“For me, it’s about reclaiming sound: telling stories of our culture, heritage, and my experience of being part of the Sri Lankan diaspora in the UK and our journeys in a Westernised format. Trying to question why there is separation in the first place.”
Ushara Dilrukshan
Ushara Dilrukshan is a Sri Lankan multimedia performance artist, soprano, cellist, DJ, and composer, currently based in London. Her work explores cultural identity, womanhood and trauma explored through narratives, in formats such as mutated operatics, sonic theatre, installation, and performance. Ushara has performed at Eavesdropping Forum, the Independent Liverpool Art Biennal, London Design Week and The Place, amongst other venues across Europe; she is currently a composer on Sound and Music’s 2025 In Motion programme, and is an Artist in Residence with Brompton Cemetery with Sonnie Carlebach across 2024-26. Ushara is part of experimental noise duo Cell Deletion, expanding on the narratives she utilises in her solo work through live coding and analogue tape loops to manipulate live instrumentation and vocalisations. Ushara studied an MA in Information Experience Design at the Royal College of Art, having previously studied structural engineering at the University of Bath.
In the midst of being an Artist in Residence at Brompton Cemetery and one of In Motion’s 2025 composers, Georgie West sat down with Ushara to discuss coding, the force of the organ, cultural identity, dealing with trauma through text scores, and womanhood…
.
Georgie/PRXLUDES: You embody many different types of performance artist from soprano and cellist to DJ, composer and coder. Can you tell me more about your background in performance and how all these performance personas became part of your practice?
Ushara Dilrukshan: I have a background as an engineer. I studied structural engineering for my undergrad, and through that whole time I was playing music in a punk band called Ushi and the Bonks with some friends. Music was always important to me growing up, it’s how I understood myself. I studied piano and then operatic voice, but I was never really allowed to take it seriously. I wanted to do it at uni, but my parents enforced engineering as they didn’t view art and music as serious career paths — I am now very grateful to have a STEM background. Before I started engineering, I actually made a contract to my parents where I said “I’m going to do four years of engineering”, and then they’d have to support me in [an] artist/ music masters — and they said it was a deal!
I then studied for a Masters at the Royal College of Art on the Information Experience Design course, which I thought would be an easier way to get more into the art world, because before that I had just been doing a bit of exhibition work and soundscapes for people. I did think that the course was quite sound heavy, but they had changed it when I came to study; so I got more into performance because I reinterpreted the assignments that gave us during the MA to fit the more sound-based approaches I wanted to explore. At the end of the masters, I made a five-act thespian noise opera [‘After Hunger’] with Sonnie Carlebach, which blended all the physical arts bit of sculpture, metal-making — which was inspired by the engineering side of me — then mixing that with opera. It was a weird piece talking about the cyclic nature of trauma and healing.
Is the coding aspect of your practice influenced by your engineering or is that something separate that you got into?
The coding aspect is a really crazy one! In 2022, I went to a Tate Late exhibition and I saw a film [called] One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean by Yuyan Wang. It was a beautiful film; very glitchy, very granular, and amazing sound design. The credits rolled at the end, and I took a note of the sound designer — Raphaël Hénard — I couldn’t find him anywhere online. He’s quite a ghost character who’s done a few other films, but there’s not much information on him anywhere. So I messaged the lady that made the film and I was like “hey, your film was really great and the sound was really amazing, do you have a contact for the guy that did the sound” — and then she sent me his email!
I reached out to him to ask if he would have a call with me, and he replied asking me to come to Brussels for five days; and in that time he would teach me everything about live coding. My parents were like “you’re not going, you don’t know anything about this man”, but I had such a good feeling about it. It was the most amazing experience; we met in a coffee shop first, and I asked him about why he had offered it to me (because I was a total stranger). He just said that he would have liked it if someone had done the same for him and one day I could repeat the same gesture. We spent five days together where he would give me tasks to code and we would talk about the history of music from classical to current and how coding fits into his practice.
That’s also how I got into the organ as well. I had listened to Nachthorn a few months prior and ended up meeting the composer; Raphaël’s work partner, Maxime Denuc, who is a really amazing electronic musician. He makes these installation robots that play the organ faster than a human can. That’s how he makes his music — by making MIDI robots that play organs. They used to be a duo back in the 90’s called Plapla Plinky composing contemporary baroque rave music; Raphaël would do the coding, and Maxime would write these organ pieces that go together to make the most amazing sound ever! (I’d recommend listening to Appel by Plapla Plinky.)
Whilst learning coding from Raphaël, he showed me how he makes these very organic sounds. It was such a beautiful concept to me, because the approach was very mathematical in that it involved numbers, frequencies and equations. Writing a script is a very logical process: you are directing that you want the sound to do this, this, this, and you see it from a very different side because it’s so far from being intuitive as you don’t know what sound you are going to get — or at least I don’t sometimes. You learn to play it in a different way, where it’s its own instrument that you have to find ways to control. I kind of like that, because it’s like having a conversation with a different being. But I picked it up quite fast because of my engineering degree.
In 2025, you were a selected composer for Sound and Music’s ‘In Motion’ scheme. How has being part of the scheme given you space and support to explore?
It’s a really great scheme. You get a mentor that you can have weekly or bi-weely meetings with, but they make sure you have someone there for your whole journey to talk to about your projects — which is not something that I’ve ever had before in a music concept process. It’s slightly like uni; you have a project and a mentor, you take your questions to them, and they give advice — but also support you with more logistical matters or recording, budget, printing, studio time. It’s much more real-world music-making advice — I can finally work on a project over a year and a half that’s not just me making something, playing a show, recording it, and then it gets saved as a file on my laptop and doesn’t go anywhere.
What have you explored so far as part of the ‘In Motion’ scheme?
My concept for the programme revolves around the idea of “decolonising space and sound”. I say that in quotation marks, because what does that really mean? I have been researching it a lot — and have some conversations planned with lecturers in the field — because I want to get a deeper understanding of what that means beyond an evocative phrase.
What I am looking into is what the realness is to this idea of decolonising space and sound — and what it really means. Is it a process of unlearning? Is it a process of educating more? Take indeterminacy and chance music as an example. John Cage was influenced by ethnic music culture that he took from his time overseas and brought back here, which was then seen as something that no one had ever done before — such as I Ching. The idea, to me, means giving credit where credit is due — and within that credit there is the act of decolonising, which is a very powerful word.
Even though I started this programme with the idea of trying to understand what the process of decolonising sound and space is, I don’t think it’s what I’m doing anymore — I don’t think anyone can “achieve” that — but instead it’s more reclaiming sound and space. I am attempting to do so by working with sounds in the Western format of a church organ and soprano — as typically these spaces aren’t meant for POC people. For me, it’s about reclaiming sound: telling stories of our culture, heritage, and my experience of being part of the Sri Lankan diaspora in the UK and our journeys in a Westernised format. Trying to question why there is separation in the first place. I don’t think that is decolonising, but I think there’s still power in reclaiming and holding the space — telling different narratives in formats that are traditionally not meant for said people.
Separate from the scheme — but something that will inform a large part of the work — is my presence as part of a “collective” of Sri Lankan UK diaspora artists that are being funded by the British Council to do a residency called Colomboscope and collaborate with local people. It’s been amazing to meet more UK based Sri Lankan artists, relating to each other on a diasporic level. I’m beyond excited for this opportunity, which stemmed from a commission from Toulip Wonder. I’m so grateful for the chance to do this as it’s brought me into a whole community which I had been searching for. I will also treat the trip as research for my In Motion project, and will gather lots of field recordings.
These field recordings will allow me to play with the idea of reframing landscape and space. I am really interested in the experience of knowing exactly where you are because of a specific sound; like when you hear the “see it, say it, sorted” announcement, you know you’re on the tube in London. So I’m trying to find those same sounds — only if you were Sri Lankan would you know where the sounds I have collected would be found. I’m going to work with the recordings and create an audible landscape that switches between Sri Lanka and London; so that people are almost unsure of where they are exactly, but are being guided by these narrative, musical, and conversational elements from these specific spaces. I’m also working with the few remaining church organs in Sri Lanka and working with this idea of sonic colonial powers.
Recently, your compositional work has focused on organ music — including your performance for Dialled In at The Cause, composed organ works for Nick Turner’s documentary shown at Fountains Abbey (National Trust), and organ works for As of Right Now, a body-image performance at The Place. What is currently drawing you to this instrumental force?
It’s great to work with the organ because it’s so powerful. Even if you’re not religious, it has such a spiritual feeling. I have always been interested in the positionality of sound too, such as how some sounds make you look up: why is that? Is it a spiritual feeling? It’s really hard to describe it, but when you go to listen to an organ gig or hear someone play the organ, you look up! I feel like it’s a drawing of spirituality and religion. It’s such an encapsulating sound, it makes you feel held. The sound really holds you in space and makes you feel less alone. I studied organ a bit while I was in Bristol; but it is an interesting thing to play the organ in a public space. The last organ project that I did was binaural recordings of different organs and spaces. It was just improv where I was playing the organ in the space working with harmonics — a very meditative sort of piece.
During that time of recording those pieces, so many people had issues with me. One example was after I had just been to see St Matthew’s Passion at the Barbican; I felt this need to go and play because I felt so inspired, and I had my recording set on me — so we went to an organ in London Bridge that we were working with. The feeling was right then, and the feeling was great. When we got there, there was a cis white guy playing the organ just messing about, it was kind of bad but no one said anything. I wait and then go play the organ. When it’s a pipe organ, it’s really nice to play with the harmonics by pulling out stops at different rates and layering those sounds over to get these beautiful long, drony tones.
Then this guy comes up to me and says “this is making my ears bleed, you can’t play like this, you people aren’t allowed to play this” — then five of his friends started heckling me and pressing buttons on the organ. I tried to ask them to leave me alone, but they wouldn’t stop. I shouted back saying that they cannot talk to people like this — and that I knew that they were pissed off because I’m a brown girl, but that they were racists. One man from the street came to break it up and just said “you shouldn’t be getting yourself into situations like that, they could be violent”. But, again, it’s not a case of me getting myself into anything. I am going to stand up for myself because if I scream at them they may be less likely to do it to someone else.
That was the worst it’s been. But generally I get people just saying “can you stop what you’re doing” because it’s not ‘traditional’ organ music. I almost do want it to hurt their ears; I’m not exploring ‘traditional’ music, but also I’m not a ‘traditional’ organ player — so people have a lot of issues. I dress how I dress, so I think people think it gives them the right to come up and say what they want to say to me, which isn’t nice; but it’s just interesting to experience when I’m thinking about reclaiming space and sound. I can take it quite well, but I shouldn’t have to be able to take it well. After the six guys yelled at me, I took a really long break from playing because I just felt unsafe.
Moving on from that though, one of the new organ pieces I’m working on with Toulip Wonder involves working with graphic scores that she has made out of beeralu lace designs — which is a traditional Sri Lankan hand-weaving pattern — and I’ve interpreted them for church organ. There are people taking steps in the right direction around changing the image of the organ.
Your works tackle ideas of cultural identity, womanhood and trauma explored through narratives, such as your recently re-performed work ‘Pooja’ at Eavesdropping Forum. Can you tell me more about how you explore these important but sometimes difficult themes?
‘Pooja’ is a project that is ongoing and keeps having different iterations. The concept and context of it is based around Hindu Tamil culture — when a girl starts her period, there is a ceremony called the Samathiya Veedu which traditionally the whole village attends. I had one so all my family and friends came. They give you gold money, jewellery, sarees, as if building a dowry. It’s meant to be a signal to the men that the girl is ready to have a child and be wed. It’s a very sexist, misogynistic ceremony. It’s not celebrating women’s growth, but instead it’s like ringing the bells so that everyone knows she’s now available.
I felt really weird having it. It’s also ironic, because when a woman is on her period, she is not allowed in the temple, because they believe that the devil is inside of her. This gives the menstrual cycle such negative connotations that are false — because women give birth, and are the most powerful creatures on earth. The menstrual cycle is one of the best things that can happen to us, as it affirms us as spiritual beings of nature that gives us time to understand ourselves better and process our emotions.
I’ve been reading a lot of papers about why these ceremonies exist, especially in today’s society. It’s more understandable that they took place years and years ago because of class systems, and how you’d let people know that your child was ready to get married — but we don’t live like that today. When I would talk to my own mother questioning the ideologies, she would say people believed “you can’t go to the temple on your period because you can’t go outside because the lions will eat you!” — and I just thought how it would’ve been something her mother told her. There’s reasons behind it, and those reasons are misogynistic. Earlier research shows that when Hindu women were on their period, they had to stay in a shed for three days away from the family. They wouldn’t be allowed to cook anything, because it was said that if they cooked it then the food would go bad and the family would get ill. They wouldn’t clean or wash their hair, they would just rest and recuperate. It was meant to be seen as supporting women but I see it as sexist.
So with ‘Pooja’, I wanted to talk on that subject and start a conversation. The first iteration was a 45 minute drone piece that Sonnie Carlebach and I had made; I brought field recordings I’d made, and Sonnie ran it through a tape machine to make a really long interaction of temple chanting from Sri Lanka. It started off as a performance piece where I was free-bleeding into three diyas — a ceramic lamp that you find in a temple — I had three in the circle, and this funnel to direct the blood into the diyas. I was free-bleeding into these temple lamps, and I would then walk around and put rice into them to “purify” my blood. I also had bells on my feet, which are worn during Bharatanatyam dancing. The chanting and bells on my feet turned the experience into a sonic performance which was contrasted with the stillness of me squatting over the lamps for around fifteen minutes each time.
I told my mum I was doing this and she told me that I was going to hell because I had to take the lamps from the temple. She told me it was atrocious. I just said that I think the ceremony is atrocious and I want to talk about it. It’s very interesting to free bleed on stage in front of sixty people. The date had to be so specific, because I had to be bleeding. There was some anxiety when my period hadn’t come the night before, mainly because of the stress, but Sonnie came through the door and my period started. -laughs-
You’ve performed different iterations of ‘Pooja’ since its first iteration, particularly at Eavesdropping Forum — tell me a bit about how you adapted the work?
In the next iteration, I talked about the Western concepts and ideas of menstruation and the taboos of blood. I made a short, granular piece using the title ‘She’s What I Smeared on the World’ — which is the final line from Suspiria where the mother says “my daughter, she’s what I smeared on the world”. I took that line and I wrote the piece using my coding to granular synthesise a word-choppy soundscape to go with a five-minute granular film using the same instrument that I bled through. It was now a white representing female cleansing this speculative instrument for funneling free bleeding into the ground, there were scenes using figs and blood visually talking about menstruation taboos and fertility. This was inspired by Anna Fedele’s ‘Reversing Eve’s Curse: Mary Magdalene, Mother Earth and the Creative Ritualization of Menstruation’.
For Eavesdropping, I wasn’t going to be on my period so I knew I couldn’t work with blood specifically, but I wanted to talk about the same concept in a sonically driven piece. I really wanted to use Manjal — which is turmeric and yoghurt — that is said to be very cleansing. At your wedding, or your period ceremony, you would get covered in the paste. It’s ironic, again, because it’s a cleansing thing but it stains everything! It’s very synonymous to the idea that the menstrual cycle is a very powerful thing that’s seen in such a bad way.
I wrote a poem about how the temple views menstruation, used the granular synthesis that I made in the last iteration, and I covered my hands in the paste in an act of cleansing myself whilst I talked about menstruation. I then play my cello and use my voice in an expanded and painful way to imitate the pain of menstruation. As I play on my instrument, type on my laptop, and pick up the mic, the turmeric is staining everything — everything becomes yellow. The whole time I used a prayer box which I begin the piece with, and it sets up the chant. The whole piece was very focused on the visual aspect of Manjal; how it’s meant to be cleansing, yet staining everything I touch. It allowed me to do a more sonic piece, rather than a purely performative piece.
During 2025 and now for 2026, you have an Artist Residency at Brompton Cemetery with Sonnie Carlebach, where you curate, facilitate and perform a vast array of works. How has this outlet allowed you to explore your work further?
Shoutout to Brompton! Amazing amounts of gratitude towards Brompton ever in the entire world. It has been so crazy to have space for a year — let alone two — but to have a space where you can host exhibitions, show a performance, and work on a project that I can then show is so special. All the questions around: where am I going to show this project? Do I have enough money to rent a space to show it? All of that is sorted, and we can really focus on making a project and making work. It was a chance to work on projects, learn from each one, and take things that we’d learned forward onto the next one, as well as to build a community of working with new people on a different scale. Everything in that space becomes very site-specific. It’s a very overwhelming space of energy, and I always feel so spiritual being there. It certainly directs the work we make — almost like the spirits talking to me saying “do this!”.
After we finished our Masters, we knew we wanted to do performance things but we didn’t really know what that meant. So to have a year where we were experimenting with what performance means for different people, allowed us to get to a place where we were more clear on what our practice was. This has taken the form of expanded theatre and operatic performative pieces and art. It feels like a really nice journey to have gone on, to understand what I enjoy working on.
How has your residency at Brompton Cemetery allowed you to further develop projects outside of that environment?
I did this residency in Berlin called Grabowsee, which was amazing. I stayed for two weeks in an abandoned tuberculosis hospital with only a small amount of electricity and no internet. While I was there, I worked on a one-woman opera called Giulia Tofana — which was so fun to do — but I was only able to do that because I’d had the time at Brompton trying to understand how I work, how we work, and what processes to use.
It reinterpreted two arias: ‘Sposa son disprezzata’ by Vivaldi and ‘Lamenta della ninfa’ by Monteverdi. I then wrote a code soprano track. Giulia Tofana was a lady from the 1600’s who was one of the first “poisoners”. She was a victim of domestic violence and abuse, and a lot of my work talks about that. She would hand it to women who needed it who were also in abusive relationships and subsequently got trialed with the murder of six hundred men and died. The Vivaldi track translates to “I am wife, I am scorned” and the Monteverdi track to “Lament of the nymph”. It was a three act journey exploring the emotional toil and pull of being in an abusive relationship, feeling helpless and in a cycle of turmoil and pain, ending in the third act of ‘Se Ore Minor’ — a nonsensical aria I composed for soprano with live coding, exploring a power of reclaiming and building of emotion through this non verbal extended operatic format using heavy vocal textural palettes emphasising the pain. It was a difficult project for me to work on, but I felt comfortable working on it at Grabowsee, being able to step away and surround myself with the beautiful community.
In addition to this residency, you collaborate with Sonnie in performative noise duo Cell Deletion. Can you expand on how live performance allows you to explore all the facets of your practice and how collaborative work fits into this?
Cell Deletion came from an open call from IRCAM. It started as tape and code manipulation with no instruments or singing. Sonnie would play bits on tape, I would play bits on code, and we would have a conversation between analogue and digital instruments. Then since I’m a singer, I was like “I should sing on some shit” — and then [after] ‘After Hunger’, which was our masters project, we got into more theatre-style bits and thought we should put this together in a gig sort of context. So it became something that we gig with, and tell little stories in a musical format.
I really like the performance aspect of it. You really have to be in it, because we are playing different characters and telling a story. We will rehearse bits, but it’s mostly us talking about a story that we’ve read, or how we’ve been feeling recently, and we interpret that in sound and start playing. It’s about letting out the feelings that I don’t get to talk about with people. Cell Deletion, in a way, is a weird space of us being vulnerable with each other and our emotions — that allow us to create emotive, weird stories. People end up feeling like “oh, I don’t really know what I’m watching right now — but it’s really interesting because I don’t know what’s going on”. It’s filling the gaps that we don’t explore in Brompton, because it’s not the way we make work in that space; whereas Cell Deletion is just us two. It’s my most vulnerable state when I play in that context comforted by the harsh noise that makes up our sound.
Your work utilises many facets of making, such as poetry, field recordings, body and soul; further explored through video installation, publication and noise opera. How do you balance each of these elements when your practice involves a multitude of different contexts — especially when you put so much of yourself into everything that you do?
There is no other way to do it apart from putting yourself in it. Everything has to be real — which is also one of the reasons why I was really shocked when I went to uni. I went to art uni expecting to be surrounded by a lot of people that have a lot to say with their work, but that wasn’t the case. That’s why I got on so well with Sonnie, because I could see a real person trying to say something real from a real angle. Obviously, it’s draining as the topics I talk about are quite draining to think about,but I think about them anyway, so I may as well get some art out of it! -laughs- It’s a really great way for me to get my thoughts and feelings out rather than ruminating on them and healing from them. All the forms I play with are so important to me to understand myself better through my practice. But also, working a full-time structural engineering job whilst also doing that was tough!
There are positives to it. I wrote ‘100 Instruction Scores to Overcome Trauma’, which is a book inspired by Fluxus and Hindu spiritual healing which is accompanied by a film of me doing those scores. The book talks about overcoming pain, or any trauma, but hints at domestic abuse and sexual violence. It was a very hard project to think about, do, and relive a lot of moments, but it was also a very healing project. Because I had to do 100 instruction scores with the knowledge that they had been written inspired by Hindu spiritual practices, it was really healing and I felt so much lighter afterwards. Sometimes when I’m ruminating too much and doing another emotional project that is really dark, I always go back to that book and spend a day doing some of the exercises. Even though it is draining, there are the nice sides of it which allows me to understand and comfort myself.
–
Learn more about Ushara Dilrukshan and her practice:
- https://usharadilrukshan.cargo.site/
- https://usharadilrukshan.bandcamp.com/
- https://celldeletion11.bandcamp.com/
- https://www.instagram.com/ushara_x
References/Links:
- Yuya Wang, One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean (2022)
- Maxime Denuc – Nachthorn (2022)
- Plapla Pinky – Appel (2015)
- Bach – St. Matthew Passion (1727)
- Suspiria (2018), dir. Luca Guadagnino
- Anna Fedele, ‘Reversing Eve’s Curse: Mary Magdalene, Mother Earth and the Creative Ritualization of Menstruation’ (2014), Journal of Ritual Studies, 28(2)
- Vivaldi – ‘Sposa son disprezzata’ (1735)
- Monteverdi – ‘Lamento della ninfa’ (1614-1638)
