Set within the context of a crippling socio-economic crisis and a repressive state apparatus, Escape Artist dips into personal archives made public, exploring how they carve out spaces as a means of collective escape and belonging. Screenshots, Instagram stories, snippets of conversations, and online ephemera randomly paired together trace the oscillatory movement between wanting to consume (and be consumed by) media made specific to your experience and the urge to escape those very specific realities.
By drawing the curtain on conversations behind "public images" of the digital age, EscapeArtist explores the borderlands between artist and audience. It invites visitors to explore these borderlands and the obscuring of lines between audience and performer.
Visitors can determine the speed at which these images interact, and their permanence (visitors can capture pairings of interests by selecting print screen). These interactions will then be added as images to the collection at a future date.
Kitty Ritig is a new media artist and an illustrator who works with a variety of media and in augmented reality. She explores the dynamic between audience and the work by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations. Psychological comfort, home and acceptance, love and intimacy are main themes in her works. Kitty Ritig currently lives and works in Colombo.
Tashyanna Handy is a performance poet and theater practitioner based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Responding to histories, once invisibilized or removed, her work examines intimate experiences of grief and violence within themes of migration and identity. She is currently reading for her degree in International Development and holds an ATCL in performance arts.
