THE VESSEL WITH TWO MOUTHS - SAYEM KHAN

There is an insurmountable power formed when you reassemble yourself. Once you’ve distilled your being into parts and studied every piece, you can remove what is no longer wanted, what no longer serves you. Coloniality and its progeny are spread all over the world. It has laid its roots like a weed and weaved itself into our mortal coils. There are those of us who have been plucked from our own roots, who look towards home and fear we do not know it anymore. We yearn for a soil in which we can grow, one that is not tormented by the blood of ancestors, by violence, and by Colonial greed.

Many of us come from places that nurture communities, tribes, nations of a collective - a commune - where we are each other’s responsibility, where we tend to each other. We trim each other’s leaves and dead flowers, and we are each other’s nourishing sunlight and torrential rain. We ensure that we grow together to be as tall as the sun, rather than outpace each other to tower over the rest, and wilt them in our shadows. These realities are the antithesis to Western dreams of capitalist individuality. The damage of the undoing of this modality of livelihood by the vicious beast of coloniality, is inconsolable. There is no land acknowledgment that undoes genocide. There is no repatriation of artifacts that undoes theft. There is no two-state solution that reconciles the river and the sea. These are simply turnings of soil that bury the blood. 

But there are some of us who still hope that we can overcome the vicious mouths of the Beasts - the Colony and the Colonizers. There are those of us who dream of producing the conditions in which we can settle and thrive, to make ourselves the world in which we would like to live. Rajni Perera is one such transplant reviving its roots. 

It’s a dreary, rainy afternoon and I’m visiting Rajni’s studio as she settles up to paint The Dream, a terrifying behemoth of work. In primary black and white, with a merging figure producing a shamanistic body, the work feels beyond the realm of anything she’s made before. Rajni is looking away from the future of our survival, and towards the present of the complex fragmentation of diasporic communities that she envisions as survivors of that same future. But Rajni is not positing a traumatized reality. She’s simply learning the world in which she has been born; the soil in Sri Lanka from which she has come, and the soil in Canada within which she was propagated. 

We both recently had the opportunity to visit our home countries, Rajni to Sri Lanka, and myself to India. It is incredible how succinctly our experiences left us longing to kiss the ground of our homes again, how much we shared that feeling. In our journeys we were reduced, and made whole again, too. My stay in India was one confounded by profound loss, and the simultaneous celebration of new births. Perhaps this was typical of returns home. Rajni had the opportunity to travel to Sri Lanka with Sayuri, her daughter, and engage in a month-long residency. She wanted to present her daughter with the earth that belonged to them, but lost to a grand migration Westward, Rajni had no ancestral home to return to. Instead, Rajni found resolve in knowledge, in a search for belonging. With Sayuri, she sifted through the red earth of Sri Lanka to deepen her relationship not only to her practice, but to herself and her country. She molded the clay with her daughter, to embolden each other and prepare for creation. They worked together to produce a new reality, a new material form. Like gods, Rajni and her daughter sculpted the ground into life. They gave birth to a new future.

These experimentations in material began to produce a feedback loop. Rajni had been conducting research on Sri Lankan spirituality, questioning the sanitized version of Buddhism that she felt had been taught to her. Rajni learned of Yaku Tovil, a Sri Lankan spiritual tradition seeped in the production of mythological universes, filled with stories of gods, demons, ancient kings and queens, much like Rajni’s own artistic practice. Yaku Tovil orally traces these stories of old and inspires the intricate song and dances of the tradition’s spiritual practitioners. However, in the past century, Yaku Tovil has fallen into obscurity amongst the country’s growing metropolitan populus due to its associations with lower castes of rural Sri Lanka. To Rajni, this represents the dissolution of our natural and spiritual world, a rotting spurred by colonial embellishments in the Global South. Rajni sits uncomfortable with this truth.

In her studio, Rajni produced a book from a stack for me to thumb through, a book documenting the fading practice of Yaku Tovil in rural Sri Lanka. I learned how the practice was guided in the exorcism of demons, even though it does not present demons as inherently malevolent but rather embodiments of dualities of profound human realities. Balances of life and death, healthy harvests and famine, sickness and good health, fertility and barrenness. But in this delicate balancing act, demons do not produce endlessly. As much as they give, they experience pangs of hunger as well. Practitioners of Yaku Tovil work to rid towns, villages, and their people of demonic plagues that have come to gorge in their greed. Beasts are fought with song and dance, spiritual talismans, and intricate garbs that fight the wills of the demons, exorcizing and healing their communities. 

Yaku Tovil began to inform Rajni’s relationship to her spirituality, as well as her practice. Learning of the continuation of ancient traditions began to delineate and fragment the linear progression of time. There was no more past, present, or future, but rather simultaneity. Rajni rejects the relegation of tradition to the past, and celebrates the legacies that these traditions represent in the modern day. No longer fascinated with imagining futures, instead reckoning with unseen presents as they are informed and stained by the past. The materiality of the tradition, the tactile nature of scepters, talismans, smudging sticks, and demonic masks, and the propagation of these crafts over thousands of years, came to mean so much more. They began to inspire the material nature of her practice, shifting the way she envisioned the transforming bodies and landscapes. The forms she began to create had come to embody reinvention and wonder

In this collapse of earthly space and linear temporality, The Vessel with Two Mouths was born, presenting a new continuum of Rajni’s practice. No longer was the future some imagined hypothetical circumstance of survival. In tending to her roots, Rajni was assured that her learning of the past guided her making of the future, and a new sense of agency was secured. Turning to her ancestry, she would no longer allow herself to be haunted by a fractured diasporic reality. Rather, Rajni is building the future repeatedly, by distilling the past and understanding how it bleeds in strokes through our bones, our skin, our eyes, and hearts, into the present. For the artist, her identity-based work is not seeped in trauma that panders to Western consumptions of our pain, but the brilliant wonder of relearning oneself. Everything is political but this is the point of the work, to be a self-searching body that plants its roots in rich soil to be born again and again in the eyes of its creator. 

Rajni maps her journey forward, understanding her creations nonlinearly, and adjusting her relationship with their birth as such. The artist delves into her relationship with the people, landscapes, and red earth of Sri Lanka, producing the imagery and forms guided by the agency found in the knowledge of an ancestral home. She asks us, too, to heal ourselves by looking home, and to embrace our traditions, which are at risk of being lost and continually fragmented in a post-colonialist, post-globalized reality. 

Rajni Perera canonizes the origins of herself and her practice on textile, and in clay. Sweeping forms, transforming beasts, and new profound knowledge. In her part as divine omniscient of the world, Rajni makes The Vessel with Two Mouths, the host that will hunt and also rear. 

Sayem Khan is an arts professional currently working at Patel Brown. Based in Toronto, Canada, he was born in Abu Dhabi, and spent his childhood between the UAE and India. Sayem is inspired by the modalities of diasporic lives that are made post-immigration. He has a background in human geography, graduating from the University of Toronto.