Perera reminds us of strategies that are already present in nature. In Lagoon <\/em>(2023), she uses the jackfruit as an example of how horror can be a resourceful tactic to deter encroachment. The presence of the jackfruit captivated me, as it artfully ushered me into childhood memories in other lands. Beloved in South Asian and Southeast Asian cuisines, the jackfruit has been subjected to colonial racist rhetoric, often described as pungent or unpleasant. I read Perera\u2019s incorporation of it as a nod to ancestral teachings embedded in living ecosystems. It embodies the epitome of strategic interventions and adaptations. Its soft, spiky green exterior and hidden interior of sweet-tasting, nutritious fleshy pods are a testament to what already exists as a biological mechanism to ward off exploitation and extraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For A Starry-Eyed Subspecies<\/em> (2022\u201323), Perera has constructed a life-size horse of synthetic and natural materials, drawing on techniques from movie special effects. The 360\u00b0 diorama includes a small human child figure atop the horse as an adult figure walks beside it, holding the reins. The landscape in the diorama is lush, with tall green grasses and reeds. At first glance, I notice the figures wearing neutral-toned clothing, the bodies carefully covered with fabric. Both figures have their heads covered in two layers: the child wearing a scarf topped with a cloth cap; the adult figure wearing a scarf covered with a raffia head covering. In each instance, no neck or ears are visible. Each figure shows biological adaptive elements, including multiple sets of mutated eyes. The jarring moment of this realization also invites introspection and curiosity about what may have happened within this speculative world to require this form of mutation and manner of garb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perera\u2019s work is underscored by Brown and Black realities of enduring long-standing apocalyptic conditions shaped by the interwoven threads of colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. In other words, racialized survivance occurs daily despite systemic inequities, discrimination, and limited access to resources. In 2008, Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor coined the term \u201csurvivance\u201d to speak of Indigenous creativity, resistance, and resilience in the face of historical and contemporary challenges. Perera extends this framework through the form of \u201cmutations\u201d to defy decay or demise. Mutations are reinterpreted, appropriating the abnormality and abhorrence of appearances, to be read with generosity and extended to new life forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perera\u2019s provocations signal the importance of restructuring the relationship among art, institutions, and knowledge production. She compels audiences and fine arts spaces to witness the repercussions of ecological destruction due to resource exploitation tied to economic profit with little consideration for its long-term impact. She throws down an unapologetic gauntlet, asking for reform within museums and arts education in order to unpack and attend to what decolonization looks like on the ground and in practice. The scene in Tundra <\/em>(2023) is a discarded territory, a waste site holding detritus from an extraction project. She depicts an oil barrel spilling its contents, which soak into the ground and enter the flora. On the sides of the barrel are various forms of mycelium-bearing mushrooms. A plant with red berries is shown on one side; a black crow perches on an antler resting against the barrel, holding a berry in its beak. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One can infer that this fruit\u2014which has been grown in the very soil that the oil has spilled into\u2014will, once consumed, create a cycle of life that will indelibly change the morphology of the bird and has already changed the fungi growing on the sides of the barrel. Perera draws the gaze to what is often hidden from sight within the depiction of \u201cnatural\u201d history within museums and institutions, even as she offers an alternate reading of the ingenuity of flora and fauna as they instinctively resolve to survive in innovative ways, such as scavenging waste zones or grafting to new materials, since their \u201cnatural\u201d environments are no longer accessible in the same way. In other instances, she proposes transparency instead of presenting romanticized and frozen natural history narratives. For example, her Still Life\u2014Tropics 3<\/em> (2023) is a diorama showing the remains of a bird, made of dyed pheasant feathers and polymer clay, presented in a shrine: a bell jar. There is no attempt to dress the bird, so to speak, and make it \u201cwhole\u201d to show it in its original form. Instead, we are left to ponder the practice of documenting lifeforms out of their real-time contexts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Through Phylogeny<\/em>, Rajni Perera extends an invitation to enter a future imaginary where living beings evade extinction despite dire circumstances. Each work in the series relies on forms of mutations, as when she distorts and multiplies sets of eyes in living beings to highlight \u201csight\u201d as an invaluable tool for agitating awareness and critique. Viewers and art spaces are imbricated through discomfiture, as they witness this possible future, to ponder what needs doing differently and to sit with what forms of adaptations will become necessary for survivance in the worlds to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A South Asian-Persian independent curator, SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa, and adjunct professor at Concordia University, Anna Shah Hoque researches contemporary visual arts and archive-making in Canada. She produces To Be Continued: Troubling the Archive<\/em> with CUAG.<\/p>\n![\"Rajni-Perera-Lagoon\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/web_oct_Shah-Hoque_Rajni-Perera_2023002.jpg\")
Lagoon<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro, courtesy of Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Rajni-Perera\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/web_oct_Shah-Hoque_Rajni-Perera_03.jpg\")
Phylogeny<\/em>, exhibition view, Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montr\u00e9al, 2023.
Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro, courtesy of Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Rajni-Perera\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/web_oct_Shah-Hoque_Rajni-Perera_2023004.jpg\")
Tundra<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro, courtesy of Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Rajni-Perera\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/web_oct_Shah-Hoque_Rajni-Perera_2023006.jpg\")
Still Life\u2014<\/em>Tropics 3<\/em>, installation view, Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montr\u00e9al, 2023.
Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro, courtesy of Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n