Reading Rajni Perera

Since becoming attuned to Rajni Perera’s works, I have been made keenly aware that any attempt to read them means signing a pact and agreement to be simultaneously read myself. Attracted by her centring of the female body, one engages with Perera’s oeuvre seeking understanding of her technique and conceptual sensibilities. Perera’s works offer themselves for our consumption; however, as we go deeper, we ourselves become the desired sacrifice to be consumed on the altar of the divine feminine.

To read Rajni Perera is to look into her mind, only to have a mirror appear and reveal all of the preconceived notions, ideas and contorted fantasies one projects upon her work. Her works are not for the faint of heart, nor for those who enjoy the trappings of ethnography and waxing nostalgic about the Empire’s glory days. Perera is wholly contemporary; hence, why she is considered futuristic to those who revel in the past. And for those seeking to satiate their fetishism, their hunger is met with beautifully rendered, conceptually rigorous disregard.

In 2011, when Perera graduated from OCAD University in Toronto, she presented a series called as her culminating body of work that won