Art director and founder of KAGUL initiative.
Chathuri Nissansala (b.1993, Colombo) is a multidisciplinary artist working with performance art,painting, sculpture, and graphics. Her works raise poignant questions about notions of gender, class, queerness, and nationalism in Sri Lanka. A recipient of The Commonwealth Scholarship, South East Asia by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, ICCR (2012), Chathuri acquired a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts (Painting) from Chitra Kala Parishath, Bengaluru (2017) and a Master’s in Visual Arts (Painting) from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara (2019).She’s been nominated for “The Emerging Artist Award (2022-23 years)”, by The Arts Family, London. A recipient of the year 2023, the ‘Prince Claus Seed Award’, by the Prince Claus Fund, Netherlands. Awarded residency from the year 2024 at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Chathuri will be taking on the role of intersectional advisor for the ‘ Queer Stitches’ project at Textile museum , Tilburg Netherlands from 2024.
She/They formed an initiative called ‘KAGUL’ , which is an incubator for research on Sri Lanka’ Southern performative textile traditions and gender studies in them. KAGUL initiated a project called ‘FE’ to educate , create awareness and to create pockets of artisans as pockets of entrepreneurship( these pockets of artisans are from the marginal groups such as queer community,sex workers, women from rural areas).
Nachchi Samayama is another collective project initiated by her to document , research and map the community called ‘Nachchi’. Nachchi’s is a term to address queer community used in the local folk language; these individuals have been existing for more than centuries as part of ritualistic acts in traditional and cultural domains.
