Artist J. Kaveh D' Rosairo approaches filmmaking through a cross-disciplinary lens, working across installation, sculpture, and the human body. Through performance—documented as stills or expanded video works—they examine the conditions within which their identities intersect, as a queer Sri Lankan navigating the realities of living in/with diaspora, disability, and loss.
At a time when engaging with politics feels like a luxury, art remains Kaveh's most honest outlet for expressing a myriad of complicated emotions, like fear and frustration. Their work critiques the intolerance of queer identities, interrogates authoritarian legacies, and traces the colonial rituals that shape these attitudes—gestures through which they imagine and construct new visions of Queer Utopias.
They work with sculptural materials like silicone, resin, metal, and textiles, alongside digital processes and time-based media. Their work is deeply personal: from the thinking and ideation to the actual performance. Kaveh often appears in front of the camera, as their body and the contexts within which they exist are integral to the themes, messages, and stories they wish to communicate and document.
Traces of bodies can be found all over their portfolio; D’ Rosairo embeds the tactile within their digital practice, where drawings, material experiments, and sculptural renderings are often placed within the final artwork in some way (for example, sculptures can become props when activated within a performance or film).
In their series of collages, titled “Samanala Yaka,” they draw from Sri Lankan legislation, traditions, and artists such as Lionel Wendt and Geoffrey Bawa. D’ Rosairo grapples with their relationship to their homeland by reworking these artists' depictions of sexuality, culture, and belonging. Kaveh places their younger self, their contemporary body, and the bodies of their chosen family at the center of this inquiry—casting them in works that span the breadth of their reality, from confronting a fraught family history to basking in a psychedelic samudra (sea) of pre-colonial bliss, where gay spirits dance freely, visibly.