Between Dust and Distant Skies Pradeep Thalawatta

LATITUDE 28 presents Between Dust and Distant Skies, a solo exhibition by Pradeep Thalawatta, includes works that engage with painting, drawing, photography, and material-led practice. The exhibition explores the ways in which images of conflict, migration, memory, and everyday life travel across geographical and emotional distances, becoming embedded within our personal experiences and visual landscapes. Through layered materials, found objects, mediated imagery, and references to childhood and popular visual culture, Thalawatta examines how memory is continually shaped by acts of looking, accumulation, and remembrance.

'The contemporary image rarely remains where it originates. Photographs of conflict, migration, celebration, disaster, and everyday life circulate endlessly across newspapers, television screens, and digital feeds, dissolving geographical boundaries as they enter the private spaces of our homes. They are consumed alongside family photographs, children's books, advertisements, and personal archives until the distinction between lived experience and mediated experience begins to blur. This exhibition inhabits precisely this unstable territory, asking what happens when distant events cease to be distant and instead become part of our emotional and visual vocabulary.

Rather than treating images as documentary evidence, Pradeep Thalawatta approaches them as accumulations that sediment within memory. The exhibition suggests that memory is not a fixed archive but an active process of layering and editing. Images encountered through the daily news gradually coexist with intimate domestic experiences, producing a shared visual landscape where personal histories and global events continuously intersect. This is not an exhibition about witnessing war from afar; it is about the subtle ways in which repeated acts of looking reshape our understanding of home, childhood, and belonging.

Central to this inquiry is his sustained engagement with material. Every surface employed in the exhibition arrives carrying a previous life. Used sandpaper, collected from construction sites, retains embedded dust, pigment, and the physical evidence of abrasion. Its worn surface becomes both image and archive, suggesting that memory itself is produced through friction rather than preservation. Instead of functioning merely as a support for painting, the material actively participates in the formation of the image, reminding us that histories are always embedded within the matter that survives them. Tar introduces another powerful register. Historically associated with roads, repair, industry, and combustion, it occupies an ambiguous space between creation and destruction. Its dense black surface evokes geological depth as readily as scorched terrain, resisting literal representation while carrying strong sensory associations. Applied to unprimed canvas, tar refuses the polished finish traditionally associated with painting. It absorbs light, obscures detail and transforms landscapes into psychological spaces where memory and imagination become inseparable.

Throughout the exhibition, ordinary domestic materials assume unexpected significance. Wrapping paper, children's stickers, toys, and storybooks are detached from their familiar contexts and repositioned within broader geopolitical narratives. These objects are not employed for nostalgia alone. Instead, they expose the fragile architecture through which childhood is imagined and protected. Their familiarity becomes unsettled when placed alongside references to displacement, conflict and loss, revealing how innocence itself is shaped by systems of representation.

Thalawatta's use of children's visual culture is especially compelling. Sticker books, cartoons and illustrated stories belong to a language of optimism, repetition and play. Yet within these works they become sites where competing realities converge. Rather than collapsing innocence into tragedy, the exhibition holds both conditions simultaneously, allowing viewers to recognise the uncomfortable proximity between protected childhoods and those marked by violence. This tension gains particular resonance through the artist's experience of fatherhood, not as autobiography but as an ethical position from which images are reconsidered. Parenthood becomes less a subject than a lens through which empathy acquires new urgency.

Art historical references are yet another aspect that layers the exhibition, though never as quotation for its own sake. Renaissance painting, decorative traditions and devotional imagery emerge in fragments, entering into conversation with contemporary media images and popular visual culture. Such references dissolve conventional hierarchies between the museum, the family archive and the digital screen, suggesting that all images participate in an ongoing cultural circulation. Historical paintings, children's illustrations and news photographs are understood not as separate categories but as interconnected systems through which societies construct memory, identity and belief. The formal language of the exhibition reinforces these ideas. Images are erased, rolled, folded, layered, and partially concealed. Landscapes become compressed into sculptural forms, while silhouettes and absences often carry greater emotional weight than complete representations. Such strategies resist spectacle, refusing the visual certainty commonly associated with documentary imagery. Instead, the works invite prolonged attention, asking viewers to navigate fragments, omissions and material traces rather than singular narratives.

Ultimately, this exhibition proposes that landscapes are never solely geographical. They are constructed through accumulated encounters, with images, objects, stories and emotions that continue to travel long after their moment of origin. In bringing together the physical residue of everyday materials with the relentless circulation of contemporary images, the artist offers a meditation on how memory is continually built through acts of looking. The result is an exhibition that quietly dissolves the distance between here and elsewhere, reminding us that every image we absorb has the potential to become part of the landscape we carry within ourselves.'

Between Dust and Distant Skies, a solo exhibition by Pradeep Thalawatta, is on view at LATITUDE 28 from 21st August to 19th September, 2026.

Curatorial Note Rahul Kumar 
Date 20.8.2026