Sreeju Radhakrishnan

B.

1988

Ernakulam, Kerala

"

References from my backyard

"

Sreeju Radhakrishnan is an artist based in Kochi. His practice engages with local landscapes, everyday surroundings, and the identities shaped within them. It examines how cultural and power structures have historically influenced the ways people and places are represented and remembered. Landscape functions as a foundational element in the work, not as a grand or picturesque view, but as an intimate terrain drawn from backyards, wetlands, small canals, and overlooked spaces of daily life.

Rather than monumental panoramas, the artist focuses on the mundane. These modest sites are reimagined as spaces of memory, history, and imagination, where personal experience intersects with broader social and political narratives. Through this approach, landscapes are treated as fluid and layered entities, challenging fixed or authoritative representations of place.

The work draws from a wide range of visual sources, including colonial-era photographs and paintings, popular magazines, social media imagery, kitsch visuals, and vernacular painting traditions. Human figures often emerge from the artist’s immediate surroundings and are occasionally transformed through the use of colonial-period costumes, such as those of sepoys or British officers.

Placed within everyday actions—drinking, fishing, walking, gardening—these figures undergo shifts in positional and symbolic meaning. The ordinariness of these gestures, combined with historically charged attire, introduces moments of dissonance and absurdity that quietly subvert the authority and rigidity associated with colonial power structures.

The surrounding flora and fauna, rooted in regional and local ecologies, further reinforce the entanglement of place, history, and lived experience. Together, figures and landscapes operate as sites where familiar environments become unsettled and dominant narratives are gently questioned.

A space for art, reflection,
and quiet creation.

write to us at movement@quietart.com

A space for art, reflection,
and quiet creation.

write to us at movement@quietart.com

A space for art, reflection,
and quiet creation.

write to us at movement@quietart.com