What Memory Built in Colour is a new exhibition at Gallery Pristine Contemporary, featuring Berlin-based Belarusian artist Dasha Buben and young Sri Lankan contemporary artist Thilini Jinadasa.
Thilini Jinadasa says
My emotions often reveal themselves through the temperature, intensity, and transparency of colour. Soft, translucent layers express calm, vulnerability, and reflection. Bolder, more saturated marks convey tension, movement, and uncertainty. Colour has become the vocabulary through which I articulate feelings that cannot be spoken, my way of giving form to the unspoken.
Working abstractly allows colour to exist freely, without the need to represent anything literal. In this space, colour itself becomes the structure shaping rhythm, balance, and movement. Through abstraction, colour carries psychological depth and spiritual sensitivity, allowing me to explore the complexity of being without the limits of narrative.
For me, memory ignites the palette, emotion guides the gesture, and abstraction provides the room to breathe. When these forces meet, colour becomes a vessel for what cannot be easily expressed. It holds the invisible, turning internal experiences into visual atmospheres where viewers can sense their own memories, emotions, and interpretations.
Dasha Buben says
“First Time I Saw Orange” goes back to a colour memory from my first trip to India in 2010. Of course, I had seen orange before, but in Belarus, it was never the main character. In India, it was everywhere, marigolds, saris, buildings, so present that I could almost feel the colour with my body. That strong sensation stayed with me much brighter than reality probably was, and that exaggeration became the starting point for the painting. It shows how memory enlarges certain moments while erasing others.
In “Myosotis / Forget-me-not”, I return to a tiny flower that immediately brings me to my grandmother. These little blue blossoms grew in her garden, and being there as a child was one of the happiest times because of her care and warmth. I don’t know if the flowers were really as bright or as many as I remember, but this soft, emotional picture is what remains.
Another work, “Sunbeams in My Grandmother’s House,” is connected to childhood memories that give comfort and form a big part of who I am. These memories are warm but blurred around the edges like sunlight itself, showing how memory never comes back as a precise image but as a feeling.
Memory and emotion lie at the core of both Thilini Jinadasa and Dasha Buben’s practice, shaping not only their choice of palette but the very structure of their abstractions. Buben’s works often emerge from lived experience- fractured recollections of childhood, the lingering imprint of political upheaval, and the emotional turbulence of displacement. These memories do not return to her as literal scenes; rather, they surface as sensations, atmospheres, and colours. The yellow that recalls the sunflowers in her grandmother’s garden, or the soft pinks of a Belarusian dusk, becomes a way of preserving moments that are otherwise elusive or painful to access. Emotion infuses these memories with intensity: the trauma of leaving home, the uncertainty of exile, and the resilience required in rebuilding identity all find form in her layered gestures and shifting tonalities.
Read the full story that first appeared in The Free Press Journal here:
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