A senior figure in contemporary Sri Lankan art, Chandraguptha Thenuwara (b.1960) uses his work as a medium of political protest. His drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations are intertwined with his anti-war activism, addressing themes of conflict, memory, and the sociopolitical climate of Sri Lanka. In 1983, Thenuwara witnessed the brutal Black July massacres, a state-sponsored pogrom against the Tamil community that triggered a 26-year civil war. Since 1997, he has commemorated this episode with annual exhibitions featuring works that interweave motifs associated with his home country, such as lotus buds and Buddhist stupas, with those inspired by the aesthetics of war: barbed wire, guns, oil drums and camouflage. Untitled IV  belongs to Thenuwara’s ‘Covert Drawings,’ a series of black-and-white line drawings in which organic-looking forms reveal on closer inspection images of corpses, disembodied limbs and weapons: a reference to the sinister histories and disturbing realities lurking beneath society’s seemingly benign surfaces.