In recent years, with the Theertha Performance Platform,Manamperi has developed several performance art work that express his politics about instances of consumerism and capitalism which happen in the day-to-day, unnoticed by the average person complicit in the rat race psyche. In 2017, for the exhibition Portraits of Intervention held at the Aicon Gallery in New York, Manamperi presented a performance titled “Highly Explosive” documented in video form. The performance is noted for his clever use of his own body as a medium of expression as he walks around Colombo covered in Chinese firecrackers, engaging with the vulnerability of human existence when confronted with intense forces of violence. His performance “Dead Fish” (2016), which was included in the Theertha Performance Platform was controversial due to his approach towards death, with Manamperi walking along the streets with a dead fish, demonstrating the manner in which persons are often dead while being alive, subject to violence and torture. Referring to the performance, he said that it “shows humanity, certification, and death, all in one. It is the dead fish, that dies. It is the dead fish, that is tortured. First you embrace it with love and then you destroy.” For several years now, Manamperi has been experimenting with his signature piece “The Barrel Man”, which consists of a man holding an empty barrel, conveying different themes about surrounding human existence. At the re-opening of the Jaffna Library in 2004 he performed a version of the piece, walking into the library covered in bloody bandages carrying an empty barrel on his shoulders, signifying the futility of the civil war and the physical and emotional toll it had taken on the Sri Lankan community. In 2017, for the Portraits of Intervention exhibition he performed the version “Golden Barrel Man” – painting himself in the same color of gold as the barrels used by the Sri Lankan army to barricade government property and demarcate territories in Colombo and Jaffna from being approached and attacked during the civil war. 

Manamperi’s work can be described as experimental creations that attempt to visually portray external social, cultural and political events that affect human existence. He is also known for evoking the political through the personal with work that focus on his own experience of the transformation of his body.