A Starry-eyed Subspecies

Rajni Perera's visionary Traveller series of paintings, pollution wear, and sculpture are showcased in a large-scale exhibition at Eastside Projects' main gallery, alongside a public mural on the River Rea's eastern banks in Highgate and Balsall Heath. The ongoing series portrays a complex, energized diaspora of climate refugees, habitats, and survival mechanisms set against rapidly transforming landscapes. The mutated bodies of the travellers indicate an evolutionary timescale thousands of years into the future. Perera's vivid artworks animate ideas and issues related to immigration, mutation, hybridity, ancestorship, and futurity. Rather than the typical European adventurers that dominate science fiction stories of spacefaring and off-worlding, Perera imagines the kinfolk of Black and Brown people as her brave protagonists, casting migrants as the first explorers.

One of the featured artworks is A Starry-eyed Subspecies, a major new sculptural work featuring a life-size Traveller and Post-Horse traversing a mutated and poisoned landscape left behind by greedy and wealthy corporate nations. The installation approaches the feeling of searching in a very particular sense, familiar to many, and is set in a mutated habitat produced by Birmingham artist Matt Gale.

The Traveller series reflects on immigrant cultures being stripped away and homogenized in nation-states and imagines off-worlding as a metaphor for immigrant resilience to retain cultures, survive, and thrive. As we begin to question abundance as a birthright for all, the glaring question becomes "at what cost? And to whom?" with the issues of hunger, thirst, pollution, and displacement becoming some of the most ignored yet prevalent issues faced by the majority of the human race.