“This work is about returning to a place I do not know - piecing together histories through people, unheard voices, texts, and field recordings. Being British is the result of war, and for a long time I’ve used playfulness, ambiguity, ‘Britishness’, and pop culture as a kind of shield - it's how I’ve moved through the world and made sense of things. In Love Island, that same familiar visual language becomes something else: not a defence, but a portal - a pedestal for tenderness. It’s about holding both the strange and the sincere in the same breath, and building a community shaped by that truth.”

~ KAVITHA BALASINGHAM ~

ALICE BLACK is pleased to present Love Island, the debut solo exhibition by London-based artist Kavitha Balasingham (b. 1994, Kent). Kavitha earned her MFA from Goldsmiths in 2022 and is currently a Lecturer in Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts. Recent group exhibitions include Bow Arts (2025), Palmer Gallery (2024), Turner Contemporary (2023-24), Sadie Coles Shop HQ (2022), and duo show at Indigo + Madder (2022). She has received support from Arts Council England (Project Grant 2025, DYCP 2024), the Gilbert Bayes Sculpture Award (2022), and co-curated the immersive Ghost Show (2022).

Kavitha explores the absurdity and tenderness of communication across time and space - through cartoon physics, science fiction, and everyday digital exchanges. Her works draw on ideas like spaghettification through black holes to imagine what it means to send a feeling, memory, or emoji across generations. Objects pass through portals and emerge transformed: stretched, melted, misread, or quietly haunting. Her forms are strange yet familiar, humorous yet melancholic - evoking a digital intimacy and the disorienting feeling of longing for something never quite known.

Love Island transports visitors into a portal - one that slips between the personal and political, between paradise and uncertainty. It unfolds through commissioned handloom tapestries, sound art, ceramic matchsticks, slip cast listening chambers, and a large-scale old iPhone. The iPhone sculpture is a to-scale replica of Kavitha’s own well-worn device and becomes a gateway to an “othered” world: a familiar yet fractured landscape shaped by second-generation displacement and the disjointed mechanics of reconnection. Developed during a research trip to Sri Lanka in 2024 and supported by Arts Council England, this new body of work explores the materiality of telecommunication, diaspora, and the strange intimacy of a place once imagined but unknown.

“This work is about returning to a place I do not know - piecing together histories through people, unheard voices, texts, and field recordings. Being British is the result of war, and for a long time I’ve used playfulness, ambiguity, ‘Britishness’, and pop culture as a kind of shield - it's how I’ve moved through the world and made sense of things. In Love Island, that same familiar visual language becomes something else: not a defence, but a portal - a pedestal for tenderness. It’s about holding both the strange and the sincere in the same breath, and building a community shaped by that truth.”

At the heart of Love Island are a series of handloom tapestries co-created with newAROW, a women’s refuge in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Founded in 2000 in response to violence against women during the war, newAROW supports women’s empowerment through collective action, economic independence, and community-led healing. Kavitha commissioned the refuge to produce handloom textiles using traditional weaving techniques.

Kavitha’s mother, Subo Balasingham, played a vital role in the collaboration, becoming a collaborator herself through the process. She facilitated translation and communication between Kavitha and Ruthira, the manager of newAROW, allowing ideas to travel across language, distance, and cultural memory. The original designs were first conveyed in Tamil by Subo, then reinterpreted through Ruthira’s own perspective - transforming the handloom fabrics into a layered, collaborative project. Once the textiles arrived in the UK, Kavitha and Subo worked together to upholster, quilt, and finish them as tapestries. These works carry the weight of intergenerational labour, care, and knowledge - part art object, part community archive, part political gesture.

“Making these with my mum wasn’t just practical - it shaped the whole project. She translated not just the words, but the intentions, and the feeling behind them. What began as help became something fuller - a shared making across generations. These works hold that tenderness: layers of labour, care, and interpretation - passed through hands that know, and hands still learning.”

Informed by Jasleen Kaur’s Be Like Teflon, these pieces make space for unheard voices - especially those of marginalised women - by simply existing, by refusing erasure. They are not only decorative, but defiant by taking up space through material, form, and solidarity.

In keeping with the exhibition’s collaborative ethos, sound artist Suren Seneviratne contributes a new commission based on Kavitha’s 2024 field recordings from Sri Lanka. The soundscape moves through the gallery like a signal in transit - looping through ceramic vessels, sculptural forms, and woven tapestries. It slips in and out of focus, flickering between frequencies, as though arriving from elsewhere and struggling to land. Caught somewhere through the tele-portal, dislocated yet intimate. The audio tiptoes between being a message or interference.

Kavitha describes Love Island as a kind of “weird paradise” - a sentimental, awkward world built from fragments of inherited memory, tourism clichés, and the glittery fake-ness of reality TV. The title nods to both the popular show and the Western gaze on Sri Lanka as idyllic and consumable. Beneath the humour, though, is a sincerity: an attempt to speak across time and translation; to touch what’s just out of reach. It is also a reminder that this “love island” is not just a place of the past, but one that offers her something in the present - a connection built through people, conversations, and shared acts of making.

Love Island is supported by Arts Council England and Goldsmiths Exhibition Hub.

With thanks to:

My mum and dad – for everything

NewAROW, Women’s Refuge, Batticoloa

Ruthira, NewAROW

Suren Seneviratne

Vinthya Perinpanathan

Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design, Jaffna

Jaffna University, Fine Art Department

Dr. T. Sanathanan

Diluxshiya Pottery, Jaffna

The artists and academics I met on my research trip: