FUTURES
Rajni Perera
The Central Gallery
January 31 to May 9, 2026
Rajni Perera (b. 1985) came to Canada with her family in childhood from Sri Lanka, and in the years since has established herself as one of Canada’s leading contemporary artists. Her paintings and sculptures draw on such diverse traditions as historical Sri Lankan art, Indian miniature painting, medieval armour, South Asian textiles, and science fiction illustrations. Gathering inspiration from across place and time, Perera looks ahead to an uncertain future threatened by climate change and looming social inequities.
Perera’s works are populated by Travellers, visitors from the future who preside over dystopic realms, flooded and in flames, often mutated to adapt to their challenging environments. Far from grotesque, their physical mutations—extra eyes or limbs, hairless bodies, technicoloured and roughly textured skin—embody potent forms of biological resistance against the atrocities humankind continues to wage against our world.
In Perera’s hands, this process of environmental adaptation mirrors the immigrant and climate-refugee experience. By 2050, projections from the UN and World Bank estimate that between 140 million to one billion people will be displaced by climate change, predominately from Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and South Asia. Through the lens of science fiction, Perera imagines the adaptations and tools needed to survive this impending climate catastrophe.
There is power in the artist’s radical and restorative futurism. As Britt Wray, a researcher and author focused on climate anxiety, writes, “Giving up just because the future looks rough is not viable. History suggests that to do so would be to forgo many better futures yet to come. In the meantime, our job is to imagine and use those visions to fuel our actions. Perera’s drawings, textiles, and sculptures are artifacts of better futures alive in the present.”
Reflecting on Perera’s paintings Flood and Storm (both 2020), novelist and poet Fariha Róisín asks: “In these unsettled times, who do we hold on to? How do we hold each other despite the darkness that exists around us, and in our collective past? How can we love beyond the hurt that we feel in those ancestral lineages of ours that have never been able to see the light of day? Who speaks for the voices that have been shackled to the histories of the forgotten?”
Perera’s vision of the future is also firmly centred in female creativity, resilience, and agency. Her more abstract works presented here, like the light sculpture Plane Bend (2020), suggest quasi-organic forms, pulsing with electric, reproductive energy. Looking to the past and to the future, and endowed with a powerful diasporic imagination, Perera is singularly equipped to express the chaotic, often frightening, and sometimes hopeful world in which we find ourselves today.
About the Artist
Rajni Perera was born in Sri Lanka in 1985 and lives and works in Toronto. Her work explores issues of hybridity, futurity, ancestorship, migrant and marginalized identities/cultures, monsters, and dream worlds. These themes come together to fuel explorations in a multimedia practice that includes drawing and painting, clay, wood, lanterns, new media sculpture, textile, and recently, synthetic taxidermy. Perera seeks to open and reveal the dynamism of the icons, beings, and objects she creates by means of a subversive aesthetic that counteracts antiquated, oppressive discourse, and acts as a restorative force.
Futures has been presented at nine venues across Canada since opening at McMichael in 2022. Perera’s previous solo exhibition Traveller was presented at Eastside Projects in Birmingham, UK (2022), and the joint exhibition with Marigold Santos, Efflorescence / Tel est notre éveil was exhibited at the macLYON in France (2025). Her work has been included in the Sharjah Biennial, in the United Arab Emirates (2025), Colomboscope, Colombo, Sri Lanka (2022); Holding a Line in Your Hand, Kamloops Art Gallery, Kamloops (2021); the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea (2021); RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting at the Fondation PHI, Montreal (2020), and Migrating the Margins at the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2017). Works by Perera are part of the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the Musée De Beaux Arts De Montréal, and the Kamloops Art Gallery.
This exhibition was curated by Sarah Milroy, Frances and Tim Price Executive Director and Chief Curator, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and organized and circulated by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.
Rajni Perera
Traveller 5, 2019
mixed media on paper
152.4 × 101.6 cm
Royal Bank of Canada Art Collection, commissioned by the RBC Curatorial Department
Photo courtesy of the artist and Patel Brown