Art of Politics and Politics of Art in Sri Lanka

Art of Politics and Politics of Art in Sri Lanka

'State had us believe that it was celestial violence, it was divine providence; and we feel sick that we believed in state-sponsored ideas; now we are patients with disease,' says Jagath Weerasinghe, the eminent artist and archaeologist from Sri Lanka, while he takes the viewers on a tour of his work at Espace Gallery, in New Delhi on 10 December 2012.

'; } } } if (google_ads[0].bidtype == "CPC") { google_adnum = google_adnum + google_ads.length; } document.write(s); return; } google_ad_client = 'pub-9372192619832074'; google_ad_channel = '9759277419'; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '2'; google_ad_type = 'text'; google_image_size = '728x90'; google_feedback = 'on'; google_skip = google_adnum; // --> THE EXHIBITION of the contemporary visual art from Sri Lanka titled ?Narratives of Resistance? is literal as well as metaphorical. Jagath?s work titled ?Soldier? reveals the phantasmagoria of death and destruction; bullets become roses and gun seems to be an intimate companion; soldiers at war loose a sense of distinction between defending and destroying the nation. It was such a scene in which Jagath argues that we all began to believe in war as the forgone conclusion in people?s destiny in Sri Lanka. The violence of deception has caused serious illness in the human psyche, which is depicted in another range of his work called ?Patient?. Doctors, of medicine, as well as of human civilization, seem to fail to diagnose it entirely. They check and recheck; they test and retest; they brainstorm to detect; nothing helps; and hence the patient has the pale face with diffusive black on which crawls antibodies. Jagath?s works shakes the beholders awake. He says with a sardonic smile, ?nobody can live with this work of art?.

On the other hand, his compatriots, young artists Pala Pothupitiye and Anura Krishantha, tell their visual tales through colorful kitsch and potent metaphors. Pala?s cartographic representation of South Asia leaps from the intellectual radicalism of the map of South Asia that Himal (South Asian Magazine from Nepal) presented a few decades back. Pala, on his maps of South Asia, shows horns locked in war, military maneuvering, cavalcade of guns, and then deceptive appearance of ambulance which camouflages military vans.

Also, to shock even further, Pala?s world map cast aspersions on the male underwear, nearly suggestive of conditioned masculinities in the wake of war. On the other hand Anura?s ?Invasion? attracts us; from distance the canvas looks full with flower petals; they are intriguing and tempting; they invite a beholder to come closer; and the close encounter shocks; they are not petals of flowers, they are all miniature images of guns. The motif of gun persist through his works ?Chairs?, which present guns in various modes of revelation. ??

Sri Lankan Art Beyond Postcard Aesthetics

The Narratives of Resistance is irresistibly provocative. It is in the league of artistic expressions which dominated art works in war ravaged Sri Lanka. An anthropological account on contemporary visual art of Sri Lanka written by Sasanka Perera, explores the length and breath of the visual arts in post 1990s Sri Lanka. The monograph aptly tiled ?Artists Remember; Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Sri Lankan Visual Arts?, published in 2012 by Colombo Institute for the Advance Study of Society and Culture and theertha International Artists? Collective,underscores memory of violence as a mediator between the artists and the work of art. And it is in the realm of memory that the romance between personal and political, biography and history, tradition and modernity surface. An irony of epistemological significance is that the romance collapses the binaries and what remains is ?politically expressive art? of Sri Lanka in and after the decade of 1990s.

In the history of human civilization memory has been the most coveted tool to do as well as undo politics of remembering. The modern nation state invariably seeks to tame and manipulate memory for creating an imagined community as it were. The state goes for war, with enemies from outside or an invented enemy from within, with the help of memory of patriotic heroism and posterity of nationalism. In this scheme, a particular kind of art and a particular kind of folklore would be given currency. But then, the same tool of memory also serves mnemonic devices to the artists who refuse to subscribe to the logic of status quo and seek to hear the sounds beyond silences. Artists, with a creative urge, (re)create the semblance of the experiences of the events of past, no matter whether it was a veritable sweet-dream or a nightmare, for a process of catharsis as well as for an honest art history. Could there still be visual art confined to postcard images of Sri Lanka, which attract tourists and honeymooners?

Decades of Artistic Fermentation and Political Catharsis

Sasanka Perera lists some of the key art works in the last couple of decades, which elucidates a dialectics of art of politics and politics of art. Thereby art is not at all related to ?the conventional tourist promotional and idyllic images of cityscapes and landscapes?. For example, Shanaathanan?s installation titled Paradise Bed, as though the tourists? paradise in an idyllic location of the natives, ironically conveys the spooky-spiky character of the bed-located-in velvety virtual paradise. The work of R Vaidehi and Vasuki Jeyashankar explores women?s subjectivities in encounter with rape and murder at the hand of Sri Lankan army personnel.

The embittering irony, as a marker in the scarred memory, unfolds in the series of Welcome to the Eastern province and Don?t Measure Me by Amarjeeva. The gruesome consequences of wars are revealed in Chandrasiri?s Broken Hands, Manamperi?s Barrel Man, and Manamperi?s Bandaged Man. While an array of personalized accounts emerges from some of the exhibited works, there are also those works offering profound propositions on the idea of living and dying. Anoli Perera in her works such as Violation of Memories and Aftermath, for example, underscores the phenomenon of ?death without a body?. Death thus assumes more macabre significance in the face of disappeared individuality of the dead in the scenario of rampant mass burial. Moreover, the works of Anoli Perera also reconfigures femininity in the social history of Sri Lanka.

It is evidently no longer the art-in-nostalgia representing the civilizational acmes of bygone time, nor is it art-in-inertia representing the political strategy to depoliticize artwork, as it were. The ?four key visual art events?, Sasanka Perera suggests, which arguably underpinned the political catharsis in the contemporary visual art of Sri Lanka were The Flag Project of the Artists Against War, the Peace Train Project of the Neelan Tiruchalvam Trust, the Aham Puram Exhibition jointly organized by Colombo based Theerthaa International Artists? Collective and Jaffna based SETHU Study Site for Visual Culture, and a collaborative performance and installation art project The Maze hosted by Theerthaa International Artists? Collective.

While the first two were ideologically motivated exhibition, which aimed at sensitization and arousal for debates among the ordinary on the perilous consequences of war, the latter two adopted more nuanced and subtle approaches. Especially the Aham Puram Exhibition, which showcased sixty works, was symbolically hoisted at a politically significant site of Jaffna Public Library, the destruction of which in 1985 was perceived as ?cultural genocide? and the refurbishing of the same did not alleviate the impact of state sponsored destruction. The exhibition revealed the worldview of people of Sri Lanka by collapsing the semantic divide of Aham (inside) and Puram (outside). The epistemological implications of the exhibition bridged the gap between the apparent insiders (Sinhala) and the alleged outsiders (Tamil) in Sri Lanka. Yet it did not compromise on truth, which reveals the brutality at the hand of state and nefarious silence of conventional artists, literati and glitterati, and academia. The new bridges are however built upon the debris of faith in the legitimacy of state.???

Not a Conclusion though!

The artists, post-1990s, have added socio-political significance to their works and thus unabashedly tell tales of silent experiences and memories of violence. These representations of memories vociferously narrate the hushed up epistemological consequences of living in a society where political history is ruthlessly checkered. Hence, while one can still witness children playing with the youthful tides of Indian Ocean, at Galle face beach in Colombo, one has to remember the seething memory of the recent past in every mind and every heart. It is this memory, which artists effortlessly express. Past is an ever-pinching present in spite of the maximal attempts of the state to turn Colombo into a veritable Singapore in a bid to compensate.

The political catharsis in the contemporary visual art of Sri Lanka opens a window to the possibility of reimagining South Asia afresh through the memory of violence. The civil memory of political violence is a socio-political reality of nearly entire South Asia and history of each country context is testimonial to it. Hence it is not absurd that one of the visiting art student at the Espace Gallery in New Delhi, while watching the exhibition Narratives of Resistance said, ?It is like reminiscing life in North-Eastern India, or in Kashmir, or in Chhatisgarh of India; and is it much different from some of those provinces in Pakistan where ordinary people are easy victims of conflict between state and Taliban?? It indeed invites for another spell of artistic meditation.

(About the contributor: Dev N Pathak teaches social Anthropology at South Asian University, Delhi)

Source: http://www.merinews.com/article/art-of-politics-and-politics-of-art-in-sri-lanka/15879097.shtml

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