📍Devon House, 136Joint Art History Research and LGBTQ+ Synergy Group Event:Queer Ecologies and Abundant Imaginaries in Contemporary Sri Lankan ArtIn 2022-23, a renewed wave of activism fought to decriminalise homosexuality in Sri Lanka, first outlawed in 1883 under the British Penal Code for supposedly being 'against the order of nature'. These years also witnessed a severe economic crisis, with the Indian Ocean island defaulting on its foreign debts, and a mass multi-ethnic uprising that forced the president to flee the country. In this social climate, a number of exhibitions in both Sri Lanka and Britain explored queer ecological artistic practices: including Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran's Idols of Mud and Water at Glasgow Tramway (2023-24), as well as Chathuri Nissansala in The Order of Nature at Lunuganga (2023-24) and Ritualising Mutant Encounters (2024) at Colombo's Barefoot Gallery. Drawing on Sri Lankan folklore alongside decolonial theory, degrowth communism, and queer studies — this lecture will investigate relationships between gender, sexuality, capitalism, and climate. Nithiyendran and Nissansala craft a queer ecological aesthetics of abundance, one that imagines possible worlds beyond the very structures of scarcity manufactured by both British colonialism and post-independence ethnonationalism.Dr Edwin Coomasaru is a Mid-Career Fellow at Yale University's Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Visiting Fellow at University College London, and Reviews Editor for Visual Culture in Britain. He is currently working on a book titled Queer Ecologies and Abundant Aesthetics in Sri Lankan Art, 1926-2024. Coomasaru has written for Art History, Third Text, Oxford Art Journal, Visual Culture in Britain, British Art Studies, The Irish Review, and Irish Studies Review; as well as numerous edited books, exhibition catalogues, and art criticism.

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