Name: TVO Arts - Rajni Perera, Traveller #5
Description: This artist’s sci-fi heroes celebrate the strength of people who leave home to find a better future.

Learn how to decode Canadian art | TVO Arts

Once you identify all the puzzle pieces, you can start to see how they fit together. 

Anyone who loves science fiction also loves the world, our world.

Why do you think the artist uses science fiction?


This artist’s sci-fi heroes celebrate the strength of people who leave home to find a better future.

TVO Arts - Rajni Perera, Traveller #5

Narrator (00:02):
Art gives us the power to imagine the future in any way we want. This is "Traveller 5". It was created in 2019 by the multidisciplinary artist, Rajni Perera. It's a standout piece from one of her best known bodies of work called Traveller, which imagines super humans from a future time after climate catastrophe. It questions, who will be alive after the world has burned? What will they look like and how might they learn to not only survive such harsh conditions but thrive in them? Though it may sound like the stuff of science fiction, it's a parallel story for the artist and many like her, who also had to travel a long way from home in the face of hardship.
Arianne (00:53):
It's beautiful. It's gorgeous. I love the colors. It's giving me some kind of South Asian feel.
Amy (01:04):
I like how the body or the costume is built out of different styles of textile kind of match together.
Ulrik (01:10):
It took me a little while to realize the number of eyes this person seems to have, including what seems to be like an eye for a mouth. So there's obviously something going on there...
Narrator (01:20):
Standing in half length. Portrait "Traveller 5" shows an androgynous humanoid figure. The curious character has seven eyes, each with a strange star shaped pupil draped in jewelry and richly patterned textiles. They look distinguished, regal. Even Perera refers to the character's attire as 'ancestral armor'; a kind of magical technology developed over centuries to protect the traveller from inhospitable conditions. Their intricate designs may look familiar.
Rajni Perera (Artist) (01:54):
The way it comes together is from things I've seen in real life, going to fabric shops, going to sari shops, looking at linga suits and salwar kameez and how the shawl is paired with the set of earrings and bengals that go with all of it. That's how I learned to dress, and that's the way I dress the travellers today.
Narrator (02:17):
The Traveller poses in front of a stately domed structure. A nod to the Unbuilt Cenotaph for the father of physics, sir Isaac Newton, designed by 18th century architect Ettiene-Louis Boullé. You'll notice the Traveller holds a mysterious striped sphere roughly the same shape as the building behind the artist calls the traveler's orb a 'portal' and like the revolutionary work of Newton, it represents a paradigm shift — a brand new way of thinking about the world.
Jim (02:51):
I like that it's kind of challenged my preconceptions about what technology should look like.
Amy (02:56):
It's reminding me specifically of manuscripts and how tiny and detailed how fine that kind of work is.
Ulrik (03:02):
Definitely sort of a sci-fi element to it. There seems to be some real different cultures kind of involved in it.
Narrator (03:09):
Rajni Perera was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1985. She grew up in a mixed Buddhist and Hindu community and as a small child, her parents had young Rajni's astrological chart read. It said that in multiple past lives she was an artist.
Rajni Perera (Artist) (03:27):
So my parents always knew that I would be an artist and I always knew that I would be an artist, and I've been drawing and painting since I was a baby and a toddler.
Narrator (03:34):
Perera and her family moved to Australia, then the United States before settling in Canada when Rajni was nine. They lived in North York and Scarborough, and later she attended art school at Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. Initially, the enterprising young artist organized her own exhibitions and brokered her own sales building, both a business and a following from scratch. But it wasn't long before curators and gallerists came calling intrigued by her powerful artistic voice commissioned by the Royal Bank of Canada. "Traveller 5" was the artist's first major acquisition by an institution. Their curator called it a reminder of how our choices now impact generations to come.
(04:22):
Growing up in Sri Lanka, it was television shows like Astroboy and RoboTech that captured young Perera's imagination. She was drawn to their epic stories, beautifully rendered and full of unique mythology. And throughout her career, science fiction has been at the heart of Perera's work.
Rajni Perera (Artist) (04:40):
Science fiction does a lot of incredible things. It prophesizes, it theorizes...
Arianne (04:46):
Between science fiction and straight up fantasy, that's pretty much the only world that you can pretty much make up,
Ulrik (04:54):
It allows us to view the future in a different way or the way we either want to view it or need to view it. Right, and I think she does that.
Narrator (05:01):
As she got older, Perera developed a more critical lens in all the stories of space fairing and off-worlding that she loved. She was disappointed to so rarely find herself, her family or her friends reflected in them. The authors of science fiction were predominantly white and so were its heroes.
Rajni Perera (Artist) (05:20):
I was really, really missing where we are in science fiction.
Narrator (05:26):
During art school, she made it her mission to bring science fiction into fine art and to paint about the lives of brown and black people through this lens.
(05:36):
Today, Pereira is known as a visionary creator of iconography, artifacts, and mythology, imagining the future of immigrants and other marginalized communities. Her Traveller series features more than 50 artworks and includes painting, mixed media, photography, sculpture, and wearable art. Within the artist's distinct sci-fi universe, she calls upon a tapestry of other visual inspirations as well, including scientific illustration, psychedelia and miniatures, such as Rajput and Mughal painting. These small, highly detailed illustrations from the 16th to 19th century often used to decorate manuscripts are important non-Western representations of human activity.
(06:22):
For Perera, just as keenly as she mixes influences, she combines techniques too. Traveler number five is an example of 'mixed media'. The term describes artworks composed from a combination of different materials. This piece uses acrylic, gouache, gel pens, pencil, charcoal, graphite, chalk and watercolor, whatever's necessary. Perera says she calls her process results oriented. She works spontaneously using whatever tool, technique or material will achieve the results she wants.
Amy (07:01):
I guess she sees the strengths of these peoples and their adaptability being the kind of factor that has them surviving the apocalypse.
Jim (07:12):
A story of immigration, I guess, landing in somewhere strange and learning how to live and how to thrive.
Narrator (07:18):
Across the Traveller series, Perera likens the classic sci-fi narrative of off world survival to the experience of the immigrant. It's the story of resilience, of resourcefulness, of creating abundance from nothing, and it's a story she knows intimately because she is herself a traveller, leaving home with her family when she was small to make a better life. Through her personal experience, she's developed a special reference for the things people bring with them from home, the garments, jewelry, the prayer mats, the stuff that makes them feel comforted and helps them to express themselves and their culture. These items function as a sort of armour. Perera says they offer a form of protection when you go from one place to another.
Rajni Perera (Artist) (08:07):
If you think of the idea of a force field and then wrapping yourself in something from back home, that's going to protect you from having to fully deal with what can be a very difficult place. That's the way that I thought about that. I thought about armor for the Traveller series,
Narrator (08:29):
The Traveller's ancestral armor — the magical technology that keeps them safe in harsh environments — references exactly this sense of tradition, cultural knowledge and history that can be bound up in our clothing and can become a source of great strength for its wearer. Their seven-eyed mutation likewise points to the Traveller's superpowered strength and resilience. While mutations are often framed as something ugly or repulsive, Perera makes them a mark of beauty, a sign that the traveler is perfectly adapted to their surroundings.
Rajni Perera (Artist) (09:04):
For me, a mutation is a protest act of an organism that's alive, saying, no, I'm going to live. I'm not going to die. I'm going to live. I'm going to expand my capacity for survival in this really sneaky, gorgeous, and beautiful ways.
Narrator (09:21):
Her next body of work is focused completely on the idea of surveying the living world, the flora and fauna that surrounds the travelers. What will plants and animals look like after a climate catastrophe? How will they mutate, evolve and adapt to survive?
(09:37):
Although Pereira's vision feels like a distant future, it's the world that may not be so far away. It is expected that anywhere from 140 million to 1 billion climate migrants will be on the move by 2050, particularly from South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Despite the impending crisis, Perera's picture of the future with her noble and heroic traveler posed proudly is fiercely optimistic. There will be survivors and there will be people who learn to thrive. She's not just hopeful. She is adamant.
Rajni Perera (Artist) (10:15):
I insist on victory, I insist on victory in this story.
Narrator (10:24):
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Traveller #5

Traveller 5

This is Traveller #5, created in 2019 by Rajni Perera. It’s a standout piece from the artist’s Traveller series, one of her best known bodies of work.Across the project, which includes more than 50 artworks, Perera vividly imagines a race of superhumans from a future time after climate catastrophe. Her Travellers have learned the skills to not only survive such harsh conditions, but to thrive in them.

Traveller 5Traveller 5

Rajni Perera

What do you see first?

Traveller 5