Exhibition DateS
2 July - 9 August, 2026
Exhibition Opening
Thursday 9 July, 2026, 6 >8 PM
Visual
Rating 100%
The Linden Projects Space can be accessed via an older lift that is not DDA compliant and requires staff operation. Our team is
always available to assist—please let us know if you need support during your visit.
This exhibition brings together selected works from Pigments of Place and People of Place, offering a retrospective reflection on Running Rivers: a body of work created over four years across Sri Lanka and Australia. Though produced at different moments and in different places, these works emerged through the same vein of inquiry, each deepening and extending a way of thinking cultivated through sustained engagement with rivers.
Looking back, I realise that Running Rivers was not simply a body of artwork but an attunement to another way of being in the world. Like a meandering river, the project unfolded through unexpected encounters, pauses, and redirections, seeking depth while also moving towards a destination. It taught me to move beyond linear and predetermined ways of thinking and instead trust emergence.
The rivers became Deities and Temples, and Temples became Rivers. They taught me the art of slowing down and allowing, of dwelling with places, materials, and relationships long enough for their complexities and nuances to reveal themselves. They taught me to become comfortable with ambiguity and the unknowable, to embrace hybridity and think in terms of and rather than or, and to hold seemingly opposing perspectives while remaining attentive to what might emerge through that holding.
Through sustained engagement with rivers in Sri Lanka and Australia, I came to understand place as multidimensional and relational. Rivers revealed themselves as living assemblages of ecological, cultural, historical, spiritual, and embodied relationships. They cultivated in me a systems thinking that perceives interconnection and recognises that everything is situated within complex webs of relations, where each action reverberates throughout the whole.
Most importantly, Running Rivers became a journey of returning home: to my body and to my place within the family of things. Through walking, gathering, making, and drawing with earth and plant pigments, I learned to listen more deeply to the intelligence of my body and to enter into reciprocal relationships with the lands and waters that have shaped me. Belonging came to be understood not as a destination to be reached, but as a continual practice of becoming at home in my own being and negotiating that becoming within the living world.
In returning home to my body and my place, I also discovered my purpose: to reclaim and reimagine priestesshood within Sri Lankan cosmologies through contemporary art. The rivers became both teacher and initiation, revealing pathways into ritual, embodiment, and the entangled relationships between land and body that are continually enacted through ritual practice and that continue to guide my artistic and research journey
Running Rivers became an apprenticeship in meandering: a practice of listening deeply, remaining open to uncertainty and
transformation, and trusting slower ways of knowing. The works presented here are traces of that journey and an invitation to follow a
river’s course: slowly, attentively, and with openness to what may reveal itself on the way.
- Kuweni Dias Mendis, 2026.
Kuweni Dias Mendis (b. 1979) is an artist who integrates movement, sound, film, installations, markings, and sculptural ritual objects to create immersive works that invite audiences into direct, embodied experiences reconnecting them to their heartbeat, rhythm, gait, posture, and sense of time and space within a decolonized body. Her practice is deeply shaped by her hybrid cultural experiences between Sri Lanka and Australia. Kuweni blends regenerative practices, arts activism, and cultural facilitation, using ritual and ceremony as vessels for artistic expression. Through practice led research, she explores her role in preserving a vanishing heritage. As a migrant woman of color on unceded lands, she advocates for and amplifies the voices of marginalized women through collaborative artworks, exhibitions, and participatory experiences. She strives to create spaces where these voices can be heard and valued. Kuweni’s solo and collaborative works have recently been commissioned by Outer Space (Running Rivers: People of Place, 2024), BEMAC (Reverberations, 2024), and Good Life x EUNIC Sri Lanka (Running Rivers: Temple, 2024).