(Adopted from, ‘Chapter 6: Going
Beyond Memories of Violence and Post War Art.’ In, Sasanka Perera, Artists
Remember, Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Sri Lankan Visual Arts.
Colombo: Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and Culture and Theertha
international Artists’ Collective. 2012).
 |
| 'Civilizing Serendib' by Anoli Perera (private collection) |
On 09 October 2014, an exhibition of contemporary Sri Lankan art tilted, 'Serendipity Revealed' will get underway at the Brunei Gallery, London. Thinking of the title, I wondered how serendipity could be revealed. One way of course is the method adopted by tourism promoters in Sri Lanka: reveal the 'beauty' and 'exoticism' of Serendib (Lanka) without contradictions. The other is to see the numerous complexities beneath the superficial touristy idea of Serendib. One has to see the exhibition itself to figure out how the artists have approached the issue.
Postwar Art
Let me now briefly focus on what might be called post war art. The works I have selected for my reading under this section emerged soon after the end of war in May 2009. What is important here is not simply the temporality of the works but the issues they deal with and their links to violence and war of the immediate past as well as in imagining the future. The four artists whose works I will focus on here are closely associated with the art of the 1990s; three of them also consistently produced work that dealt with pain, violence and memory in the time of war and their work has been discussed in the preceding chapters. More specifically, I will focus on Bandu Manamperi’s exhibition, Numbed (17 October to 09 November 2009, Red Dot Gallery, Pitakotte), Koralegedara Pushpakumara’s exhibition, Goodwill Harwear (14 November to 09 December 2009, Red Dot Gallery, Pitakotte), Sarath Kumarasiri’s exhibition, Kovil Pansal (12 December 2009 to 04 January 2010, Red Dot Gallery, Pitakotte) and Chandragupta Thenuwara’s exhibition (July 24 to 29 2010, Lionel Wendt Gallery, Colombo).
Though Bandu Manamperi is better known as a performance artist, the works in the exhibition Numbed consisted of a series of sculptures cum installations plus one performance. In all of these works, the artist had taken his own body as the focus of attention and point of departure. Visually, the installations consists of a number of sculptures molded out of his own body in different shades of light colors ranging from white through green to blue eerily suspended from the ceiling of the gallery. All of them have the appearance of being shocked, frozen or numbed. More specifically, the visual motifs that Manamperi has utilized for his installations are of three types, categorized strictly in terms of their basic appearance. The fist type is a visual-form that shows an expression ‘instantly frozen’ and there were a number of installations of this type in different colors and surface markings. The second type of form is more flexible, akin to a skin without any discernable texture (Ranabahu 2009). According to the artist, this was the basic or primary form that exists before the introduction of more pronounced and different textured surfaces as covers. In different spaces in the gallery, this form was presented as something that was limp and lifeless. The third visual form Manamperi has used for the exhibition consists of his own performance (Ranabahu 2009).
Through this exhibition, the artist’s intention was to suggest that individuals in society cover themselves in different cultural, ideological or political coverings as protective layers over one’s own natural self or the biological and psychological skin while constantly seeking and often finding comfort and security within it. More specifically, depending on different circumstances the individuals would dress themselves in different layers if political meaning representing extremist and obsessive positions reflecting different versions of competitive religions, histories and counter-histories, nature, patriotisms, self-absorption, ideas of independence and versions of media representations. This prpcess is undertaken in relation to or in support of various cultural and political environments (Ranabahu 2009). The artist suggests that these tendencies operating within the complexities of the present political, cultural and religious circumstances have restricted individuals’ personal integrity and their collective capacity to feel pain and injustice. IN other words, the prevailing circumstances have made the body numb. In this case, the body contextualizing this numbness is that of the artist in the sense that all the installations/sculptress have been molded out of his own body while the performance was also centered on himself. But the numbness he feels, Manmperi suggest is the numbness that the society at large is experiencing. Though the artist is commenting on the present state of politics, it is very clear that a linear thematic connection can be drawn from this exhibition to his earlier works. The present works are a more subtle and nuanced articulation of the post war state of feeling in the country.
Though a key artist closely associated with the 90’s Trend, Koralegedara Pushpakuamara’s work so far has shown a preoccupation with issues of sexuality, personal pain, self-frustration as well as wider frustrations of youth. It is in this context that Ranabhu has noted that Pushpakumara early works tended to depict “a single individual frustrated by the constantly present social, cultural and political brutalization as the main motif” (Ranabahu 2009). This was a representation of himself as well as others like him. In this sense, his early works were not only autobiographical but also narcissistic according to at least one recent commentator (Ranabahu 2009). From a methodological point of view, Pushpakumara’s 2009 exhibition, Goodwill Hardware almost obsessively focused on what may be called ‘materiality,’ particularly compared to Pushpakumara’s earlier work which were mostly paintings. The major works in the exhibition were installations along with two dimensional works hung the walls which also incorporated relief forms. Moreover, due to what he was attempting to narrate through this methodological framework, this exhibition brought his work directly within the focus of this book.
Ranabahu has noted the overt disconnectedness presented in the combination of the adjective (goodwill as something good) and the noun (hardware a something hard or harsh) which formulates the theme of his exhibition (Ranabahu 2009). The main material and the manner of their use augment this contradiction as well as the artist’s argument. The work titled Goodwill Hardware 1 incorporated barbed wire safely within transparent plastic tubes. In this context, something intrinsically seen as dangerous, hurtful and marking clear borders which should not be crossed was transformed into something apparently safe. In Goodwill Hardware 2, Pushpakumara similarly encased within transparent plastic tubes regular household matches which were perceived as common and relatively safe items in daily use which nevertheless had potential for danger given their ability initiate fire. But that too, remains safe only as long as they are encased in plastic tubes, thereby removed from conditions of ignition. In Goodwill Hardware 3, he used material that tend to signal danger or mark off areas which should not be trespassed in terms of their color like traffic or police tapes, wrapped them around objects similar to large sausages and transformed them into mere playful or trivial structures in which their sense of danger was seemingly erased. In all the situations, one type of material was dangerous or had the possibility to become dangerous or signal danger while the other material juxtaposed with them had the potential to neutralize them while the former was incorporated or associated with the latter.
The artist was inviting viewers to explore the popular meanings embedded in these seeming contradictions and ponder over the liminality of apparent safety in the transformed or new form or environment. In his mind, this was similar to the manner in which the dangers and unresolved issues of immediate post war are not always visible; they were subsumed under various guises of the emergent national security state and its multiple discourses. Ranabahu notes this is also Pushpakuamara’s attempt at suggesting that intensely harsh and bitter situations of human suffering are “dismissed from social memory and forgotten through skilful political maneuvering of subtle as well as blatant political discourses or unrelenting cultural strategies” (Ranabahu 2009).
Sarath Kumarasiri is the best known sculptor associated with the 90s Trend who has been consistently working on issues directly related to violence and memory as evidenced in Chapter 4. In that sense, his intention to comment on the politics of post war in his 2009 exhibition Kovil-Pansal is a logical extension of a well established narrative trajectory. Much of his earlier works took as its point of departure the dynamic of memorialization through the reproduction of common, mundane and everyday items used by victims of violence. In comparison, the two highly visible works in the Kovil-Pansal exhibition were clearly monumental. They were executed in metal sheets out of which the artist had hewed entrance facades of Buddhist and Hindu shrines combining the dominant features representing Buddhist and Hindu religious architecture. In fact, the title of the exhibition which combined the Tamil (kovil) and Sinhala (pansal) words for temples was emblematic of this synthesis.
On one hand, Kumarsiri situates both words from the two languages in a single, composite and equal setting contradicting the state’s official patronage of Buddhism as the religion of the state through its entrenchment in the Sri Lankan constitution. On the other hand, the artist attempts to implicate the sectarian politics that made such divisions and their resultant fallout possible. In other words, this is an articulation of the omnipresence “of extremist religious nationalism behind many dark episodes in recent Sri Lankan history” (Ranabahu 2009). The viewing of these artworks and stepping into them is a matter of entering these ‘dark episodes’; it is about resurrecting the blue prints of social tragedies that are not openly articulated which are therefore made invisible through that in-articulation.
For Kumarasiri the politicized versions of both religious traditions and their ideological make-up represents the authors of the tragedies of violence, nationalism and ethno-cultural competition that has affected Sri Lanka for over three decades. His main concern is that these issues remain unresolved despite the end of war. That is the reality of post war: nothing is really resolved except the war. That is why, when one enters the temple facades it would not be possible travel beyond as one’s entry is barred just inside the front doorway. Post war then for Kumarsiri is not a phase of progress but of non-movement or even regression.
The post-war work and the politics of Chandraguptha Thenuwara tend to be much more blunt resistant to over-interpretation than the work of the other three artists disused in this section. This also means that Thenuwara’s work has the ability to communicate his ideas better to a larger audience not necessarily equipped with an informed sense of art appreciation. It does however run the risk of blurring the boundary between art (even political art) and political activism. Ability to communicate is an enduring feature and strength of his work.
His first important postwar exhibition was ‘Black Paintings & Other Works: An Exhibition of Paintings and Installation at the Lionel Wendt Gallery, Colombo held between 3rd and 5th April 2010 (GroundViews 2010). This was followed soon afterwards by ‘Vigil and Other Works: An Exhibition of Installations, Drawings and Paintings’ at the same venue from 24th to 29th July 2010 (Kanagasabapathipillai 2010). The two exhibitions together establish the parameters of Thenuwara’s postwar output in art.
‘Black Paintings & Other Works’ consisted of fifteen artworks that included installations, drawings and paintings. In his own statement formulated to contextualize the exhibition, the artist refers to the postwar period in which it is held as a difficult and unique moment marked by both the end of protracted war and the divisive politics of parliamentary elections (Thenuwara 2010). The structure and presentation of the exhibition link some of Thenuwara’s earlier works from the immediate past to the current works, thereby also simultaneously linking in an unlinear manner the prewar and postwar politics of the country. In his conceptualization, the exhibition consists of two parts. The first, which he calls the ‘preface’ presents three previously exhibited works; this section is symbolic of the immediate past in terms of wider politics. The second component addresses the issues of the current moment with nine new paintings and an installation. According to Thenuwara, the preface was needed because the ideas expressed through these earlier works are still valid in the context of postwar realities (Thenuwara 2010). This marks his self-conscious and direct attempt at linking the past and the present. Among the works included in the preface is triptych (2007) based on three selected verses from Dhammapada. The articulations he has adopted from Dhammapada are the following: 'hatred never ceases by hatred'; ‘to all, life is dear and all fear death’; and ‘one should neither kill nor cause to kill' (Thenuwara 2010). The association he makes between the words of the Buddha and the unpleasantness of war and destruction is clear enough. The second series of works in the preface consist of the triptych 'Erasing Camouflage: Peace' (2008) through which he attempted to formulate the literal erasure of camouflage in imaging peace. That is, issues linked to war represented by camouflage designs and colors had to be addressed for them to be erased I order to achieve peace. On one hand, it indicated a moment of hope, but on the other hand, it was also the reiteration of an ideal goal that was difficult to achieve. The war was now over, but whether peace was achieved in the wider sense of the word remains contested. The third component of the preface was a painting initially exhibited in 2009 under the slogan “now there is only black and white” (Thenuwara 2010). Here, the reference was to the lack of contradictions in the postwar mega narrative that was emerging in the background of victory in war. Thenuwara believes that the politics these earlier works represent need re-exploration because the issues they attempted to address have not been resolved; in his own words, “ we are facing a moment in which we are compelled to be cautious and to go forward with greater care” (Thenuwara 2010). ‘Greater care’ in this context is an euphemism for ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety.’
What he considers ‘The Black Paintings’ were specifically executed for this exhibition, and were meant to address the issues of the current moment (Thenuwara 2010). For him, the transition from prewar to post war is effectively ‘black moment’ where outstanding political issues from the past remain unresolved and the future is unclear. Nevertheless, he notes, “this moment should not be bleak and terrible. It should not be a time where thorn-like barbed wire becomes familiar, where masks conceal ill intent. This is a moment that should be bright with light and hope and openness. It should not be shrouded in darkness with various kinds of strictures imposed on the print and electronic media; where there is no place or space for expressing what needs to be said. Instead we are compelled to scribble again and again on a wall that is wiped clean regularly” (Thenuwara 2010). The artist is clearly critiquing the absence of wisdom in the politics of postwar. The following rhetorical question he poses makes this very clear: “If the masses are going to be imprisoned by rulers who came to power promising benevolence and if injustice is going to be masked in the name of the motherland, patriotism, and nationalism, what should we do?”
He answers his own question by placing the overall responsibility for social justice on concerned citizens thereby removing the onus for politics from the clutches of politicians: “Only we can build an era of good governance, a time that is free of hatred, a time in which love can spread and rights can be protected, a time in which we can speak and express our ideas freely and live without the fear of mistrust and the fear of death, it is only then that freedom, equality and peace will prevail” (Thenuwara 2010).
Thenuwara’s next postwar exhibition ‘Vigil’ (24th to 29th July 2010) consisting of fifteen exhibits is literally what the word implies, particularly with reference to its central installation. It consists of a number of female figures made out of white plaster of paris, lamps in hand waiting in vigil for the dead and the disappeared of their families. Another installation called ‘Columns of our Time’ consists of a number of columns made out of empty camouflage painted barrels, tin roofing sheets and used tires all of which were acutely linked to violence, war and destruction in the local context. ‘Vigil’ is part of a series of commemorative exhibitions he attempts to hold annually in the month of July to commemorate what is known in Sri Lanka as the ‘Black July.’ This refers to the extensive violence in July 1983 unleashed against Tamil civilians in response to the killing of thirteen Sinhala soldiers in Jaffna by the LTTE. The violence consumed hundreds of Tamil civilian lives along with the destruction of their properties and large-scale displacement of Tamils in Southern Sri Lanka. The violence was orchestrated by Sinhala thugs operating under the protection of the ruling United National Party. No one linked to the violence has been charged or brought to justice up to this point. For Thenuwara, the exhibition was to sustain in memory a crucial event from the divisive politics of the recent past that has not been resolved or closed even though overall political circumstances have changed dramatically. The artist observed in a 2010 interview, "with this exhibition I wanted to commemorate those events. A 30-year war is over, but there is still no peace. We must be aware of our actions and we should not forget the past so easily. We must participate in the peace process because there are several obstacles that must still be overcome" (Asia News 2010).
Both exhibitions are symptomatic of Thenuwara’s insistent contention that postwar is not a moment of hope or a process of transformative social justice. For him, it is a time of forceful erasure imposed by the state and other political forces aligned to its ideology which he as an artist is refusing to be consumed by. As he observes, “my shows are always political, social awareness is very important for me. I think it is my responsibility" (Asia News 2010).
The general theme running across the postwar works of all four artists
is the cynicism or lack of confidence in the seeming or relative quiet of postwar
society and politics. This is not a non appreciation of the absence of
war. After all, all these artists very vigorously
opposed the war as well as other forms of political violence because of the
destructions it ushered in throughout their careers. It is in essence a
critique of what is now considered ‘peace’ in terms of the dominant political
discourse, particularly of the state given its lack of clear direction,
disinterest in learning from history and what seems to be the institutionalized
absence of wisdom in contemporary national politics. Seen in this sense, the
postwar art of these artists as well as that of others who continue to comment
on politics do not constitute works that narrate uncritical stories of hope;
instead, they are extensions of the prewar narratives of memory and despair
which now go on to explore the contradictions and hypocrisies embedded in the
ideas and experiences of peace and postwar.
Future of Political Art in Sri Lanka
As a process of catharsis or as a process to reclaim and narrate painful personal and collective memories and to memorialize them, the art of the 1990s made a visible impact upon recent Sri Lankan art history. This becomes even more important when one considers the fact that, except for a handful of academic tracts, the violence and pain of the past as well as appeals for and expectations of justice in this context remain largely un-addressed, and certainly not publicly acknowledged. Moreover, postwar politics remains dominated by nostalgia of victory in war to the extent of undermining essential postwar political considerations such as reconciliation. In that sense, these works not only constitute a component of personal histories of individuals and segments of recent art history in general but also a larger corpus of narratives of the social and political history of the recent violent past and the contested present. It is in this context that the observations on the role of contemporary art by of Miguel Angel Corzo and Roy Perry that I referred to at the outset of this book becomes important. When Angel Corzo wondered “if we accept the notion that arts reflects history, then contemporary art is, in some way, a monument to contemporary civilization. It is the cultural heritage of our time…(1999: XV) and when Perry observed that “if we do not preserve the art of today for tomorrow’s audience, their knowledge and experience of our culture will be, sadly, impoverished” (Perry 1999: 44), they were clearly hinting at the communicative and historiographic dynamics of contemporary art. However, this perceived, anticipated and possible role of art runs into a set of crucial problems in the Sri Lankan context.
One is the absence of a dynamic and formal art historic narrative process that could have recorded the contributions to memory and history the art works reviewed in this book have made. In fact, in the relative not existence of such a tradition, this book itself becomes one of the very few preliminary efforts in attempting to institutionalize such a process. Second, the absence of a formal, publicly accessible and continuous system of art acquisition, preservation and presentation in state or private sectors means that these artworks could disappear from both the memory of individuals and the public as well as from the unprotected collections of artists themselves where they at present mostly remain. Unlike in many other countries, Sri Lanka does not have a public or private system of galleries and art museums with clearly defined agendas or facilities where such practices could have been institutionalized. The state has since the 1950s maintained a Department and Ministry of Culture, within which the National Art Gallery is also institutionally located. However, since Independence, national governments have shown no serious interest in selective preservation of contemporary and particularly alternative art. Clearly, this becomes an even more sensitive issue, when it comes to the kind of work I have referred to in this book. As pointed out by Webb, the attention any national government would pay to art “is predicated on the fact that what is turned into art signifies what is perceived as worthy of attention” (Webb 2005: 3). In many countries where such things as national art collections have been institutionalized, the emphasis has been to select and preserve art that perceivably indicate a sense of national cultural identity, a sense of authenticity. This is because in such national contexts, art is seen as ‘vehicles of social meaning’ in the sense articulated by Cesar Grana (quoted in Webb 2005), which “both represent and realize ‘the world’; and as a corollary can confirm (or deny) the stories of nationhood (Webb 2005: 30). This general observation has partial relevance to what has happened in the Sri Lankan context. That is, in addition to the almost complete absence of a system of galleries and museums, the state’s understanding of art is based upon a very restrictive notion of culture and heritage, which since the time of independence has privileged traditional forms of art and craft associated with the domain of Sinhala culture. In that same context, contemporary art has almost no sense of value, particularly within state and national systems of cultural reckoning. If some contemporary artworks were selected to the un-curated national collection at the National Art Gallery or for other ad hoc collections in various government institutions as decorative arrangements, such works were likely to be very representational works linked to perceived glorious pasts, idealized village scenes and idealized religious sensibilities mostly informed by middle class conceptions of Buddhism. All these selections are supposed to represent the nation, and in this case they refer specifically to the Sinhala nation while at the same time such works are expected to symbolize the county without any contradictions.
It is in the context of such a highly selective system of privileging art that Webb’s following comment makes sense: “not just any art could become metonymic of nation, of course. The art selected to inscribe national identity, tended to be works that relied on orthodox images” (Webb 2005: 30). As this book has illustrated, the art of the 1990s did not rely on orthodox images. In addition to this restriction based on conventional wisdom, the art of the 1990s is not considered worthy of attention given their rather gloomy subject matter to which the state also has a significant degree of culpability. In the same manner, the few private collections have also preferred a similar mode of selection, and in the event they did opt for contemporary art, they often tended to be works that more clearly represented the modernist credo of art-making, and clearly excluded works that claimed to be ‘political.’
In the long run then, these significant systemic, policy and perceptive absences could mean that the contribution of works such as the art of the 1990s would over time not be part of history or memory. They would have gone beyond history and memory into oblivion thereby making the future’s understanding of our times, our culture, our fears and our collective being impoverished, marked by serious absences.
No comments:
Post a Comment