Dilohana Lekamge

INFO

Name	Dilohana Lekamge (she/her)
Born	1993
Country of Birth	Sri Lanka
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Sri Lankan (Sinhalese)
Artform	Visual arts
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Dilohana Lekamge is a curator, arts writer and artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her art practice often relates to her homeland of Sri Lanka, and uses several research methodologies to explore political, historical, and mythological contexts that relate to her experience of cultural hybridity. As a writer and curator, much of her work explores the wider terrain of multiculturalism in Aotearoa.

Lekamge moved to Aotearoa with her family at the age of 3, to the suburb of Newlands in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, and an early work featured some of the homes her family lived in during those years. In 2015, Lekamge graduated from Massey University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, counting among her friends and peers artists such as Christopher Ulutupu, Elisabeth Pointon, and Laura Duffy. Having an early interest in self portraiture, she moved into creating live and video performance artworks. Early works often featured her own body, and involved acts of endurance.

After finishing art school, Lekamge became a facilitator (an artist who runs an art space alongside others) at MEANWHILE, a relatively new artist-run space in Pōneke Wellington (2017-19). She continues to maintain a practice as a curator and writer alongside her work as an artist. In 2021 she was the Associate Curator of the Performance Arcade Programme, producing the group exhibition Prophetic Visions. After relocating to Tāmaki Makaurau in 2021, Lekamge was the Gallery Coordinator at Fresh Gallery Ōtara (2021-2023), where she curated exhibitions such as here together an exhibition of artworks by Salome Tanuvasa and Pusi Urale. The exhibition was a celebration of two different generations of Pasifika women painters who celebrated their connection to the area of Ōtara through starkly different approaches to colours and form.

In recent years she has focused on a balance of visual and verbal storytelling in her video art practice. Recent works incorporate her background as a writer, such as A Softer Limestone (2021), a video work that explores limestone formations in South Canterbury and the site of Ram Setu (also known as Adam’s Bridge), a line of limestone shoals that geographically link Sri Lanka and India. Lekamge created a narrative that traverses the timeline of the bridge from a great shift in its form in the year 1408, to 1964, when a cyclone tore through the site, and to current times where it is a point of political, cultural, and environmental tension. This narration is accompanied by visual footage of the Tīmaru breakwater and limestone formations, creating a mirror between these two sites that parallel each other in their environmental and cultural histories.

In 2022 Lekamge curated the exhibition The House is Full, an exhibition at Te Tuhi in Pakuranga, which featured “artistic practices that could be considered on the fringes of anti-establishment art movements in Aotearoa from the 1970s onwards. Each of the artists’ ancestral homes was not Britain and explored different roots in this particular era of cultural transformation.” Bringing together the work of Emily Karaka, John Miller, Teuane Tibbo and Parbhu Makan, the exhibition reconsidered these existing practices in a new light. The works that Lekamge showed had not been seen publicly for several decades, as they were all sourced from private collections or the artist’s own archive. Makan’s work, in particular, was curated from the artist’s personal archive of photographs which have not been widely shown. Writer and curator Balamohan Shingade reviewed the exhibition, writing “it was gratifying to see Makan’s work from almost 50 years ago, not for a politics of representation but for recognition. Through this exhibition, Lekamge provided a context in which to recognize Makan’s contribution to narratives of national identity against the backdrop of Indian New Zealanders’ invisibility.”

Continuing her work on the subject of multiculturalism, in 2023 Lekamge undertook the RM Gallery and Project Space’s Writing Residency, where she conducted a research project into intercultural collectivism in Aotearoa. Through this project she interviewed groups that spanned across cultural and social activism, arts, and music. As she notes in her text, “Belonging to something offers a sense of companionship and connection that working solely as an individual cannot offer. Within the social context that is Aoteroa, with its long histories of colonisation, racial intolerance, bigotry and separatism, it is no surprise to those who have felt the weight of these injustices that they seek togetherness with others who can empathise with them. In working together to push against these formed barriers one can find more fruitful and comforting ways to traverse these social structures.”

A photographic work by Lekamge features on the cover of the novel Slow Down, You're Here (2022), which was written by fellow Sri Lankan New Zealander Brannavan Gnanalingam. She has also contributed to building the Satellites archive of Aotearoa Asian arts practice as part of the team of archivists. From 2023–24 Lekamge was the Exhibition Curator and Gallery Manager at Depot Artspace in Te Hau Kapua Devonport.