In Person: Neelika Jayawardane on Writing Alongside Images
Writer and researcher Neelika Jayawardane presented on the works of photographers from Afrapix, a South African photographers' agency, as part of a panel titled “Seeing Through Images” for the Image Worlds symposium, supported by PhotoSouthAsia and co-presented by Alkazi Foundation, Offset Projects and Maze Collective, held recently in Delhi on 25 and 26 July 2025. She drew from Raqs Media Collective’s concept of “the event-shaped hole” to think through contested histories in postcolonial contexts by examining that which is unseen or resists forms of documentation. In the recent decade, her writing practice has moved towards more speculative forms to engage with the complexity of narratives around images, especially in the case of violence and trauma. In this episode of In Person, Jayawardane speaks to us about her practice and how it has transformed over the years, of writing alongside photographic images, and on dealing with archives, methodology and the conversations that photographs allow.
M. Neelika Jayawardane is Professor of English at a small public university in Upstate New York, and a Senior Research Associate at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her work focuses on the nexus between written texts, visual art, photography, and the transnational/transhistorical implications of imperialism, ongoing forms of apartheid, discrimination, displacement and migration on individuals and communities. Jayawardane received the 2018 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for a book project on Afrapix, a South African photographers’ agency operational during the last decade of apartheid; the Foundation also supported her interdisciplinary project examining photography from Sri Lanka’s civil war period. She was a writing fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study in 2023.
(Featured image: “Kite flying at dusk in Galle Fort.” Neelika Jayawardane. Sri Lanka, August 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.)
Recorded on 21 July 2025.
In case you missed the previous episodes of In Person, watch Varun Kodamana speak about his film I Am Lawrence Wilson (2022), programmed at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2024 and Vani Subramanian speak about her film Cinema Pe Cinema (2024), which premiered at the Dharamshala International Film Festival 2024.
To learn more about writers and artists engaging with Sri Lanka’s recent past, revisit Ankan Kazi’s conversation with Sinthujan Varatharajah on reclaiming repressed histories of displaced communities, Pramodha Weerasekara’s conversation with Tashiya de Mel on her series documenting the 2022 protests, Sucheta Chakraborty’s essay on Prasanna Vithanage’s Paradise (2023) and Annalisa Mansukhani’s conversation with Jasmine Nilani Joseph as she explores themes of belonging through her practice.
