Artists Remember Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Contemporary Sri Lankan Visual Arts

Artists Remember;
Artists Narrate:
Memory and Representation in
Contemporary Sri Lankan Visual Arts
Sasanka Perera
Co-published by
Colombo Institute
for the Advanced Study of
Society and Culture
theertha International
Artists' Collective
Artists Remember; Artists Narrate:
Memory and Representation in Sri Lankan Visual Arts
is co-published by the Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and
Culture and Theertha International Artists' Collective, 36 A, Baddegana Road South,
Pitakotte, Sri Lanka.
Copyright © 2011 Colombo Institute for the Advanced Study of Society and
Culture and Theertha International Artists' Collective.
This book is funded by
Arts Collaboratory is a Hivos and DOEN Foundation program for visual artists’ initiatives in Asia, Africa
and Latin America and for exchange with visual arts organizations in The Netherlands in cooperation
with Mondriaan Foundation.
Concept, layout and graphic design by Anoli Perera.

Printed by L & C Printers, Embuldeniya, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka.
Front cover image: Broken Hands by Pradeep Chandrasiri

Back cover image: Bandaged Man by Bandu Manamperi
Content
Acknowledgements
Preface 07
Introduction 11
Contextualizing Sri Lankan Visual Arts 17
Personal Experience in Violence as Narratives of Memory 27
Reformulating Landscapes, Cityscapes and the Ordinary:

De-contextualizing Contexts in Meaning Construction 65
Visual Moments and Events as Repositories of Memory 88
Going Beyond Memories of Violence and the Emergence of

Postwar Art 91
Bibliography 109
Acknowledgements
This work has progressed through a number of phases since 2005 before being published in
the present form. Initially, this was conceived as an integral part of a book on the politics of
memory funded by SIDA and facilitated by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES)
as one of the Centre’s main research activities. When my book, The Politics of Memory:
Political Violence, Remembrance and Erasure in Southern Sri Lanka was published in 2007
as a text with limited circulation, much of what is contained in the present book constituted
chapter five of that book. The present book is an edited version of that initial compilation
that has incorporated additional and more recent information accompanied by plates of se-
lected artworks that exist as a secondary and interconnected pictorial narrative along with
the description. In any event, much of the research for this work was funded by the SIDA
grant administrated by ICES. However, a writing scholarship from the Social Science Research
Council, New York under its South Asia Regional Fellowship Program enabled me to conceive
and formulate this work in the present form as well as access much needed published mate-
rial. However, given my own multiple schedules, it was very difficult for me to find the time to
complete this book earlier though it is a relatively modest contribution. This became possible
only during the respite I received while serving as a visiting professor at the Institute for the
Study of Global Issues at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo in 2011. I would specifically like to
thank Tharanga de Silva, V. Varadarajan and Siraj Abesekera at ICES as well as Yoshiko Ashiwa
at Hitotsubashi University for their help.
I would specifically like to thank Anoli Perera for initially introducing me to the world
of art both in Sri Lanka and beyond, and for introducing me to many of her friends and col-
leagues whose works have been the focus of this book. She also carefully and elegantly
designed the book as well as its cover. Theertha International Artists’ Collective offered its
fullest support throughout this entire project initially by coordinating some of the interviews,
providing introductions to artists, offering help in collecting published and unpublished ma-
terial, allowing me access to its extensive visual arts archives and finally sponsoring the pub-
lication process. Chandraguptha Thenuwara and the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts provided
important published material on artists linked to the academy and also allowed me the op-
portunity to use the academy’s extensive archives. I would like to thank Jagath Weerasinghe
for the published material he provided from his own library as well as for commenting on the
initial drafts of this book. I would particularly like to offer my sincere gratitude to the artists
who provided information on their work.

In this sense, I see this project as a collaborative work where my role was merely that of the
writer, compiler or author. I am well aware, as many postmodernists would suggest, that
authorial authority would also diminish once this book enters the public domain.
Sasanka Perera
Department of Sociology
South Asia University
Chanakyapuri
New Delhi
India
01 November 2011
Preface
This work is meant to be a limited initial description of Sri Lankan visual arts of the 1990s
with a focus on painting, sculpture and installation. It covers what might be loosely called
‘politically expressive art’, some of which in the Sri Lankan context are now formally identi-
fied as the 90s Trend. In fact, my focus in this book is on this specific genre of contemporary
art. I am well aware that in terms of most conventional systems of reckoning, the correla-
tion or the critical relationship between art and politics is not always clear; often it could be
tenuous. On the other hand, the mere existence of socio-political calamities at a particular
time and place does not necessarily mark the emergence of politically expressive art. In
fact, precisely due to such calamities and the lack of safety such times might usher in, art
could become much more apolitical or even aesthetically sedate. Landauer has noted that
periods of cultural and political ferment do not necessarily lead to the production of art “af-
fectively addressing that ferment (2006: 1). She refers to the lack of politically engaged art
among the avant-garde in New York in the 1960s when multiple political crises were impact-
ing not only the United States, but the world in general (Landauer 2006: 1). It is their lack-
luster response to the Vietnam War that moved Susan Sontag to describe their approach as
an “aesthetic of silence” (quoted in Landauer 2006: 1).
Nevertheless, the work of some artists within the annals of modernism have come
to be accepted as politically informed art whose aesthetic sensibilities are no longer ques-
tioned. As such, the work of the surrealists in general, Kathe Kollowitz’s focused attention
on the working classes, Pablo Picasso’s relentless critique of war made famous in works
such as Guernica as well as George Grosz’s satirical visual language have come to occupy a
permanent place within modern art as works that engaged with politics. Nevertheless, de-
spite such well-known examples to the contrary, the relationship between art and politics
within modernism has been difficult while a lingering discomfort in mixing politics with art
has endured (Landuer 2006: 1). This was mostly due to the perceived risk an artist has to
take in venturing into politics through his art which might be interpreted as banal or naïve
(Landauer 2006: 1).
These kinds of restrictions have been evident not only in the United Sates, which
Landauer refers to but also in many other parts of the world where modernist creeds in
art-making has had their impact. Sri Lanka is no exception in this case where many of the
artists if the 1990s who expressed themselves politically ran the risk of being labeled politi-
cal activists rather than artists. On the other hand, in addition to limits of modernism in
dealing with art and politics, specific cultural sensibilities within Sri Lanka also impacted
against politically informed art. Despite these global and local limitations in grappling with
7
Artists Remember, Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Sri Lankan Visual
political art, there have always been artists who openly claimed that their art is ‘political’ in
the more overt as well as more nuanced sense of the word. The artists I have focused on
in this book mostly belong to this category of politically expressive artists. They were ideo-
logically opposed to the ambiguities of modernism as well as local cultural reservations on
combining art and politics. That was a self-conscious ideological position which is also the
strength of their work. Referring to German impressionist painting, Peter Selz has pointed to
the the need to focus on ideological currents of the time rather than a mere contextualiza-
tion within a discourse of formalism (Selz 2006: 25). This becomes a crucial preoccupation
when attempting to situate art within the larger context of evolving politics. This consider-
ation impacts art everywhere at all times, though its relevance to art that is seen as 'politi-
cal art' by the artists who create them and the viewers who consume them become more
pronounced. That is, the art that is described in this book as well as the politics embeded in
them are highly contextual. This contextuality operates at two levels. One, these artworks
find their point of departure within the experiences of violent politics that the artists have
experienced personally or have witnessed. Their works are extensions of their experiences,
and as such they narrate a specific history that unfolded since the mid 1980s to about 2009.
These works would make sense more fully and in a nuanced manner when squarely located
within the larger politics of the time. The second contextuality has to do with materiality
of the works and external influences that gave them impetus. The art of the 1990s were
highly experimental in the use of material and in combining them as well as amalgamating
forms of expression that varied from sculpture to performance art. On the other hand, this
experimental spirit became possible and was sustained not only due to prevailing local con-
ditions but also and more importantly due to the opening of venues for artists to take part
in regional art workshops in South Asia and beyond where they had opportunities to engage
in experimentation as well as collaboration. This also allowed them numerous spaces for
exchange of ideas not only with regard to art but also in terms of emerging political currents
that were both very local as well as global in their reach. Even though this second contextual-
ity is not addressed in this book as it is beyond its scope, it is an important area that needs
further exploration.
Landauer has noted that political art in California were revitalized, particularly from
the 1950s to early 1970s compared to the aesthetics of silence in New York because of the
ability of the California artists to breath “new life into the iconography of protest” (Landauer
2006: 2). In this same context, these artists also extended the conventions of traditional
formats thereby “breaking away from conventional art media to produce new vehicles of
expression (Landauer 2006: 2). This ensured that California’s most significant contribution to
20th century art is its political art (Landauer 2006: 2). Though the operative social and politi-
cal circumstances were not comparable, the contribution of political art almost exclusively
based in Colombo in the 1990s towards the progression of contemporary Sri Lankan art from
the point of view of formalist considerations and methodology as well as the history of art
are strikingly similar. The pioneering and avant-garde nature of this contribution would be-
come apparent as this text unfolds. Nevertheless, “self- sufficient underground networks of
printing presses, artist and poet-run galleries and private venues” which provided a nurtur-
ing and supportive environment for the political art to emerge and mature in California were
almost nonexistent in Sri Lanka. One can only think of the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Art and
8
the Theertha International Artists’ Collective (particularly the latter) that played a similar but
lonely institutional role in the Sri Lankan context.
There is also an important art historical consideration that has backgrounded this
work. To put it more clearly, this book emerges in the context of the peculiar politics, voices
and silences which together constitutes Sri Lankan art history of the mainstream. I have
noted briefly the nature of Sri Lankan art history in The Introduction to contextualize the ap-
proach of this book. As such, it is not necessary to elaborate it here. But I would like to make
one crucial point in the context of a brief explanation. Sri Lankan art history in the formal
disciplinary sense of the word still remains to be formulated. The first ever local conference
on art history was organized only early this year (4th March 2011) by the University of Jaffna
titled ‘Rethinking Sri Lankan Art History: Objects, Methods and Politics.’ The key texts that
have briefly talked about art in Sri Lanka have been produced from the perspectives of ar-
cheology, history and to a lesser extent social anthropology, mostly without a sophisticated
theoretical interrogation. If this is what formal local art history written in English looks like,
there is an emergent but extensive corpus of knowledge on contemporary Sri Lankan art
written mostly in Sinhala and less in Tamil that offers much discussion on recent Sri Lankan
art. But this material is not considered the mainstream.
In this background, the point I want to make is this: much of this subaltern writing
and the works such as those that have been the focus of this book are not taken into ac-
count within the existent dominant but somewhat intellectually poverty-stricken discourse
of contemporary art history. This has mostly come about as a result of being imprisoned
within the modernist credo of art that was ambiguous or uncomfortable with art that dealt
with politics. In the Sri Lankan context, intensely personal politics also played a role in this
scenario. The classic example of this state of affairs is Senake Bandaranayake’s and Albert
Dharmasiri’s recent book, Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century (2009) published by the
National Trust Sri Lanka.1 It marks a significant methodological lapse in its inability or disin-
terest in exploring in any systematic manner the dynamics of the 1990s art within the social
and political contexts of its emergence (Perera 2009). This happened in a situation when
extensive literature on its dynamics and politics existed in Sinhala as well as in the form of
exhibition catalogs in both Sinhala and English (Perera 2009).
In this overall context, though an initial survey, the present book is also meant to
bring this ‘absent’ knowledge into the mainstream discourse.

End Notes
1. For detailed comments on this book, please refer to my review in South Asia Journal for Culture,
Volume 3 (2009), pp. 90-98.
9
10
Introduction
My interest and primary focus in this book are the Sri Lankan visual arts of the 1990s as a re-
pository of violent memories. As such, I would read them as narratives of political violence
of the recent past. In order to contextualize what I want to achieve, I think it is necessary to
simultaneously look at two inter-related contexts. One is the socio-political context within
which the visual art works I am interested in, and the dynamics that generated them, can
be located. The second is the context of art history that gives further meaning to these
works as they are, and in times to come. The works that have captured my interest are now
popularly known as the ‘Art of the 1990s’ among contemporary local visual artists. These
works are not autonomous texts, but are provided meaning and location via the histories
and politics that impacted the society which generated them. These histories and politics
include not only the social and political memory of the collective but also the experiences
and memories of individual artists, their kin and friends.
Three violent political eruptions have significantly impacted the Sri Lankan politi-
cal and historical landscape since the early 1970s. These are the two anti-state rebellions
launched by the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) in 1971 and in the late 1980s, and the Tamil
separatist rebellion that emerged in the early 1980s which ended in 2009 with the military
defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE). The artists of the 1990s were too young
to remember the violence of 1971, even though some artists active in the 1970 such as W.
Nayanananda used art as a medium of expression for their experiences and memories as
rebels and political prisoners as well as to represent what they thought were the ills of so-
ciety. However, in the 1970s the critical commentators of politics and society active in cre-
ative work were poets to a greater degree than visual artists. This was particularly so in Sin-
hala society. It is in this context that the Sinhala language poetry of Parakrama Kodituwakku,
Buddhadasa Galappatti, Monica Ruwanpatirana, Dharmasiri Rajapakse and Bertie Kudahetti
come to mind. In the 1990s however, initial efforts of artists such as Nayanananda were
taken to a much more conscious, interventionist, vocal and consistent visual extreme by
the new generation of artists who became active at the time. In that process, they ruptured
both artistic conventions and ideologies prevalent up to that time as well as redefined the
meanings and politics of dominant aesthetics. Clearly, without their personal and collective
experience in these domains of violence1, the artists of the 1990s could not have created
such works. However, this does not mean that it is only in the works of these visual artists
that the memories of the country’s violent past have been embedded and inscribed. Such
memories are also inscribed in the bodies of victims, in public and military monuments as
well as monuments of the LTTE, ritualized memorial programs of the state, the JVP and the
11
LTTE, tombstones in public and LTTE cemeteries, and private rituals and narratives of indi-
viduals and families.2
The second context in which I would like to locate this book is the context of art
history, which gives further meaning to these works at present and over time. I would begin
this discussion with the observations about a well-known work of art formulated in another
place and in another time that nevertheless narrates a story of extreme violence. I refer to
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, his well-known painting marked by its expressiveness in terms of
forms and gestures within a basically monochromatic composition that depicted the 1937
bombing and devastation of the Basque town of Guernica, and the following comments on
it by Futurist artist and critic Gino Severini:
There could be no severer condemnation of the bourgeoisie and the Fas-

cist systems with which it defends itself than his magnificent picture, Guer-
nica. In work of this kind, and especially in that great picture, he reached
the extreme limits of expression and abstraction, of an almost monstrous
representation of all the evils which have led to war and for which the
whole world is responsible (Severini 1946: 9).
In talking about Guernica, Severini is referring to both its methodological adaptations as

well as to the story of extreme political violence it narrates. Picasso, in this particular case
did not simply produce a painting, but a painting that had a particular political narrative that
was effectively communicable in the context in which it was produced. This communicabil-
ity has now reached beyond that time because of its preservation and the discourses of art
history it has since generated. Perhaps Guernica is the best-known painting that is based on
memories of violence of a particular political moment. Similarly, the works that I want to
place in context in this book also narrate stories about experiences of violence and pain of a
particular phase of history in Sri Lanka. However, unlike the case with Guernica, this reading
has to be undertaken without the benefit of an established tradition of art-historiography.
To further contextualize my project in this book, let me refer to the introduction of the 1999
collection of essays, Mortality-Immortality: The Legacy of 20th Century Art. In it, Miguel
Angel Corzo contextualized the following concerns which had to do with how 20th century
art would be remembered in times to come:
… if we accept the notion that art reflects history, then contemporary art is, in
some way, a monument to contemporary civilization. It is the cultural heritage
of our time ... (1999: XV).
Within certain limits, I think Corzo’s observations create an avenue to pose a series of ques-
tions about the politics of memory as they are reflected in contemporary Sri Lankan visual
arts. That is, how are notions and experiences of pain, war, and trauma represented in visual
arts? On the other hand, it is also pertinent to ask at the same time, how or why such condi-
tions might not be represented. But does art reflect history and does it represent particular
civilizational attributes of a particular place or moment as the general observations of Corzo
suggest? If it does, what kind of history does contemporary Sri Lankan visual art narrate?
What does it not narrate? Who narrates these memories and who are the consumers? What
12
are the absences and silences in these narratives? These are some of the issues I would like
to address in this book as this reading progresses.
Caroline Turner, talking specifically about contemporary Asian art has noted that
political and social changes in the region and beyond have been “mirrored and reflected”
in the region’s art, and that individual changes within countries have significantly impacted
upon the development of art practices in these countries (Turner 2005: 1). In this regard,
she makes the following observations as well:
Artists can, through their work, reflect the values and aspirations of their
own society, and of humanity. While some react with cynicism and even
despair, others produce an art of resistance. Over the past decades, many
artists in the Asia Pacific region have protested colonialism and neo-co-
lonialism; global environmental degradation; cultural loss; illness due to
poverty; sexual exploitation; social and political injustice; war; violence and
racism. Their work is in the broad area of social justice (Turner 2005:4).
It is in this context, marked by specific local political conditions and global concerns that In-
donesian artists in particular have produced a significant collection of works opposing human
rights violations in that country, often facing personal danger in the process (Turner 2005:
9). According to Jim Supangkat, these particular tendencies manifested themselves in the
1990s (Supangkat 2005: 223). In terms of one such tendency, artists were interested in locat-
ing the “truth based on morality and not the truth in social reality” (Supangkat 2005: 223).
He further suggests that such works are “reflections accompanied by emotional intentions
that manifest critical opinion” (Supangkat 2005: 223). It is within this particular manifesta-
tion that he locates the work of an entire range of artists who explore “social realities which
they see as reflecting poverty, injustice and oppression” (Supangkat 2005: 223). The other
tendency, represented by artists such as Dadang Christanto and Tisna Sanjaya critiqued the
government as “an oppressive, corrupt and powerful group of people who deceived the
poor” (Supangkat 2005: 222). Dadang Christanto is perhaps the best-known Indonesian
artist who has consistently narrated in his work extreme conditions of human suffering such
as the work he and three others presented at the fiftieth Venice Biennale in 2003 under the
theme, Paradise Lost: Mourning the World (Turner 2005: 9). In this series of works the art-
ists took the Bali bombing incident in which over 200 individuals perished as their point of
departure (Turner 2005: 9). Similarly, Thai artist Vasan Sittiket has commented on issues of
war in Iraq and corruption in Thailand in the work, The Truth is Elsewhere based on shadow
puppet techniques (Turner 2005: 10). Earlier, in a painting titled If Buddha Returned to Bang-
kok, he depicted the image of the Buddha among scenes of corruption and social dislocation,
thereby commenting in a very graphic and easily communicable manner his own thoughts
on the events surrounding the 1992 coup in Thailand (Turner 2005: 2005).
Seen in this sense, it would be clear as this reading proceeds, that the work of Sri
Lankan artists I want to place in context belong to this wider tradition of art-making in the
Asia region that has emerged out of particular peculiarities and conditions in the countries
of the region. Irrespective of the varied conditions in which such art appeared and the dif-
ferent methods of expression, they can, as Turner suggests, be placed in the general area
13
of ‘social justice.’ However, a question that must be posed at this moment is this: can we
assume that art in fact does reflect history or memory in some linear and coherent fashion
without any contradictions? Is art such a simple text? I would suggest that in the Sri Lankan
context (and elsewhere too) some of the fundamental assumptions of Corzo’s observations
would have to be reformulated. For instance, art does reflect history in the sense that all
artworks are produced at particular historical and political moments within clear social and
cultural geographies; they are also impacted upon by temporal restrictions. Therefore, in
many ways such works are products of that moment in terms of the material used, stylistic
conventions and often in what is represented. However, despite that historical location in
spatial and temporal terms, art does not always narrate clear histories as it also does not
always capture and transmit coherent memories. In other words, despite the possibility of
historically locating a work of art, it does not necessarily visually represent that moment in
all its complexities. On the other hand, in many societies, but particularly visible in devel-
oped industrial countries, the crucial and multiple roles art plays in society has been widely
recognized. No such serious debate has taken place in Sri Lanka. As such, Turner’s notion
that “artists can transcend and perhaps even change society as well as reflect its tragedies”
is not a notion that has gained acceptance in Sri Lankan society or its intellectual circles. The
exceptions perhaps are the works and the politics of artists that I would be exploring in this
book as well as the scattered writings of artists such as Jagath Weerasinghe in his scholarly
writings and Anoli Perera in her exhibition reviews and essays. Yet, the power of social
reformation and radical political change that is sometimes romantically attributed to artists
should not be taken as an absolute truth because it would be an over-simplification of their
role in society. It is in this context that Masahiro Ushiroshoji has cautioned against the naïve
assumption that art alone can achieve an understanding of other cultures and values or in
itself can heal disjuncture in relationships between societies and people (quoted in Turner
2005: 5).
It is then within this frame of reference that I would be looking at Sri Lankan visual
arts of the 1990s as a possible repository of violent memories by focusing on the work of
a number of selected visual artists. However, to do that one also has to look at recent Sri
Lankan art history because it too holds certain answers as to why violent memory as an
experiential category might not be represented in the work of some visual artists. On the
other hand, such an understanding would also help better contextualize the role of art in the
recent past as a ‘political movement’ in the wider sense of the concept, and its continuity
into the present. In brief, I am mainly interested in how and what artists remember, while
at a less focused level I am also interested in how, why and when artists forget. But there is
another temporal dimension to the potential erasure that one must pay attention to which
has nothing to do with what artists actually create or do not create. This has to do with the
future and not the present. That is, at the present moment, the thematic orientations and
representational politics of the works that have become the basis of this reading are often
clear enough in so far as their fundamental point of departure is concerned: that is, the po-
litical violence of the late 1980s and the memories of that period. Nevertheless, would their
narratability as art extend to the future? For instance, what kind of works would survive
over time that would narrate the story of a past marked by political violence, death, pain and
trauma that was narrated in the immediate past or even at the present? In other words, are
there mechanisms in place in contemporary Sri Lankan society to ensure that the narrative
14
abilities of these works would survive over time? Talking about the preservation of contem-
porary artworks in the Tate Gallery, Roy 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). Similarly, even when we do consider the reality that art is
not the only source of narrating to future generations the politics and culture of today or
the immediate past, its potential inability to extend into the future would mean that what-
ever story that is narrated at that time could have some serious absences, particularly with
regards to memories and consequences of political violence. This is particularly the case,
where visual art is the most consistent repository of such memories at the present moment;
a function not fully addressed by creative literature, poetry, or mass media. Similarly, trans-
mission of ideas created through visual arts, as well as the preservation of artworks them-
selves, are replete with politics of power, inclusion and exclusion. Again, with reference to
the preservation of 20th century art, Corzo makes the following observation:
For the first time in history, it is possible for us to decide what we want to save
for posterity. Do we have an obligation to the future to provide a comprehen-
sive record of twentieth century art? If we do, how do we choose what will be
saved? Who makes the choices? And how do we save what we have chosen?
(Corzo 1999: XV)
These same questions can also be reformulated to suite the extended context of Sri Lankan
visual arts, and more specifically the art that narrate stories of pain and violence. In the
mind of Corzo, it is possible to make a judgement on what of the 20th century art should be
saved for posterity because of the ready availability of technology, institutional structures
and a specific political and cultural frame of reference that are collectively conducive to that
purpose, particularly in Western Europe and North America. Unfortunately however, this is
precisely what is lacking in Sri Lanka. The country neither has the institutional framework,
nor the funds or accessible technology to ensure such an outcome with regards to visual
arts in general. This means that there is an absence of a system of galleries and museums
that make decisions on the purchase of specific artworks and their preservation as part of
their curatorial role. On the other hand, when it comes to works that deal with unpleasant
realities such as violence and pain, there are both political and cultural conventions that also
inhibit their preservation. Political inhibitions exist in the form of regimes’ lack of comfort
in offering sponsorship for such works in galleries or museums. Besides, when it comes to
state sponsorship, erasure and memory become a crucial and contested issue. What is to be
remembered and what is to be forgotten would be made on clear political grounds depend-
ing solely on the interests of the regime in power at a given moment.
Similarly, violent subject matter also inhibit many people from having such works
in their homes as part of private collections, because such works would often be seen as
indicative of bad omens within the popular interpretation of the dominant Hindu and Bud-
dhist religious practices and even in terms of local interpretations of Christianity. This means
that though some individuals might recognize the political and historical significance of vi-
sually recording the politics of the past and their consequences, they might still not be cul-
turally conditioned to offer such works private sponsorships and maintain them as private
collections. On the other hand, academic tracts that do explore these issues, by the very
15
nature of academic exercises, tend to make such narratives clinical and generally aloof and
detached from the popular domain. In this extended context, when reading visual arts as a
repository of violent and painful memory, it would be important to pose the question about
their continuity over time as sources of political and historical knowledge, as well as narra-
tives with specific meanings.3
End Notes
1. I do not intend to document the dynamics of these different phases of political violence here, as
they have been previously documented in a number of academic and popular texts. For a narrative
description of the 1971 and the latter JVP insurrection, one can read A.C. Alles’ The J.V.P. 1969-1989
(Colombo: Lake House, 1991) while C.A Chandraprema provides a detailed description of the second
JVP insurrection in Sri Lanka: The Years of Terror – The JVP Insurrection 1987-1999 (Colombo: Lake
House Bookshop, 1991). Daya Somasundaram details the psychological impact of the war between
Tamil separatist forces and Sri Lankan and Indian military forces upon Tamil civilians in Scarred Minds:
The Psychological Impact of War on Sri Lankan Tamils (New Delhi: Sage, 1998). The second chapter of
my own book, Stories of Survivors: Socio-Political Contexts of Female Headed Households in Southern
Sri Lanka (New Delhi: Vikas, 1999) provides a brief description and analysis of the patterns of political
violence in Sri Lanka and the contexts of their historical emergence.
2. The LTTE cemeteries in the northern part of the country have been destroyed since the military
defeat of the organization in May 2009.
3. For a detailed analysis of the politics and dynamics of memory that also includes an earlier version
of the present book as a chapter, read my book, Politics of Memory: Political Violence, Remembrance
and Erasure in Southern Sri Lanka (ICES, Colombo 2007).
16
Contextualizing
Sri Lankan Visual Art
In general, Sri Lankan art history as a corpus of formal knowledge still largely needs to be
written. That is, Sri Lanka hardly has a serious art historical tradition in the formal sense.
This means that there is no tangible tradition of a discourse spearheaded by scholars trained
in the craft of art history or a discourse that could be construed as a tradition of art history
formulated by scholars from other disciplines who are conscious of the politics, dynamics
and expectations of art history. This however does not mean that nothing is written on Sri
Lankan art. For instance, much of what might be called art history with regards to the an-
cient periods (prior to European colonization of the island), particularly focusing on Buddhist
temple murals and sculpture comes from archeology and history with the limitations and
strengths of these disciplines. For instance, Bandranayake’ book, Rock and Temple Paintings
of Sri Lanka (1986) offers an exhaustive history of the painting traditions of Sri Lanka from
prehistoric times right up to the mid 20th century with a focus on Buddhist mural paintings.
On the other hand, though a theoretically sophisticated art history is still a distant reality,
certain aspects of the progression of Sri Lankan art as a process and Sri Lankan painting of
the early and mid 20th century is reasonably well documented. Manel Fonseka’s and Senake
Bandaranayake’s Ivan Peiris: Paintings, 1938-88 (1996), Neville Weeraratne’s '43 Group: A
Chronicle of the Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka (1993), Sunil Goonasekera’s George Keyt
Interpretations (1991) and Senake Bandaranayake’s and Albert Dharmasiri’s Sri Lankan Paint-
ing in the 20th Century (2009) are well known examples of this genre of writing. Compared
to this situation, the dynamics and politics of late 20th century art is not well documented
in the mainstream art historical discourse in the English language even though “numerous
discussions on the art of this period are available in a number of subaltern sources mostly
written in Sinhala” (Perera 2009: 91). However, this latter genre of writing, though often well
informed, does not command the same kind of power as the writings in the English language
within the structures of knowledge production in the local context precisely due to their
subaltern position. What is available in English on this period are the solitary works of Jagath
Weerasinghe and Anoli Perera along with an increasingly expanding but scattered collection
of exhibition catalogs published by entities such as Theertha International Artists’ Collective.
Given this relative absence and the politics it entails, the narrative in this book needs to be
contextualized within the overall art history of Sri Lanka to understand the continuities and
discontinuities from the past that might have impacted contemporary art production. On
the other hand, the reading of contemporary art that narrates memories of violence and
pain is not merely a reading of a particular genre of art. It is also a process of writing and
contextualizing a particular social and political history, and situating that art more fully in the
context of its inspiration and sites of production.
17
If one takes painting, sculpture and installation art, three of the most widely used
mediums of expression in contemporary visual art, one could formulate an argument that
such methods were part of traditional Sri Lankan art-making over a considerable period of
time, spanning into the pre-European colonization era. However, when such a formulation
is articulated, one also needs to be cautious of the contexts in which it is presented. That is,
the vastly different contexts in which art was produced in the distant past and the present, as
well as the primary purposes of art in these different periods needs to be clearly understood.
In the past prior to European colonization, it is clear that painting, sculpture and installation
did exist as methods of art practice; nevertheless, they did not exist merely as art as it is
conceived in terms of today’s more dominant domains of thinking in the fields of aesthetics.
For instance, painting has a considerably long history in Sri Lanka, both in Sinhala and Tamil
societies, and in the case of the Sinhalas and in terms of available historical evidence, this
tradition first emerged in the second century BC (Weerasinghe 2004: 5)1. However, this was
a tradition that was always closely linked to religion, and was practiced in most cases as an
essential component of pictorial socialization of the Buddhist laity institutionalized through
temple murals. There were a few rare exceptions such as the frescoes in the 5th century AD
rock fortress Sigiriya, which do not seem to have any direct religious connotations. Given
that primary role, Buddhist art over the years, despite stylistic innovations at particular his-
torical moments, maintained its representational and didactic narrative style in composition.
That is, this art was representational and didactic to the extent that whatever was being nar-
rated had to be communicated clearly to the intended audience without contradictions and
without offering space for individual interpretation. If symbols were used in paintings, they
had clear meanings that were generally accepted in society at the time. Among many other
things, different forms of violence were also depicted in Buddhist mural paintings as long as
it was necessary to contextualize a particular ethical issue that was important to Buddhism,
or explain the consequences of actions considered unethical in the Buddhist worldview. In
these situations, art, particularly painting, was a clear medium of representation and trans-
mission of ideas that were centrally important to either Buddhism or Hinduism. They were
also executed by craftspeople whose sole duty was to undertake such ventures as part of
their caste duties.
On the other hand, sculpture also emerged and was sustained under similar condi-
tions. In the Sri Lankan context, most major sculptures had clearly religious significance given
the fact that remnants of most sculptures from the ancient past represent figures of religious
importance varying from the Buddha to Buddhist saints or arahats, to divine and ‘demonic’
characters. One could also argue that today’s installation art also existed in the past, but in
a vastly different context. In that context, these ‘artistic’ or ‘decorative’ structures were not
considered art but were contextualized within the realm of rituals of healing as well as reli-
gion. Thus often, temporary and in some cases elaborate structures, decorative objects and
figurines were constructed for Buddhist pirith chanting ceremonies, perahara or religious
processions as well as healing rituals associated with planetary deities (bali) and yak tovil or
rituals organized to expel malevolent influences of yakshas (often erroneously and simplis-
tically called ‘demons’ in the popular as well as dominant anthropological discourse on Sri
Lankan culture and ritual practices2).
The brief description above is intended to make one crucial point. That is, at a
certain level of perception, methods of contemporary art-making were never historically
18
completely alien to Sri Lankan people. However, in the colonial and post colonial contexts
these practices had to be radically re-oriented and redefined to suite contemporary needs,
times and tastes. This is not to argue that methods of contemporary visual arts practiced
around the world were invented in ancient Sri Lanka, as such practices with clear linkages to,
and similarities with, present practices could be discovered in any pre-modern society. More
accurately and specifically, in the Sri Lankan context since the colonial period, ‘art’ forms as-
sociated with religion and ritual tended to coexist with art that was undertaken for purely
aesthetic purposes de-linked from religion and ritual. In this equation, the second category
tended to be elevated to a more socially prominent place within the politics of aesthetics
introduced by the colonial masters. These changes were most clearly visible from the advent
of British colonial rule.
Even in the pre-colonial past, temple paintings in particular played an additional
role beyond the primary role of transmitting key concepts and value positions of organized
religion, and the pictorial formulation of a moral community based on religious affinity. That
is, they also often presented narratives that gave clues to the individuals who built and main-
tained temples, and more importantly, they also reflected experiential histories of the time
by introducing iconic symbols from the times in pictorially narrating theological positions. At
a certain level these were social histories familiar to, or experienced by, the ancient artists
who executed these works. When an unknown ancient artist in executing the well-known
cave paintings of the Dambulla Rajamaha Vihara placed a gun in the hand of a yaksha inhab-
iting Yama Lowa or the Buddhist Hell, he was making a clear connection between his experi-
ence of colonialism and what had been traditionally narrated to him as part of his Buddhist
socialization. Without a doubt he was convinced of the lack of human ethics, uncontrolled
ferociousness, and the anthropophagous tendencies popularly attributed to yakshas in the
Buddhist cosmos. Similarly, he was also aware of the repercussions of colonial expansion,
primarily because of the ‘demonic’ and destructive power of the gun. So the decision to
place the destructive gun in the hands of an equally destructive mythical creature would
have come naturally to him, allowing us space for a number of interpretations of his times
beyond the direct subject matter of the paintings themselves. Similarly, in temple paintings
done in the latter part of the colonial period, particularly of the southern school, it is pos-
sible to see elements of contemporary social practices and material culture imported to the
paintings that narrated, among other things, lessons to be learnt from the Buddha’s numer-
ous lives as depicted in Jataka stories (Perera 2005). In this sense, it is possible to see that
these mural paintings were “a monument to contemporary civilization” (Corzo 1999: XV)
similar to Corzo’s contextualization of 20th century paintings. Therefore, narratives of social
history and commentary have been an important aspect of Sri Lankan visual art, particularly
in temple paintings for a considerable period of time, even though this practice was not
politically and ideologically motivated as is the case with the works of contemporary artists
that I would focus on later.
The first serious European influence on visual art came with the Portuguese and
later Dutch colonization of the island. However, this was institutionalized in a more formal
fashion only in the British colonial period since 1815 as part of the colonizer’s civilizational
package offered to the natives. The colonial intervention into visual art was not a mere
aesthetic exercise, but a methodological and ideological intervention that had significant
political connotations similar to the efforts of contemporary artists engaged in what they
19
perceive as socially ‘engaged art.’ In other words, colonial art was not a discourse of inno-
cence but a discourse of power and reformation. It was articulated as a civilizational force
that would civilize the uncivil natives. Traditions such as easel based realist academic paint-
ing that the British formally introduced through organizations such as the Ceylon Society
of Arts were political interventions because they were not mere aesthetic exercises. These
were also attempts of introducing the perceived ‘high tastes’ attributed to the colonial mas-
ters to the colonized elites. In other words, familiarization with such practices in the colonial
context was an experience of being ‘born again’ into a more sophisticated civilizational do-
main armed with new cultural practices and habits that made the complete colonial subject.
Weeraratne articulates this transformation in the following words:
The modern and particularly the Western notion of painting came to Sri Lanka
mainly in the years following the fall of the island to the British ... But with the
final intellectual and emotional colonisation which began in 1815 the people
started to imitate the manners of the conqueror – framed pictures appeared
on the walls, portraits were enthroned on easels, and a new psychology ex-
pressed itself in the way the ancient skills of the painter were employed. This
was the order of secularism. Easel painting had been discovered (Weeraratne
1993: 11).
This was also the beginning of an elite pastime, and not a passion that was shared by the
larger populace. It was also delinked from the caste system; the pre-colonial caste system
played a significant role in the initiation and maintenance of temple murals, sculptures and
‘crafts’ in general as an ascribed practice. A forerunner in the new colonial process was the
Colombo Drawing Club also known as the Portfolio Sketch Club, which was inaugurated in
the early 1880s (Weeraratne 1993: 11). This organization like the Ceylon Society of Arts was
both a political and socio-cultural domain of the privileged: the colonial masters ruling the
colony of Ceylon on behalf of Britain as well as the privileged from among the colonized
subjects. Weeraratane points out that from early on, membership in entities like the Ceylon
Society of Arts was open to locals with the correct pedigree and education as a means of re-
warding loyal colonial subjects. The education they received in the colony or in the imperial
center “demanded that they become acquainted with all the extra-mural activities of those
they were to serve” (Weeraratne 1993: 12-13). The kind of art that the Ceylon Society of
Arts represented has been described by Weeraratne as “a manner of painting that perpetu-
ated the tastes and ideals of an English middle class that was embarrassingly simplistic, and
often sentimental and at best naïve” (Weeraratne 1993: 13). Perhaps it was Peter Berger,
the art critic of the New Statesman who captured the essence of the colonial period art in a
1952 essay when he noted that this art was “not only boring and dead but also an imported
if not imposed art: an art deriving from the nineteenth century English tradition with an
exotically ‘oriental’ overtone added” (quoted in Weeraratne 1993: 13).
The brief history of art during the colonial period in Sri Lanka outlined above, should
amply illustrate the point that art practices introduced by the colonial regime and its agents
were part of an important political experiment that was meant to ensure the success of the
colonial enterprise over a long period of time. Whether perceived in political terms or not,
it was very clearly a political project that had social reformation and transformational goals
aimed at the creation of a colonized elite who exemplified the ideals of colonialism.
20
In the same manner, the 43 Group that was initiated before the formal end of co-
lonialism which utilized post colonial art practices also has to be understood as a politically
motivated art movement. In the history of contemporary art practice, the intervention of
the 43 Group is considered to have played an avant-garde role within the paradigm of mod-
ernism. Weerasinghe has suggested that the 43 Group’s main source of external inspiration
was Paris rather than the imperial capital of London. This group “positioned the sign of
Ecole de Paris as the mark of excellence in art taste in the art of mid 20th century Sri Lanka”
(Weerasinghe 2005: 180-181). This was a conscious political decision that opposed the aca-
demic realism and orientalism influenced by the Royal Academy and other British schools
that held sway throughout the entire period of British colonialism, and in most spheres of
formal and secular art training after independence. Seen from this perspective, the forma-
tion of the 43 Group and its politics of art were not merely the formation of a particular set
of methods of art-making; they were also part and parcel of the larger politics of the society
and the region that can best be understood in the cautious anti-colonial sentiments and
movements in the mid 20th century led by middle class elements in society. Weerasinghe
notes that “the formation of the 43 Group can be viewed as a project that constituted an
anti-colonial stance within the larger picture of national struggles that gathered momentum
in the mid 20th century in South Asia for regaining political independence from the British
colonizers” (Weerasinghe 2005: 181).
In this context, it is clear that the 43 Group represented both an aesthetic innova-
tion as well as a conscious political intervention. In real terms, this innovation referred to
their selective privileging of “a number of modernist trends and artistic approaches that
flourished in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries giving rise to a distinctively Sri
Lankan modernist art” (Weerasinghe 2005: 181). In the group, George Keyt represented
a pictorial language that was similar to cubism through which he narrated what might be
called ‘orientalist’ themes (Weerasinghe 2005: 181) in terms of Edward Said’s articulation
of orientalism. The works of Justin Deraniyagala and Ivan Peries represented the “two ex-
tremes of the group’s expressionist trends” (Weerasinghe 2005: 181). The multiplicity of the
visual languages adopted by the members of the 43 Group indicated both the individuality
of members as well as its interests in experimentation, though within limits. The 43 Group
was also a nationalist project as much as it was an artistic movement. In that sense, its
themes often expressed what were perceived to be local or Asian realities or mythic narra-
tives. It is in this context that we can understand the group’s idealization of local village life
by emphasizing its perceived purity in terms of ideology as well as simplicity of life and natu-
ral serenity. One might also understand the preoccupation of themes from Hindu mythology
as in the works of George Keyt in such a context. If thematic orientations and subject matter
tended to emphasize what was considered local and the heritage of the wider culture world
of South Asia, the methods of expression were clearly European derived. This was the work
of the Colombo based social elite far removed from the village life they visually idealized
while emotionally they were perhaps more comfortable with European centers of art such
as Paris. In the context of this experiential and artistic contradiction, it is clear that the work
of the 43 Group while nationalistic on the one hand, did not completely exclude the west
on the other. They were looking for, and found expression in a visual language and thematic
orientations that allowed them to do both. In this sense, the 43 Group was a political move-
ment that worked on the ideal of fusion, which was a very real experience at the social and
cultural level for most of its members.
21
At the same time the 43 Group was making its presence felt, there were also other
art movements in the country which politically excluded what was perceived to be ‘west-
ern’ influences in the process of art-making. This more exclusionist trend consisted of two
schools. The first was a culturally more ultra-nationalist movement that demanded and
worked towards either a purely Sri Lankan or at most an ‘Asian’ (in reality a South Asian) art
form that was perceivably untainted by western influences (Weerasinghe 2005: 181). This
trend was representing a need for an ultra-nationalist identity in art that was either inspired
by Sri Lankan or more specifically a Sinhala history and traditions, while it was not hostile to
drawing inspiration from the wider cultural experience in South Asia, particularly informed
by Buddhism and Hindu mythic narratives (Weerasinghe 2004:10). Because the artists who
represented this trend dreamt of an Asia untainted by western influences (Weerasinghe
2004:10), they also exhibited in that context certain millenarian tendencies and yearned
for an undifferentiated linear past that was both perceivably powerful and prosperous. The
second trend was represented by artists who were either trained at, or were influenced by,
the Shantiniketan School founded by Rabindranath Tagore, and “expressed a much wider
sense of the idea of ‘nationality’ and ‘modernity’” (Weerasinghe 2004:10-11, 2005: 181).
Both of these manifestations were visible in the National Arts Front that emerged approxi-
mately around 1956 (Weerasinghe 2004:11). It is not an accident that these manifestations
occurred at a time Sri Lankan politics in the wider context were making decisive inroads
towards language and ethnicity based politics of culture and identity that subsequently be-
came a hallmark of national politics.
The decades from the late 1960s to the late 1980s did not indicate major ideologi-
cal or methodological shifts in Sri Lankan art until the emergence of the art of the 1990s.
The only serious exception during this long period marked by relative lack of innovation and
experimentation was the work of painter H.A. Karunratane. He brought into local art the
influences of the New York School of Art, particularly abstract expressionism, and combined
this visual language with ideas of religiousness linked to his understanding of Buddhism
(Weerasinghe 2005: 182).
My intention in the discussion above was not to offer a chronologically ordered
history of Sri Lankan art. Such an activity while urgently needed is a separate intellectual
project. However, my intention was to pave the way to argue that historically, art-making in
the country has never been a simple aesthetic exercise. That is, in the period prior to Euro-
pean colonization art was part of religious socialization and ritual practice of Buddhists and
Hindus, and became a secular practice in the European sense in the colonial period. During
these phases, as I have briefly described above, art was also a political process of power,
dominance, civilization and change. If it was a matter of religious socialization and ritual
practice in the pre-colonial period, it was a civilizational force for the purpose of civilizing
the natives in the colonial period. Similarly in the postcolonial period, the dominant schools
of art-making were part of a wider nationalist discourse that emerged as an integral compo-
nent of the independence movement. So the art of the 1990s while being the most political-
ly motivated art movement or trend in recent times, does not emerge without precedence
albeit in different forms, and a vastly different intensity. It represents the most recent phase
in a historical process of art-making. However, the art of the 1990s should not be confused
as representing a perceived linear continuity from these earlier phases. It is merely part of
22
an evolving history that has some interesting precedence in political processes that surpass
the dynamics of art-making.
The Present: Visual Art as Repositories of Violent Memory
As referred to in preceding chapters, the visual art works I would be attempting to read here
present narratives of a violent past. However, even though they are located in a specific
experience of political violence in the recent past as a point of departure, there is significant
variation in terms of mediums of expression and how artists contextualize their work and
construct meaning. While the work I want to read as a collective needs to be situated in the
overall context of Sri Lankan art history briefly outlined above, they are specifically linked to
the genre of work that Weerasinghe has called ‘the art of the 90s’ (Weerasinghe 2004: 5-43,
2005: 180-193). He identifies two significant and broad thematic preoccupations in the art
of the 1990s:
1) Works that investigate the self and individuals’ sense of being who have
been victimized and made frustrated as a consequence of organized violence.
2) Works that investigate the allure as well as the frustrations of the city as an
artistic expression (Weerasinghe 2004: 15-40).
Generally speaking, both of these trends are biographical in the sense that these themes are
visually articulated as narratives of personal experiences on the one hand, and as the experi-
ences of a particular generation on the other. Even though both of these preoccupations
are the preserve of mostly young and rural individuals who would have experienced both of
these manifestations, my interest would be focused on the works that specifically represent
the first manifestation. Weerasinghe has suggested that the last decades of the 20th cen-
tury in which much of the work I am concerned with have been produced, “stands out as a
period of extraordinary revitalization of art in Sri Lanka, which paved the way for a diverse
and multifaceted practice of visual arts in the country” (2005: 183). This phase marks the
most dynamic period in contemporary art since the advent of the 43 Group, even though
much of this dynamism took place in the backdrop of extreme social and economic upheav-
als specifically marked by the militarization of the inter-ethnic conflict involving segments of
Sinhala and Tamil people, as well as the attempted insurrection staged by the JVP and the
counter terror campaign of the state unleashed to contain that situation. One way in which
this period can be characterized is to suggest that it paved the way for the emergence of a
“whole new generation of artists equipped with a range of new ideas and concepts of art,
themes for artistic investigation and, especially, with an understanding of the idea of the
artist as a political individual” (Weerasinghe 2005: 183). This expressly articulated political
consciousness is the clearest marker that differentiates the artists of this period and of this
genre from earlier periods and genres. Weerasinghe describes one aspect of the collective
background of these relatively youthful artists in the following words:
... most of the animators of this high-powered movement are a group of young
men and women who were forced to spend their teenage years in a highly
chaotic social and political environment in their rural villages and hometowns.
23
These radically new, yet artistically interesting young men and women are at-
tacking the established ideas of excellence in art from a consciousness formed
within the habitat of a rural periphery by positioning their bodies and lives as
the crux of art-making! Put in other words, ‘small-town’ Sri Lanka is making its
mark in Colombo’s metropolitan art world” (Weerasinghe 2005: 183).
Precisely because of this general background, many of these artists, irrespective of thematic
orientations of their work emerged as a “group of people living with memories of violence,
dispossession and despair, on the one hand, and on the other, as the casualties of the al-
luringly strange beauty and the evasive nature of urban culture” (Weerasinghe 2005: 183).
Nevertheless, inspiration and motivation based on personal and collective experiences in the
execution of this genre of work did not mean that they constituted a homogenous genre. In
most general terms, while some of these works represented a preoccupation to reorganize
chaos into a sense of order, while others were concerned with presenting “perplexity as a
rational consciousness” (Weerasinghe 2005: 189). Yet others presented chaos and perplex-
ity in a surreal and mythic imagery (Weerasinghe 2005: 189). As already noted, the execu-
tion of temple paintings and other decorative or representational works in places of worship
in the pre-colonial period was a caste-based occupation. Comparatively, the art tradition
introduced by the colonial masters was very much an elite pre-occupation which continued
after independence into Sri Lanka’s postcolonial reality. It is this class and urban-based tra-
dition emanating from colonial times that has been challenged by individuals mostly from
rural Sri Lanka but also from non-elite middle class backgrounds from urban centers that
Weerasinghe has referred to above. However, for ‘small-town’ Sri Lanka to make this impact
on art, its proponents had to come to the city for learning, and stay there to ensure that their
art was noticed and had a market. In that process, much of the routine links to their villages
also waned while their experiences of violence, deprivation, displacement and disillusion-
ment provided the themes for their art and became marketable commodities and noticeable
narratives of their memories. It is in this context that Weerasinghe has aptly articulated,
that their creative process is a struggle through which they are interested in converting “the
realization of their oppressed and marginalized position in society into a dynamism that al-
lows them to surmount their despair and gain subsistence in the very society that rejected
them in the recent past” (Weerasinghe 2005: 183-184).
However, it is also important to note that for many of the artists whose works I
refer to, the mere conversion of their memories and experiences into commodities with a
price tag was not their only matter of concern. The fact that some of these works sold well,
particularly among the community of overseas patrons based in Colombo and a handful of
contemporary art museums in Japan and Western Europe is a secondary consequence. Giv-
en the negative cultural value attached to themes like death and violence in the Sri Lankan
cultural terrain, and the often violent and devastating visual language used in much of these
works, there was always a good possibility that much of these works might be labeled in-
auspicious, and therefore not something to be owned. Well aware of the limitations of this
cultural terrain, these artists continued to engage in their work, and while some managed to
sell them, others did not. But as a collective discourse, these works made their presence felt
mostly because of the epistemic break in art-making they introduced, and the discussions
they generated. Many of these artists also engaged in other income generating activities
24
to sustain themselves, allowing them the economic freedom and creative space to do what
they desired in painting, sculpture and installation. What they desired most was society’s
recognition of themselves as individuals and serious artists as well as the acknowledgement
of their experiences. They have narrated their negative experiences in society through their
work, and used them as methods to gain some degree of acceptance and acknowledgement
in that very society (Weerasinghe 2005: 184).
It is in the context briefly outlined above that the works and the politics of art that I
refer to in the remainder of this book should be located and understood. My presentation of
different works of art is categorized on the basis of how different artists attempt to construct
meaning in their work. However, it must be clearly noted that such categories of analysis are
not mutually exclusive, but are often interconnected, as would be the case in a porous field
of activity such as art.
End Notes
1. This periodization excludes the cave paintings of the pre-historic period when the cultural and social
identities of today’s ethnic groups had not been formed. For a useful and informative discussion on
the periodization of Sri Lankan art, refer to The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka by Senake Ban-
daranayake (Colombo: Lake House, 1986 [2007]).
2. For a discussion on this issue, refer to Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses
on Sinhala Yak Tovil by David Scott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994 ).
25
26
Personal Experience of Violence as

Narratives of Memory
A number of Sri Lankan visual artists have framed the extensive violence around them as a
commentary of personal experience that has directly impacted on their personal lives and
collective social space. Commenting on the works of artists who represent this particular ori-
entation, Weerasinghe has noted that according to them, “making a work of art is the surest
and most immediate way of registering the sentiments and sensations of an individual who is
made frustrated and despairing in the face of political or personal adversities” (Weerasinghe
2005: 189). In this context, for them, “the painting or the sculpture is the vehicle for this ac-
tivity of ‘chronicling’ the pain and history before it is normalized and re-radicalized” (Weeras-
inghe 2005: 189). All the artists whose works are explored in this chapter are commenting on
violence in their personal and collective social space. But not all of them have experienced
violence first hand as a victim or as a witness at close quarters.
I begin my reading of the works and politics of artists who narrate in an (auto)bio-
graphical sense, with the work of Jagath Weerasinghe1 for two reasons. First, Weerasinghe
himself has noted that his work along with the work of a number of other artists engage in
“constructing biographies as an artistic expression in its most evident form” (Weerasinghe
2005: 189). Autobiographical does not necessarily mean only a reflection on personal vio-
lence and painful memories. Some of Weerasinghe’s works have nothing to do with violence;
nevertheless they are personal reflections on his existence and position in society. However,
majority of his works bear a significant preoccupation with issues dealing with violence, not
only as someone who personally experienced it, but also as someone who experienced it as
a member of a society torn apart by violence. By the same token, his early works were also
a reflection of the guilt of an individual who witnessed political violence all around him since
the early 1980s, but felt powerless to change its direction. Second, if one interrogates the an-
nals of recent Sri Lankan ‘art history’, it is evident that Jagath Weerasinghe’s 1992 exhibition
Anxiety, held at the National Art Gallery, Colombo consisting of 40 works of art, effectively
explored for the first time in Sri Lanka the possibility of using the experience and memories
of violence and pain as a legitimate thematic concern for artists to engage with, and present
these as part of a public discourse. Equally as importantly, in the words of one critic, this
exhibition “disclosed the possibilities of artistic manifestations that are reflective of broad
political and social implications within a deeply personal context” (Perera 2001).
In other words, Weerasinghe was exploring the possibilities of art practice in public
spaces such as galleries, that commented on or narrated complex social and political issues,
taking individual experience as a point of departure. Anxiety was a visual text that publicly
narrated the artist’s personal point of view, the experiences, traumas and memories of the
27
July 1983 violence against Tamil civilians. In the exhibition, Weerasinghe was blurring the
boundaries that separated the personal biography of a moment, political and social com-
mentary of a particular violent event and art practice. G.R. Constantine, commenting on
the exhibition in 2001 notes that, it “was the first exhibition to clearly demarcate the shift of
Sri Lankan art from a perceptual level to a conceptual level,” where it was necessary for the
viewer to engage in an active process of self-questioning in order to fully complete a “cre-
ative appreciative process” (2001: 7-8). In his own brief comment in the exhibition catalog,
Weerasinghe made the following observations that contextualized the politics of the works
in terms of personal experience of violence, guilt and anxiety over what was witnessed, and
how these feelings might be overcome through the practice of art:
My mind that races across Galle Road, was gripped by an unknown fear. A
very intimate thought, an almost secret preoccupation, which had been kept
from the generality of men for ages as it seemed, appeared before me in an in-
stant. The intense concentration that safeguarded my keenly private thoughts
for ages shattered into smithereens. Hideous beastly figures emerged in the
street in the distance. I saw them burning away at will, and sucking human
flesh and blood. Those magnificent creative monuments of man’s age-old an-
nals, broke into bits within my being. With that, only one residue remained in
the recesses of my mind, and that is Angst. The sole aim and hope of my inner
being, that has attained higher reaches for your sake, is to achieve victory over
this Angst (Weerasinghe, No Date).
The guilt and anxiety that the artist experienced in the July 1983 anti Tamil violence articu-
lated above was translated effectively into the works at the exhibition as evidenced by some
of the reviews published at the time. Bandaranayake noted:
The immediately striking aspect of his work is the frenzied, passionate expres-
siveness and a pervasive sense of horror and tragedy, displaying an urgent con-
cern with the human condition ... the frenzy, acidity and ‘ugliness’ of his artistic
statements become an appropriate vehicle for the somberness of mood and
the agony, frenzy and tragedy which seem to constitute the principal emotion-
al content of his paintings (Bandaranayake 1992).
Much of the guilt and anxiety that emerged from the works that constituted Anxiety con-
tinued to dominate his unnamed 1995 exhibition of paintings at Colombo’s Lionel Wend
Gallery. However, if Anxiety was a personal commentary on the memories of violence that
the artist witnessed at a single traumatic event in 1983, the Lionel Wendt exhibition was
more a general comment on the state of violence which had become part of the routine
reality of society. One critic noted that this was “art of protest” consisting of “canvases with
chaos and ugliness,” and “pen and ink works that had a nightmarish quality” (Macan-Markar
1997). In a brochure to mark the exhibition, the artist poses the following rhetorical ques-
tion that contextualizes his work:
This is a society that has been brutalized by racial and religious extremists, and
28
the corrupted politicians and the newspaper merchants vending death. They
have murdered my Buddha, my arahaths2 and my deities. What is the meaning
of winning a society like this? (quoted in Macan-Markar 1997).
As the above words indicate, the works in the exhibition narrate a story of both frustration
and rage, not only at the institutionalization of violence but also at the dismantling of a pre-
viously existing more sedate way of life. They further critiqued the role of mass media in
promoting and sustaining violence, and dismantling or making impotent organized religion.
The latter theme continues to emerge in some of Weerasinghe’s subsequent works. In this
context, Macan-Markar asks with a note of empathy, “how else does one paint except in a
volatile manner? How else, other than an art that boiled for a country on fire?” (Macan-
Markar 1997). The images were often grotesque as amply demonstrated in the following
comments by Macan-Markar on the series titled Public Rally:
It stood out, among other things, for the way he had interpreted that ubiqui-
tous of events in the country: the political rally. It had as its dominant motif
huge ugly mikes. And there were two in particular, where the mikes looked so
ominous that they appeared like the talons of a giant bird of prey. They were
suspended in the foreground. They were painted black and midnight blue....
and with such compositions Jagath had brought out a very disquieting truth
about these instruments of communication. They were emblems of evil, to
him, purveyors of lies and propaganda, agents used for national brainwashing.
Yet on the other hand, if the mikes were taken metaphorically, they stood for
the other villain in our island – the media (Macan-Markar 1995).
Another critic, commenting on the same series of paintings with particular reference to the
omnipresent microphones as well as mounds of weapons, has noted that the exhibition was
a critical comment on the status of democracy in the country and the region (Govinnage
1995). She also underscored the politics of the exhibition by observing that this was the
work of a contemporary artist critically placing the existing social realities in context (Govin-
nage 1995).
Weerasinghe’s 1997 exhibition Yantra Gala and the Round Pilgrimage held at the
Heritage Gallery, Colombo was one of the most politically interventionist exhibitions up to
that time. In it he further explored his thematic interests in political violence and its con-
sequences upon individuals and society. The dominant component of the exhibition was an
installation that was a forceful and insistent invitation to ponder over what happened in the
immediate past, and a powerful effort to not allow society’s collective memory to lapse into
a sense of convenient amnesia (Perera 1999: 39). In this exhibition, Weerasinghe narrated
the story of political violence in southern Sri Lanka and its traumatic effects on survivors.
One of the recurring themes of the exhibition and one of its repetitive images was that of
a mother going in search of her son who had disappeared (Perera 1999: 39). The artist de-
scribes the political aims of the exhibition in the following words:
The basic intention of this installation is to conjure memories and experiences

of pilgrimage-making practiced by Sri Lankans, and to align those with ‘mem-
29
ories of human cruelty’ that the Sri Lankan civilization has produced in the
recent past. A mother goes around the country looking for her disappeared
son, carrying his photograph with her. She goes from Batalanda to Hokandara,
to Suriyakanda, to Sevanagala, to Ankumubura and to many other places of
detention, torture and mass murder3. While making this ‘round trip of suf-
fering’ she thinks of the many ‘round pilgrimages’ she had made, going from
temple to temple; from Tissa to Kelaniya, to Attanagalla, to the sacred Temple
of the Tooth, to the sacred ‘Bo’ Tree and to many other places of worship. And
gradually many things begin to change and deteriorate. Ideals begin to wither
(Weerasinghe 1997).
The main installation was made up of what is known as a ‘yantra gala,’ usually a sealed block
of granite in which different compartments would contain objects of religious or ritual value,
and would normally be buried at sites of Buddhist worship incorporating structures that were
built. For the artist, this object symbolized Buddhist holy places. Surrounding this structure,
raw rice was scattered on the floor, intermingled with nametags of sites synonymous with
violent death and torture and well-known places of Buddhist worship. In this narrative, the
artist made no attempt to distinguish between the places of violence and places of worship
since his overall narrative was based on the ‘yantra gala’ and the round pilgrimage; the dis-
tinction was a mere temporal issue. In the pre-violence period the dynamic referred to a
religious ritual, while in the period of violence and immediately after, it referred to a painful
personal ritual attempting to seek closure to a violent and traumatic episode. In the paint-
ings hung on the walls surrounding the installation, executed on fragments of maps of Sri
Lanka, the repetitive figure of an obscure woman holding a photograph was seen, while on
another wall a flower alter that typifies places of Buddhist worship was depicted with clay
flowers and broken pieces of daggers. In another set of paintings that depicted dismantled
Buddhist stupas and other scenes of chaos, Weerasinghe critiqued the existing dominant
historical positions and narratives within which selective use of violence has been justified or
tolerated. The artist attributes “the calamitous situations of our present and immediate past
to this de-glorified and desecrated historical and religious paradigm,” coupled with what he
calls without explanation “our meek peasant psychology” (Perera 1997).
Taking the exhibition as a whole, Anoli Perera in a critical review has noted that the
artist has used a range of available media to “allegorize and metaphorize an unforgettable
inventory of events and melancholic realities of the present,” and the uncompromising aes-
thetics that he has utilized succeeds in resurrecting “obscure images which acknowledge
the violent legacy of our immediate past, and its aftermath without being evasive, and give
no consolation to the convenient amnesiac” (Perera 1997). Moreover, critiquing the hith-
erto surviving conventions of aloofness in modernist art, she also notes that the exhibition
indicates that art “can deal with such monumental calamities, and that inconvenient and
unpleasant truths can, and should be interrogated” (Perera 1997).
In this exercise, like in the case of Anxiety, Weerasinghe has merged the personal
and political into one experiential category. However, the merging of these categories so
freely, as well as the blurring of the boundaries between the very specific personal experi-
ences and the more general collective and other individuals’ experiences, was critiqued as
untenable and unethical by at least one critic. In the aforesaid review, Anoli Perera noted
30
that the artist’s claim to assume the position of the aggrieved mother in search of her disap-
peared son, presupposes that he also feels her pain, sorrow and humiliation as well as claim
her narrative” (Perera 1997). She points out that her dissonance with the artist is with the
appropriation of personal experience, and not with respect to his aesthetic epistemology
or his attempts at forcing people not to forget (Perera 1997). As Perera notes, to “claim to
feel another’s pain is at best contestable since to do so one has to assume that pain can be
objectified and placed outside the body of the victim” (Perera 1997). Taken in this sense,
Weerasinghe’s works presented in the exhibition Yantra Gala and the Round Pilgrimage,
while being a repository of violent memory and pain of a particular period, also have ten-
dencies of appropriation.
Weerasinghe’s 1998 exhibition Dialogue co-presented with Christa Weber at Gal-
lery Mountcastle in Colombo continued to explore issues related to violence; but it was also
his last exhibition dedicated to this theme. Issues of violence and memory continued to be
a theme in his later work though not in a visibly dominant manner. In a review, Anoli Perera
notes that in the works of Weerasinghe at the exhibition, one could trace the same thought
process that animated the Yantra Gala exhibition and his series of paintings titled The Soldier
(Perera 1998). In terms of dominant imagery, “most of the paintings carried a man placed
in and out of obscurity, obviously symbolizing suffering and confusion” (Perera 1998). She
further articulates the meanings and images that the paintings narrate:
In all of these works his thoughts manifest in psycho-dramatic images in hal-

lucinating intensity. The brush strokes that create these images are sometimes
clear and sometimes enigmatic. Moreover, they are executed with a sense of
daredevil freedom, and is charged with such spontaneity as if to declare that it
is the only way to express life force that remains within oneself and one’s world
when both are under the perpetuating threat of annihilation (Perera 1998).
Perera makes two other crucial points with regards to these works. First, the gap she sug-
gests existed between the artist and his subject matter in some of the previous works, does
not exist here, and second, “the rational, logical being is taken over by the hysteric who is
screaming that time is running out” (Perera 1998). In other words, in this series the artist
is in the center of the chaos (Perera 1998). Some of Weerasinghe’s more recent works such
as (My) Inability of Painting Women (2000), Portrait of an Artist as A Divine Being (2001-
2002), Confused Narrative: That’s the Way Life Is (2003), and Celestial Underwear (2003)
have attempted to address issues of masculinity and identity taking as the point of depar-
ture the artist’s own identity (Perera 2009: 13, 19). Nevertheless, his interest in the politics
of violence in Sri Lanka has continued as evidenced in works such as the series Celestial
Violence (2008) and his most recent exhibition, Celestial Fervor (2009). Commenting on Ce-
lestial Fervor, Perera has noted Weerasnghe’s continued interest in amalgamating elements
of popular culture and archeology in constructing his political narratives and the manner in
which he has succeeded in embedding irony, mimicry and metaphors in narrating his story
(Perera 2009: 21)
Without a doubt, up to 1998 Weerasinghe was the most prolific and interventionist
artist who was keen in exploring new methods of artistic expression in narrating experiences
and stories of violence and pain. In many ways, he also continued that role up to 2009 while
31
motivating many others. Most artists whose works are referred to in this chapter, have
opted to take up the themes and the modes of presentation he introduced. Hence lies his
contribution: as an artist who used his works as a repository of violent memory and pain,
and also as the trail-blazer who indicated the vast possibilities of politico-artistic narratives.
T. Shanaathanan is the only artist who lives and works in the war affected city of
Jaffna whose individual work is represented in this study. Those of his works that can be con-
textualized within the theme of this discussion constitute of paintings and etchings. The pain
and suffering of war are very close and immediate, to Shanaathanan. However, compared to
the experience in the south, active war and political violence in Jaffna and the extended area
of the northeast have been on-going for over thirty years. Its physical and emotional toll is
immediately visible at a much higher scale than in the south. These conditions constitute
the main point of departure for Shanaathanan’s most important work, and in general they
also represent the dilemma of a minority ethnic community whose members are caught in
a situation of war (Perera 2001). In this context of enhanced violence and destruction, Sha-
naathanan’s work becomes a manifestation of a collective experience and reaction by a war
weary community (Perera 2001).
According to him, being a Tamil person in his immediate social context in the midst
of war and its consequences, has negatively impacted upon his sense of self and identity. He
believes that this process has made him nameless, homeless, and faceless and further trans-
formed, demolished and disrupted his identity by changing its defining factors (Perera 2001).
In other words, in the context of war and even in relative peace, Shanaathanan believes that
Tamils defy most categories of identity that existed in the past because as a community they
were forced to change their patterns of life, and to bear in silence the complicated and com-
plex life experiences resulting from war (Perera 2001).
Shanaathanan formulates this collective state of affairs as the creation of an inner
mental struggle caused by the outer physical struggle. It is more psychological than physical.
It is about breaking up of relationships with the country, history, tradition, relatives, neigh-
bors and friends. In the end, it is a matter of breaking up relationships with one’s own self
and within one’s self (Perera 2001). To him, it is important to understand what the commu-
nity feels about this change. Their reaction is silence, but that silence is not without mean-
ing, and in fact it is impregnated with meaning. What he attempts to narrate through his
paintings is that long moment of silence with multiple meanings that deal with the ruptures
experienced by a society in extreme conditions. Within this frame of reference, he attempts
to explore what he believes to be the “other side of the well-spoken and debated things like
history, truth, identity, victory and so on” (Perera 2001). Like the work of most other artists
explored in this chapter, much of Shanaathanan’s works are visually arresting and disturbing.
S. B. Dissanayaka, commenting on Shanathanan’s work in the Ceylon Daily News, observed
that “Shanaathanan’s art is distinctly an engagement with social and political questions and
[the] human condition itself, he produces works that are removed from the utilitarian roots…
His sequence of etchings are as disturbing as the Caprichos and Desastros de la Guerra of
Goya, if you ponder over them long enough” (Ceylon Daily News, July 1996). Dissanayaka
also situated Shanaathanan’s work in the larger global context marked by political violence
when he noted that “he is an artist for our time, and of our time, not only Sri Lanka, but for
the troubled world in which we now live” (Ceylon Daily News, July 1996). Weerasinghe has
noted that Shanaathanan’s work is a good example of works that present “chaos and per-
32
plexity within an almost surreal and mythical environment” (Weerasinghe 2005: 189). The
surrealism and mythical quality of his work narrate the harrowing memories of the violence
of the recent past, as well as the ‘un-reality’ of that experience.
One of Shanaathanan’s relatively recent works, an installation titled Paradise Bed
executed outside of his home region of Jaffna as part of the Theertha International Artists’
Camp 2003, makes a shift away from the intense personal experience of war and trauma
in his home locality, to the more generalized and pervasive experiences of violence and its
‘taken for granted’ nature in the rest of the country. Paradise Bed is an installation that is
highly successful in terms of meaning construction, use of space and color and in its ability
to visually narrate a convincing story (Perera 2004). It consisted of an elegant, striking and
comfortable-looking velvet-like red colored bed and accompanying pillow set in the natural
backdrop of spectacular beauty consisting of a large expansion of green grass, trees, sky and
flowing blue water, conjuring immediately notions of paradise that have been made popular
by tourist and travel narratives including those used by the Sri Lankan state to attract for-
eign visitors to boost its tourist industry (Perera 2004: 85). Yet, the moment one sits on the
bed, it becomes clear that it is an extremely hard surface bringing out the binary opposite
of popular imaginings of paradise. Through that realization, Shanaathanan establishes an
important reality about Sri Lanka: nothing is what it seems to be; notions of paradise could,
and in fact actually do, camouflage the larger realities of violence, pain and other contradic-
tory meanings of violence.
Vasuki Jeyashankar is one of the few Tamil women artists living and actively working
in the east. Originally from Jaffna and currently living in the eastern town of Batticaloa, she
has been painting and exhibiting since 1988 (Shanaathanan 2004). Like T. Shanaathanan’s
and G.R. Constantine’s work that visually narrate stories of war, violence and displacement
in the region, some of Jeyashankar’s more important works also take as their point of depar-
ture these same themes. For instance, her watercolor and collage work Krishanthi (1998)
narrates the gruesome rape and murder of Krishanthi Coomarswamy and some of her rela-
tives at the hands of Sri Lanka army personnel in Jaffna in 1997. However, her artistic rigor
compared to artists like Shanaathanan and Constantine remains at the level of an amateur
practitioner. This seems to be because as a highly involved civil society activist, much of her
time is spent on activism rather than on sustained art practice. Nevertheless, she remains
the best known Tamil woman artist in the country who addresses issues of violence and
memory in her work.
No longer resident in Sri Lanka, R. Vaidehi is one of the few consistent Tamil women
artists. Her works are autobiographical narratives that are informed by her experiences of
war and violence in northern Sri Lanka as well as identity politics that the war has ushered in.
Perera has noted that “the investigation of women’s subjectivity in the predicament of social
chaos and violence with racial overtones has also directed artists to look at one’s identity in
terms of ethnic politics and questioned the composite ideas of ‘national’ categorizations”
(Perera 2009: 73). She suggests that this tendency is clearly visible in the work of R. Vaidehi
as exemplified by her practice of locating herself in the form of a “lonely image at the center
of her etchings in the background of a mass of buildings” (Perera 2009: 73). As Perera notes,
“similar to an autobiography, the artist’s own self becomes the allegorical content refer-
ring to personal pain and collective anxiety of a community which has been made refugees
and members of a scattered Diaspora” (Perera 2009: 73). Her works point to the physical
33
and emotional dislocation of individuals in situations of war where familiarity is constantly

threatened and disrupted and people are forced into the unfamiliarity of refugee camps
and exile while one’s social and historical locations are constantly in a state of flux, forcing
individuals to “repeatedly reposition one’s self” (Perera 2009: 73). It is this exact situation
that Shanathanan also refers to with regard to Vadehi’s work: “Vaidehi in her work questions
the notion of identity in an ethnically polarized Sri Lankan society and attempts to see how
the self identity is exchanged, devalued and handled by the agents of power through making
a collage of various identity cards, police registrations and other documents (Shanaathanan
2010).
Pradeep Chandrasiri is one of the leading artists who has consistently dealt with
the theme, “youth and political violence” (Perera 2001). As a young man, he himself was
detained in a government detention camp in the late 1980s. The immediate context of much
of his work is the period of intense political violence in the south in the late 1980s when
large numbers of youth from peripheral geographic areas fell victim to either the govern-
ment sponsored vigilante or regular military and police forces or the anti government politi-
cal group, the JVP (Perera 2001). His works are autobiographical because they narrate his
own individual experiences as well as more general collective experiences. There are two
main manifestations of his work that are relevant to this reading. The first is his painting/
installation titled The Thug is Everywhere which he first created in 2001 as part of a series
of works that came out of the highly experimental International Artists’ Workshop at Lunu-
ganga organized by the Theertha International Artists’ Collective (Perera 2005: 190). This
work that combined elements of painting and installation methods “constituted of a larger
than life plywood cutout of a character that Chandrasiri called ‘the thug’” who “was a macho
man who appeared everywhere” (Perera 2005: 190). During the period of the workshop,
the thug was omnipresent, and there was simply no escape from him: “He was part of life.
It was routine” (Perera 2005: 190). In the workshop site which became symbolic of the
larger society for the artist, “there was no reality or a moment without the thug,” and more
importantly, “like those of us in the wider society, the residents at the workshop got used to
the appearance and reappearance of the thug in different times in different places” (Perera
2005: 190).
Through a very simple idea, Chandrasiri was making a powerful and effective com-
ment on the omnipresent nature of generalized violence in our society. He was not narrating
a personal experience per se, but a collective experience that every individual in the country
could relate to, on the basis of everyday experience. As a result of three decades of war, as
well as due to the conscious dismantling of democratic institutions and practices since 1977,
Sri Lanka has “become a society where violence is a truly potent force of social change and
governance” (Perera 2005: 190-191). That process has “created a new pantheon of Mega
Gods generally known as thugs, and have imprisoned our traditional deities and other su-
pernatural characters within their holy places” (Perera 2005: 1991). Since 2001, Chandrasiri
has installed his work in different parts of the island, narrating both the omnipresent nature
of generalized and institutionalized political violence as well as creatively disseminating his
message.
In the second and more consistent manifestation of his work, he uses the recurrent
image of ‘broken hands’ sculpted from terra cotta as a metaphor for his ideas. This particular
image has been a central feature of his work since 1996. The frame of reference, the politics
34
of his visual language and the immediate contexts of this series are outlined in the following
words by Chandrasiri when he strived to explain the meaning of his work for an exhibition in
Fukuoka, Japan:
Let me tell you how the form of the hand becomes a visual experience for me.
During my captivity in the detention camp, one of my hands was violated. Be-
cause of this experience I proclaim that for me, the form of the hand becomes
a crucial object within my art. At the same time, in Asian/ Sri Lankan art forms,
especially in visual and performance art, one could see that the hand is an
important aspect where its gestures (mudra) express meaning. I recognize this
influence in my art.
I use this form in my installations to symbolize multiple meanings. In one way,

it symbolizes my protest against violence and terror. I use it also to remember
or renew my own memories of the past. I also use it in the meaning of parting
and as a symbol of hope (Chandrasiri 2002: 124).
While obviously autobiographical in nature, this nevertheless was also a shared experience
for many other youth in the late 1980s in the south and the north east over a much longer
period of time. Chandrasiri strongly believes that his work is a narrative of youth, violence
and loss of innocence. In the Broken Hand Series 1, Chandrasiri uses as the main material for
the work, charcoal, nails, firewood, terracotta lamps and beetle leaves. This particular leaf
which individuals traditionally chew as people chew tobacco or chewing gum in other cul-
tural contexts, has significant cultural meanings. They are often used at auspicious moments
including weddings and other cultural functions. They are also used at funerals during the
long vigils that relatives and kin undertake in the presence of the body of the dead. It is to
evoke connotations of death that Chandrasiri uses images of beetle leaf in his work. In the
Broken Hands in the Burnt House - Series 2, Chandrasiri uses the image of the broken hands
with the remnants of a house that belonged to a Tamil individual which was burnt down dur-
ing the anti-Tamil violence in July 1983 as the backdrop. In this work, he links the violence
against Tamils that he saw as a child to the violence that he himself experienced much later.
Chandrasiri noted in an interview that at the time of the 1983 violence he “was about eleven
years old and [that he] had bad memories of it, and this work is built on those memories.”
In the work Broken Hands on the Bomb Explosion Site - Series 3, Chandrasiri installs his de-
capitated terra cotta hands at a site where a suicide bomber exploded himself killing about
80 people, most of whom were schoolboys. In the work Memories of Innocence – Series 4,
the artist uses a photograph of a woman from the Mothers’ Front4 who lost her husband
in the civil unrest during 1988-1990 as the backdrop. In the work Broken Hands - Series 5
which was also exhibited at the Fukuoka Triennale in 2002, Chandrasiri attempts to capture
and visually narrate the memories of extensive political violence in the south and the north-
east that was shared by him and many others. In this work, he requested thirteen artists,
including himself, to write their experiences which became an integral part in the process of
creating the work.
Chandrasiri is perhaps the only artist who has consciously attempted to recreate his
own traumatic memories graphically, and also do so in sites that contain violent narratives of
35
their own. He specifically locates his method and ideology of art practice within the trends
that emerged in the 1990s, through which he believes artists like himself memorialize the
destruction that was caused by the politics of that time by consciously investigating the roots
and causes of these violent phenomena.
The general theme of violence and memory from his earlier works has continued
into his more recent paintings such as the series The Mountain (Weerasinghe 2007: No pagi-
nation). However, in these works, which have privileged black and white shapes and sten-
ciled images, Chandrasiri has utilized a “radically different narrative account and presents
a very different psychological and visual disposition,” engaging with his theme in a much
“deeper and subtle manner” (Weerasinghe 2007: No pagination). As Weerasinghe notes,
“bloody events of the late 1980s are reminded not in an agonizing manner but in a mournful
and melancholic way (Weerasinghe 2007: No pagination). Moreover, in this series, Chandra-
siri is not simply narrating memories of violence but attempting to “transcend memories of
violence and look deeper into the meaninglessness of being violent” (Weerasinghe 2007: No
pagination).
Like Chandrasiri, Bandu Manamperi also experienced political violence at close
quarters, initially as an observer in society of the time, but later as a very young individual
in state detention for a brief period. While he survived detention, many people he knew did
not. These experiences form the backdrop for Manamperi’s best-known works, particularly
manifested in his performance work though not so much in his sculptures and installations.
Hence my focus here will be his key performance works both in Sri Lanka and abroad. He
explains the background and the inspiration for his works in the following words in an un-
published concept note:
I have lived in a situation where war and violence have taken place. The close
proximity to intense violence has made me witness the destruction and chaos
it has created over the years. It has managed to reduce the human being and
everything humanity has built, physically and emotionally, into mere rubble
and ash. I am afraid of the wounds it has inflicted on the human body and the
human psyche (Manamperi 2005).
His first best-known performance work addressing and negotiating with these concerns
titled Bandaged Body: Body in Ash (2003) was formulated and performed in Burragorang,
New South Wales, Australia. Manamperi, on his way from the Sydney International Airport
to join an international artists’ workshop in Burragorang saw large burnt out and fallen trees
along the way. According to his personal narrative, some of these were completely charred,
while others were half burnt, and yet others were getting a new coverage of foliage showing
some signs of life (Manamperi 2005). This aftermath of a bushfire along a road in New South
Wales made a deep impression in Manamperi’s mind because it took him back to a time,
place and a set of experiences with which he was quite familiar with:
This scene got etched in my memory very strongly. I remembered various vio-
lent incidents during the 1980s and 1990s in Sri Lanka. They were mostly orga-
nized political violence directed at people. During that time, there were burnt
bodies scattered along the roadside. As a person who went through those
36
violent incidents, seeing the big burnt trees renewed the memories of those
burnt bodies. I felt the violence in both the burnt trees and the burnt bodies
(Manamperi 2005).
The image of destruction through fire, in one case caused by an act of political violence, and
in the other case by a destructive moment of nature, became the point of departure for
Manamperi’s performance. In the initial phase of the performance, the remnants of burnt
pieces of wood were wrapped in gauze while the artist’s own body was wrapped in burnt
white cloth. Cultural symbolism of white originated from its association with death in con-
temporary Sinhala culture. The burnt pieces of wood were carried in a tray to a fireplace
and were hung on the wall above it. Afterwards, the artist crept into the fireplace itself and
rolled upon the ash like “an embryo in a womb” (Manamperi 2005). At that moment, the
fireplace represented the womb to the artist, and from it he emerged covered in ash, remi-
niscent of the birth of a child (Manamperi 2005). The ash that covered his body narrated the
story of violence that even a re-birth could not prevent from clinging to the individual and to
the community. After his emergence from the fireplace, Manamperi carried the aforemen-
tioned tray towards the audience, expecting them to place upon it some personal item that
they might carry in their possession. As expected, many people placed things like shoes,
handkerchiefs, hats, reading glass cases etc (Manamperi 2005). These were then deposited
in front of the fireplace, similar to the altar of flower-offerings in Buddhist temples, once
again evoking a religio-cultural experience familiar to the artist. This was in his mind, an
offering of memory, an offering that disturbs and disrupts erasure and amnesia. The artist
asserts that his expectation from the performance was to emphasize “that we have to take
responsibility for all crimes because we are part of the system that constitutes society” (Ma-
namperi 2005).
The themes initially explored in his Burragorang performance were further articu-
lated in his second performance in Jaffna titled Bandaged Barrel Man (2004) as part of the
Aham Puram exhibition.5 This performance was far more significant in terms of location and
context than the first one. The venue of the performance, the Jaffna Public Library, as well
as the city of Jaffna, had been sites of violence for over three decades while the authors of
that violence vary from the LTTE to Sri Lankan military forces to Sinhala civilian thugs who
burnt down the library on December 8, 1985, and Indian military units who occupied the
north in the 1980s. As such, the symbolism and political representation of Manamperi’s
performance was self-evident to the audience in Jaffna. In this performance, the artist’s
entire body was covered with bandage signaling the wounds and scars of war, while the
corroded tin barrel he carried symbolized both the destruction and the emotional burden
of war. While the formal opening ceremony of the Aham Puram exhibition got underway,
Manamperi, carrying his barrel, walked slowly into the auditorium where he maintained a
haunting presence before finally leaving. This was in effect a visual and performative intru-
sion of disturbing memory. The artist himself says that his attempt in this highly significant
venue and powerful performance, was to narrate the pain and burden of war (Manamperi
2005).
T.P.G. Amarajeewa’s work too finds its theme in contemporary Sri Lankan politics
of violence and his personal experience with manifestations of that violence in the Eastern
Province from which he originates. For him, the specific experiential context of that violence
37
is the militarized inter-ethnic conflict involving segments of Sinhala and Tamil ethnic groups.
For Amarajeewa, irrespective of whether this conflict is categorized as ethnic conflict, free-
dom struggle or terrorism, it is ultimately a power struggle over the ownership of a particu-
lar geographic territory (Perera 2001). Amarajeewa’s following observations contextualize
his work and the politics embedded in them:
As a complex mechanism, this war gives rise to various sub or regional cultures.
The most visible sub-cultures are the refugee camps and the life in the boarder
villages. ‘Junction 69’ is one such subculture that has been formed over the
past two decades. At one time in my life, I was part of that subculture from
which I have now distanced myself. From Colombo, the so called ‘centre’ of
modern Sri Lankan society the war is a ‘media reality’ [...] intermittently rup-
tured by bomb explosions. I look back at my days at ‘Junction 69,’ and I can see
how war and violence defined a human space in alarming dimensions that are
horrific and weird on the one hand, and sarcastic and satirical on the other.
The irony of this situation is that the benefits of globalization and technological
advances that Colombo enjoys do not come even close to places like ‘Junction
69’ that are situated in the boarder villages where war has taken precedence.
In my work, I try to capture these dichotomies of war.
Amarajeewa is voicing his experiences specifically from the town of Ampara in the Eastern
Province as well as his immediate home locality in the vicinity of the intersection called
‘Junction 69,’ named after the 69th milepost between Uhana and Padiyathalawa on the Am-
para - Kandy Road. Amarajeewa’s visual narrative is a personal comment on home and
beyond, the familiar that has become unpleasant and unpredictable due to war, and the
deprivations of living in an active war zone where violent death of kin and close friends was a
routine existential reality. Over a period of twenty years, he and many others saw the trans-
formation of a sleepy Dry Zone Sinhala settlement into a target of regular LTTE incursions
and attacks primarily due to its Sinhala cultural identity. On the other hand, it also became a
recruitment ground for the Sinhala dominated Sri Lankan armed forces. Many youth joined
the military as a reaction to LTTE attacks and as a way out of chronic poverty, given the fact
that the military offered a regular salary and other benefits to kin even after death. It was
also a way of finding direction and a sense of identity in life for these youth. The newly cre-
ated political image of war hero was an important iconic and symbolic attraction despite
the dangers it entailed when contextualized within the reality of actual combat. All this can
only be understood in the specific context of living in this locality, its rapid transformation
and its marginalization from the rest of the country as a ‘border village’ or ‘combat zone.’
Amarajeewa’s series of paintings titled Welcome to the Eastern Province plays on the tour-
ist promotional slogan welcoming people to the east and elsewhere in the country in the
pre-war period, and how touristic images can be caricatured in the context of war marked
by violence, death and deprivation. His self-portrait photography series depicting his own
chest being measured titled Don’t Measure Me, is a specific narrative against the rapid mili-
tarization of the conflict in the East and the death and destruction it brought specifically to
youth who opted to join the military for numerous reasons.
When Amarajeewa’s works are situated in the context of the larger socio-cultural
38
domain of the south, they also become a narrative for the deprivations that localities or
‘homes’ that have become marginalized and therefore ‘border villages’ have to endure,
when compared to areas such as Colombo. Precisely due to their marginality because of
geographic location and distance from centers like Colombo, and also due to added margin-
alization through entrenched war, they become areas from where material and psychologi-
cal benefits such as relative affluence and safety taken for granted in places like Colombo
seem permanently banished. His constant reference to ‘Junction 69’ is a reminder and a
lingering memory of these contradictions caused by war.
Let me now focus on a single work by Kingsley Gunatilleke. The primary preoc-
cupation in his work is usually not war, violence or memory. His work explores issues such
as the natural environment and its degradation as well as what he personally perceives as
‘beautiful.’ In more recent times, he has also opted to paint what appears like mythical
worlds inspired by his close association with restoring Buddhist temple murals, including
those at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, the holiest shrine of local Buddhists, that was
significantly damaged by an LTTE bomb in 1998. Nevertheless, some of his strongest and
best-known works, mostly executed prior to 1999 have dealt with the issue of war, violence
and displacement in which he engaged in a process of fragmenting and refracting the time/
space/ form relationship (Perera 2001). His 1998 exhibition Year Planner, consisting of a se-
ries of paintings and installation works, was a reformulation of the sense of time imposed by
personal calendars, schedules and time-bound agendas of individuals. He took as his point
of departure, personal planning and timing that are crucial for individuals, and by extension
for the community to plan their lives which is possible only if they have control over their
sense of time.
In the exhibition Year Planner and the installation work that also caries the same
title, he poses the following question: what would happen if this sense of time were no
longer within the control of the individual? Citing the artist, one critic points out, that poli-
ticians are the actual players who exert control over time (Perera 2001). Their social and
political agendas become the rules of the game that ordinary individuals have to adopt. His
metaphor to interrogate this state of reality was the bomb blast that destroyed part of the
Temple of the Tooth (Perera 2001). He takes burnt pieces of wood from amidst the debris
of the bombed out temple that are the very reminders of its destruction, and arranges them
in a new layout denoting an ‘alternate year planner’ (Perera 2001). The pre-war sense of
personal and social time and predictability have been suspended in the context of violent
politics. People now have to live amidst this violence and destruction as determined by
political actors over whom they had no control. In this installation, the elements are jarring
and fragmented, which supports his concept of ‘uncertainty in spite of the illusive certainty
of the planned time’ (Perera 2001).
G.R. Constantine is one of two non-fulltime artists whose works have been selected
for this reading. His early 1980s series (which is now lost) titled, In the Trenches was for-
mulated on the basis of his experience of anxiety, fear and survival in Jaffna in the midst of
war. It was this series that initially introduced him to the art circles of Colombo. As Perera
observes in a 2001 introduction to his work, Constantine’s paintings take “us to a space
engulfed with acute political and social implications” (Perera 2001) emanating from inter-
ethnic conflict and its militarization. In his paintings, “Constantine has developed a haunting
iconography within his visual language where fleshless sculls peep at every corner making
39
the foreground, and devastated landscapes forms the backdrop” (Perera 2001). She sug-
gests that his work “could find affinity with Kathy Kollwitzs’ numerous drawings of ‘death’
and Anslem Kiefer’s tortured landscapes that stretch into infinity” (Perera 2001).
Constantine uses as his subject matter, the essence of an individual’s existence that
is challenged and transformed in the traumatic circumstances of war, and part of the inspira-
tion for, and conceptual intensity of his work come directly from his personal experiences
living in war-torn Jaffna as a youth (Perera 2001). Yet, in his more recent works, he has
moved away from personal experiences of youth and his community, to the more general
experience of violence in the south where he now lives. In many of these narratives, the
violence perpetrated by the LTTE on Sinhala civilians is narrated with the same intensity, as
his previous paintings narrated the violence perpetrated by the security forces of the Sri
Lankan regime on Tamil civilians. He is perhaps the only Sri Lankan painter other than Sujith
Ratnayake, who has visually contextualized the consequences of violence initiated by the
LTTE, which has created a certain kind of unhappiness towards his more recent works among
some segments in his native town as evidenced by the disproval of his work at the Aham
Puram exhibition in 2004.
Constantine’s most recent solo exhibition in 2011 was titled Imaging the Aftermath
and was presented by the Theertha red Dot Gallery. With reference to this exhibition, Perera
(2011: 3) notes of Constantine’s use of images impregnated with symbolism to refer to un-
spoken and taboo issues in the context of war and conflict in his own immediate surround-
ings and beyond. At present, much of Constantine’s creative energies are articulated in the
realm of performance work. His best-known performance (2003) titled Homage to Thirana-
gama, was formulated as a remembrance of Rajni Thiranagama, the Jaffna University medi-
cal teacher and human rights activist who was killed by the LTTE in Jaffna in 1989 (Perera
2001).
Sarath Kumarasiri is the best known sculptor who represents the 90s Trend. While
his sculptural practice in bronze, terracotta and cement extends well into government com-
missions of monuments as well as numerous commercial works, his most consistent work
related to the present theme have been formulated as an articulation of memory of those
who were close to him who were lost in the violence of the late 1980s. These works were
initially presented in his 1998 exhibition No Glory at the Heritage Gallery in Colombo. Since
then, though individual works carried titles such as The Trouser and The Shoe, they have col-
lectively become better known as the No Glory series. In the 1998 exhibition as well as the
series, his preoccupation was with the reproduction of personal items used by his friends
in university and his village in terracotta, and present them to the public as if they were
components of a museum exhibit. Ranabahu has commented that a characteristic feature
of Kumarasiri’s No Glory series as well as in the works presented in the 2009 exhibition
Kovil Pansal6 has been his ability present the works as ‘aged or museum items’ (Ranabahu
2009). The works in the series included replicas of rubber slippers, shoes and jeans. All the
individuals who once used these items had fallen to the violence of the JVP or more often
to the counter insurgency violence of the state. Kumarasiri’s argument was that people with
power, be they representatives of the state or the JVP would be glorified and memorialized
in museums, monuments and rituals of public memory whereas ordinary people who had
succumbed to the same cycle of violence were not publically remembered; in other words,
their memory carried ‘no glory.’ He has articulated his purpose in the following words:
40
I took the personal items such as clothes, shoes etc. a symbol of the victims of
oppression and recreated them in sculptural form. By doing this, I consciously
decided to exhibit them in a museum/gallery situation where their memories
could remain alive in my artwork and that memory could be shared by the
public who view my work ... (Perera 1998: No pagination).
He further stresses that the clearer political intention of these works was to “bring ‘signs’
that refer to memories of innocent victims of violence into the gallery situation where their
deaths are moaned reputably without stigmas, and their memories are not forgotten and
trivialized” (Perera 1998: No pagination). In this sense, for Kumarasiri, the act of reproducing
the personal items of these subaltern individuals who had died violent deaths, and present-
ing them in a series of exhibitions was a symbolic act of pubic memory as well as public
moaning. Further, he was interested in infusing a sense of greatness into the memory of the
victims and thereby counter the idea of ‘no glory’ itself. Work from the No Glory series had
been exhibited many times in Colombo in the 1990s and later in Jaffna at the Aham Puram
exhibition in 2004.7
Anoli Perera’s work has also been described by Weerasinghe as autobiographical
(Weerasinghe 2005: 189). She is the most significant woman artist who represents the art
of the 1990s. However, her preoccupation has not been with political violence and pain,
but with the experiences and politics of being a woman in contemporary Sri Lanka. In other
words, she has concentrated on her own position and subjectivity in society. Even though
her gender sensitive works that have often been popularly perceived as ‘feminist art’ have
been significantly influential in changing some of the directions of contemporary Sri Lankan
art, this is not the focus of this reading. Instead, I would deal with a number of works that
she has produced intermittently that have made strong statements about the consequences
of violence in Sri Lankan society. However, precisely because she is not perceived as an artist
who usually narrates such experiences, these works have been largely underemphasized or
forgotten within the discourse of contemporary Sri Lankan art. Her perspective within these
works are the thoughts of a person who has seen, heard of and anguished over the conse-
quences of political violence from afar. In other words, unlike Amarajeewa, Chandrasiri and
others who narrate from personal experience, Perera comments from a more general col-
lective experiential point of view. But her pictorial narratives refer to specific categories of
experience that individuals who directly experienced violence, or those who lived through it
as members of society are familiar with.
Her mixed media works, Violation of Memories and Aftermath have to be under-
stood in the context of disappearances of individuals and the politics of mass graves. The
disappearance of an individual often meant violent death, but death without a body. This
also meant that survivors could not fulfill ritual obligations associated with funerals that
were available under normal circumstances, which made closure extremely difficult (Perera
1995, 2001). Violation of Memories executed in 1996 is composed of brick red colors remi-
niscent of dried bloodstains on paper in the middle of which one finds a number of strips
of soiled clothing. For Perera, this was the ultimate experience for kin whose loved ones
had disappeared; bodies are discovered in mass graves where there are no culprits to take
responsibility or survivors to claim the bodies because they cannot be identified. What one
41
is left with are unclaimed remnants of bodies and clothing stained with blood. Memories
are therefore violated at the time of abduction as well as at the time mass graves are opened
up, which nevertheless does not offer adequate space for closure. Aftermath on the other
hand, is a more straightforward comment on the consequence of violence on survivors, con-
sisting of two dominant contorted faces indicating excruciating pain through a combination
of colors that indicate death and violence. Both these artworks record her personal reac-
tions to the issues concerning mass graves discovered in Suriyakande in southern Sri Lanka
in January 1994.
Her works titled Claiming the Bodies and Hooded Men were commissioned by the
International Center for Ethnic Studies in Colombo for its own collection in 1999. The imag-
ery in these paintings, and the stories they narrate are closely rooted in the experiences of
violence and terror in southern Sri Lanka. Claiming the Bodies narrates a story quite similar
to Ariel Dorfman’s play Widows. Here, Perera depicts in an accessible pictorial language a
group of women carrying the dead bodies of loved ones. In this case, despite the violent
death, a certain kind of closure is possible because of the availability of a body. As in the
case of Dorfman’s play, here too, the ‘lucky’ ones were those who could claim a body in the
name of someone who had disappeared or was believed to have been killed. In Hooded
Men, using a similar pictorial language Perera emphasizes the role of the most dreaded
character that the periods of terror in both northern and southern Sri Lanka helped create;
that of hooded men known in Sinhala as goni billo who were military informants. Their role
was to travel with military and police units into villages, towns and neighborhoods and point
out perceived or suspected insurgents, who were then picked up, after which most never re-
turned. These hooded men, as purveyors of death and abductions epitomized the collapse
of trust and the ruptures that emerged in many communities (Perera 2001: 159). “For the
local community, the identity of the goni billo -- were they friends, relatives or neighbors
-- made everyday relations fraught with apprehension and distrust” (Perera 2001: 159). This
haunting, eerie and uncertain quality of life at the time, particularly as narrated by the exis-
tence of hooded men, was effectively captured in Perera’s painting where the heads of such
men were covered in soft fabric thereby giving them an unearthly or ghostly appearance.
The importance of these two paintings also lies in their ability to narrate their stories with-
out complications, and also because they have been consistently displayed in public space
since they were executed.
Her more recent work Broken Dialouge (2004), specifically formulated for the Aham
Puram exhibition in Jaffna in 2004, talks about the breakdown of social and cultural com-
munication between the Sinhala and Tamil ethnic groups since the militarization of the inter-
ethnic conflict reached catastrophic heights in the 1980s. This mixed media work consists of
four partially burnt books mounted on a road map of the country symbolizing the dynamism
and power of the written word in the making of ethnic myths, stereotypes and other forms
of suspicions. On the books tied with rope and entangled with the texts narrated, are minia-
ture cotton pillows symbolizing ordinary men and women who have nothing to do with the
competing nationalisms articulated through the written word, who are nevertheless victims
of it. More specifically, and in her own words,
Broken Dialogue emphasizes the disconnect between two communities that

42
has taken place over the years because of the inability to go beyond the myths,
heightened nationalist emotions and its popular rhetoric; the written word
through books, media, internet, and email crisscrosses numerous domains of
discourse with extremist, moderate and very explosive opinions, but the dia-
logue that really connects the Tamil and the Sinhala communities still remains
fractured”.8
More than the work of any other artists, the work of the artists described in this chapter
tends to be more contextual in the sense that their presence in their own work is more
entrenched, clear and visible. This is due to the autobiographical or semi-autobiographical
nature of these works. Without acknowledging or locating their presence in these works,
they cannot be read with any degree of accuracy. Clearly, these artists do not have to claim
the voice of others; either as victims of violence or as onlookers of violence they formulate
their work taking their own location in society at the time as the point of departure.
In the next chapter I will explore the works of some artists who have opted to trans-
form the conventional meanings of city and landscapes and ordinary everyday things, there-
by commenting on politics of violence and their consequences.
End Notes
1. For a detailed reading and historical contextualization of Jagath Weerasinghe’s work, read ‘A Prelude
to an Exhibition’ by Anoli Perera (Art of Jagath Weerasinghe: Celestial Fervor, 2009, Pitakotte: Red
Dot Gallery); for a critical reading of Jagath Weerasinghe’s work, refer to ‘Reading the Art of Jagath
Weerasinghe by Qadri Ismail (Art of Jagath Weerasinghe: Celestial Fervor, 2009, Pitakotte: Red Dot
Gallery).
2. Arahaths are Buddhist sages.
3. These place names refer to sites well known for government detention and torture centers and mass
graves in southern parts of Sri Lanka in the late 1980s.
4. The Mothers’ Front mostly consisted of a loose amalgamation of mothers who had lost their sons in
the violence of the late 1980s in southern Sri Lanka.
5. See the chapter 'Visual Moments and Events as Repositories of Memory' for a detailed description
of the Aham Puram exhibition (2004).
6. ‘Kovil’ refers to Hindu shrines while ‘pansal’ refers to Buddhist temples. For more comments on this
exhibition, please refer to the chapter, 'Margins of a Conclusion.'
7. In 2007, at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, Kumarasiri presented a series of terracotta woks
tilted Memories contextualizing issues of memory consequent to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by
the United Sates on 6th August 1945. The series included works such as The Hiroshima Bicycle, among
others. With these works he expanded his portfolio linking in thematic terms the work initiated in the
1998 No Glory exhibition in Colombo to the Fukuoka exhibition.
8. Personal email communication, 14th August 2005.
43
Jagath Weerasinghe, Broken Stupa (Anxiety Exhibition).
Jagath Weerasinghe, Long Necked Man (Anxiety Exhibition).
44
Jagath Weerasinghe, Yanthra Gala and the Round Pilgrimage.
Jagath Weerasinghe, Shrine of the Innocents.
45
Jagath Weerasinghe, Kitchen Knives: Weapons of Mass Destruction (above top) and
Soldiers in Clouds (above). These works were part of his exhibition Celestial Fervor.
46
Jagath Weerasinghe, Celestial Violence (above top); Snakes & Mikes (above).
47
T. Shanaathanan, Paradise Bed (International Artists' Workshop 2003).
48
T. Shanaathanan, The Day after Seige (above top); Grandma's Ccourtyard (above).
49
T. Shanaathanan, Home for My Butterflies II.
50
R. Veidehi, Awaiting I (above top) & Awaiting II (above).

51
Pradeep Chandrasiri, Broken Hands.

52
Pradeep Chandrasiri, Sign of Violence.

53
Pradeep Chandrasiri, Broken Hands (above top); Wispering Mountain (above).

54
Bandu Manamperi, Barrel Man.

55
Bandu Manamperi, Bandaged Man.

56
T. P. G. Amerajeeva, Dont Measure Me.

57
Kingsley Goonatillake, Year Planner.

58
G. R. Constantine, Revisiting Guernica (above top) & Untitled (above).

59
G. R. Constantine, Untitled .
60
Sarath Kumarasiri, No Glory.

61
Sarath Kumarasiri, Shirt.

62
Anoli Perera, Broken Dialog.

63
64
Reformulating Landscapes, Cityscapes

and the Ordinary: De-contextualizing
Contexts in Meaning Construction
A handful of contemporary Sri Lankan visual artists have attempted to create meaning with
regard to political violence and its consequences by altering the primary meanings gener-
ally associated with ordinary things such as landscapes, cityscapes and common cultural
paraphernalia, thereby de-contextualizing these subjects from their conventional episte-
mological roots located in the popular language as well as commonsensical cultural experi-
ences. So their art can be viewed as conscious acts of political deconstruction within which
new meanings embedded in the politics of the present and the immediate past gets con-
structed. To begin with, I would focus on the major works of two artists, Chandraguptha
Thenuwara and Chammika Jayawardena who are associated with the Vibhavi Academy
of Fine Arts.1 In their major works, both artists have shown a keen interest to initiate a
counter discourse to conventional discourses of meaning associated with landscapes and
cityscapes by radically altering their meanings and re-contextualizing them within a dis-
course that places an emphasis on the idea of war and its resultant consequences. In this
transformation, the conventional tourist promotional and idyllic images of cityscapes and
landscapes begin unravel, and articulate a very different narrative.
In the case of Thenuwara, I would focus on his installations as well as paintings
that have as their collective point of departure the repetitive obsession with ordinary bar-
rels, giving them altered meanings when they are transformed into artworks. He has iden-
tified his entire discourse as ‘barrelism’, which has transformed the image of an ordinary
empty barrel into a series of artworks through paintings and installations imbued with
political meanings directly linked to the political violence of the immediate past as well
as the uncertainties of the present. One critic has described his method as a “tool that
probed contemporary Sri Lankan politics (Weerasinghe 2001). Another critic, referring
to the thousands of ‘barrelistic images’ in his 1997 and 1998 exhibitions titled Barrelism
noted that “the haunting figures seemed to asphyxiate Thenuwara’s artistic visions when-
ever he painted; indeed the man was a microcosm of his country” (Provost 2001: 6). To
Thenuwara, the barrels are a political issue that refers to broader contexts of life, violent
death and politics in Sri Lanka: “The presence of these barrels inadvertently created a
new identity for all those who were forced to live within the constricted boundaries that
they drew” (Provost 2001: 6). Therefore, barrels are also a clear metaphor for war and its
multitude of consequential impacts on public life:
To us in Sri Lanka, the immediate perceptive onlookers, our living space has
been gradually taken over by barrels. In the capital city of Colombo, barrels
65
have gained such prominence like no political issue has. Barrels, in their num-
bers, have debarred civil life of all flow and movement. They dominate many
major intersections, disturbing the flowing life of the city (Thenuwara 1999: 82,
Hanru and Obrist 2008: 67).
Through his writings and interviews Thenuwara emphasizes the radical manner in which
the meaning of barrels has changed, from peace to war and from an absence of violence to
enhanced violence. In fact, his discourse is situated primarily in the space marked by these
extreme experiences. As he states, “before 1983, barrels played a different role. Then,
roads seen with rows of barrels blocking physical mobility was a sign of road development”
(Thenuwara 1999: 83). July 1983 is a watershed in inter-ethnic relations and political vio-
lence in Sri Lanka. It marked the worst organized violence against Tamil civilians in the recent
political history of the country in retaliation to an LTTE ambush of a Sri Lankan army unit
in Jaffna. It also marked the emergence of civil war that continued for thirty years until its
violent end in 2009. In this transformative context, using the barrel as an icon, Thenuwara
explains the metamorphosis of society from peace to violence in the following narrative
titled The Story of a Barrel:
Once upon a time there was a Barrel. It was used as a container and was 35"
in height, 23" in diameter, cylindrical in shape.
I first saw this Barrel alongside the roads when I was a child. It was on a fire.
Workers took boiling tar from it to cover the road. I was happy because roads
were being constructed and roads reduced distance between relatives and
friends. Roads also brought villages closer to towns and linked regions ....
Then came the year 1983, the month of July and the pogrom ... And so com-
menced the Killing Games and the war countdown ...
With the war, that innocent barrel changed. It was camouflaged with paint col-
orfully. Many barrels were added to it and they invaded the towns and cities,
including Colombo. The barrels became part of the landscape. They created
‘barrelscapes’ (Thenuwara 1999: 87).
For Thenuwara, the transformation of the barrel from its pre-violence function to a war
function is not merely a simple metamorphosis of roles assigned to an inanimate object, but
also marks the loss of innocence in the society at large. The change of the ‘innocent barrel’
is an easy to understand symbolic reference to the transformation of society itself, which
is why his work has captured the attention of both the Sinhala and English language press
which remains conservative with a minimal interest in art in general and conceptual art in
particular.
On the other hand, Thenuwara’s work refers to another important critique that
has to do with the normalization of symbols of war and the routinization of the experience
of war itself. One of the most dangerous experiential consequences of long-term war in Sri
66
Lanka has been that “notions of security and insecurity, mobility and immobility, war and
chaos” were “normalized, and accepted as routine” (Perera 2003). However, the routiniza-
tion and familiarization of war has not been widely critiqued in Sri Lankan society. As the
artist explains, “barrels have contributed to the social construction of the frightening reality
that they are a permanent, organic part of life, and what’s more, a state of nature! Life has
returned to normal, thanks to the overwhelming presence of barrels” (Hanru and Obrist
2008: 67). In Thenuwara’s perception, there are two kinds of barrels in the context of war:
those painted by the authorities and those painted by me. But there is a dif-
ference. The barrels painted by the authorities stand guard to the so called
security of the people and are a symbol of the on going war.
The barrels painted by me stand guard against war ... (Thenuwara 1999: 87).
Some of the main strengths of Thenuwara’s work is the ability of the average person to
decode the codes in his conceptual work as well as the almost obsessive repetition of the
work over a long period of time. On the other hand, their visibility is unmistakable whether
they are installations in open space or in private galleries or paintings in routine exhibition
venues. The artist identifies three forms in which his ‘barrelistic’ works are produced:
1. In two-dimensional form, consisting of paintings, drawings and photo-

graphs.
2. In three-dimensional form, utilizing real barrels that are installed in visually
different situations such as labyrinth or monument forms.
3. Combining mediums such as painting and sculpture with barrels, in which
case the paintings and sculptures have to be read in the context of barrels
(Thenuwara 1999: 86).
If Thenuwara’s work has captured local attention as well as international interest, Chammika
Jayawardena’s work has not. One important reason for this is Jaywardena’s relatively junior
position in the hierarchy of artists in Sri Lanka, and more importantly, his relative lack of con-
sistency in his chosen iconographic project. That is, while Jayawardena’s project was inter-
esting as an artistic intervention in a time of war that represented a series of realities linked
to war, he has not succeeded in maintaining a sustained interest in the idea. Compared to
Thenuwara’s work as a long-term obsession with a single idea, Jayawardena’s work has to be
understood as an activity of a brief moment.
Jayawardena’s work that I am concerned with in this reading, takes as its point of
departure the multiple layers of camouflaged colors and forms that became a familiar sight
in Sri Lanka as the military manifestation of the inter-ethnic conflict and the southern insur-
gency expanded. Camouflage marks two moments, a moment of transformation as well
as an extended moment of entrenched military conflict and political violence. Deliberate
camouflaged colors and forms were not a common sight in Sri Lanka prior to the entrench-
ment of political violence when military units were merely ceremonial outfits not trained
for combat or which had any serious combat experience. However, as the political violence
and the military manifestation of the twin conflicts in northeastern and southern Sri Lanka
67
expanded in the 1980s, camouflage became a familiar sight, initially as part of the combat
fatigues of military units and then as part of the uniform of the LTTE carders. Finally, in
shades of pink and pastel colors with horizontal lines, another kind of uniform emerged that
was worn by military personnel who were seriously injured in battle and institutionalized in
various state-run rehabilitation centers. Camouflage in the more common shades of green
and yellow also became the color of choice for some military and LTTE combat vehicles, Navy
gun boats, and Air Force helicopters as well as military buildings in camps and in the vicinity
of checkpoints in towns and elsewhere. Over a relatively short period of about ten years,
camouflage had captured the attention of the people as a clear symbol of war; its wide
expansion as a visual image also indicated the expansion of military conflict as well as the
omnipresence and routinization of institutionalized political violence. In some cases how-
ever, the omnipresence of camouflage went beyond its immediate military meanings. To a
certain extent, camouflaged tee-shirts and baggy shorts became fashionable clothing items
among some sections of the youth while home-made camouflage uniforms also manifested
as favored fancy dress costumes among very young children. In a few instances, some youth
musical groups operating in Colombo also adopted them as the uniform of choice making it
an integral part of the overall spectacle.
It is then this routinization and expansion of violence that Chammika Jayawardena
narrates through his work generally referred to as the ‘camouflage series’. He uses as his
point of departure various camouflage patterns, forms and colors that are easily recognized
in the contemporary Sri Lankan socio-political and cultural contexts. Jayawardena simply
transforms what could easily be normal, routine and apolitical landscapes and patterns into
different landscapes and patterns imbued with camouflage designs, altering the primarily
apolitical meanings of the original routine scenes. What he suggests is that militarization,
war, violence, death and destruction are everywhere; they are as routine as the touristy im-
ages of mountains, rivers, waterfalls and tress.
Let me now explore the works of a number of other artists producing their work
within the same context. Anura Krishantha in his early work did not focus on themes re-
lated to violence. He was more interested in playing with colors and shapes narrating the
allures of urban life and their appeal to youth, the generation he represents. Weerasinghe
has suggested that his works combined elements of kitsch and pop art (2008), and that his
early works gave no indication to any interest in highly charged ‘political’ or ‘national is-
sues’ (2008). His early work often constructed narratives of love, passion and the carefree
existence of youth despite the obstacles to such an existence in contemporary Sri Lanka.
Nevertheless, he also belongs to the group of artists generally represented by the genre of
the 90s art. As an artist, he has not opted for recurring symbols in his work except for the
appearance of general themes of youth and their desires.
However, some of his later works, such as the Stolen Wreath Series (2005) has be-
come an important and subtle commentary on generalized political violence in the country
and the death and destruction created in its wake. In this series Krishantha opted to display
a number of burnt flower wreaths as objects of beauty in a lighted display case. Flower
wreaths have been associated with death and funerals for a considerable period of time,
which is a colonial legacy that has been eagerly adopted by locals. Its association with death
is unmistakable in all segments of society. Given the clarity of that association, one would
not find a flower wreath in any place other than a funeral even though the same flowers
68
can also be presented in different arrangements at weddings or other social and cultural
events that celebrate life. Therefore, rather than the flowers themselves, the association
with death is this particular mode of presentation. It is this model that Krishantha utilized as
the main object in his series of installations that were designed to be hung like regular paint-
ings. He introduced a set of transformations to the conventional wreaths. The conventional
wreaths consisted of fresh flowers. Krishantha burnt these flowers and thereby introduced
to them a culturally easy to read sign of destruction and violence. Then, he went on to place
them in a display case which was illuminated, injecting into the reformulated wreath a differ-
ent sense of beauty, and in that process added a sense of deliberate contradiction between
death/destruction and beauty. Weerasinghe (2000) has noted that Krishantha’s reformula-
tion of the wreaths created a distant memory of a grave stone and a light box usually used
for selling commercial products.
His installation created a sense of culturally induced discomfort in at least one ex-
hibition. One recorded instance was, when his works were included in an exhibition of con-
temporary artworks of a number of Sri Lankan artists in the Colombo office of the German
Technical Corporation between February and April 2004. Its Sri Lankan workers who read
his work in the conventional meanings attached to flower wreaths and what is represented
by burnt matter, immediately protested to the management of the office that Krishantha’s
works were inauspicious and culturally inappropriate to be displayed in the office that just
opened. The works had to be relocated to different parts of the office that were not as pub-
lic as where they were originally placed. It is clear that memories of violence and death are
not always welcome even as art, particularly in places that has no experience in displaying
or viewing serious conceptual and political art.
His 2007 series titled Chairs carries forward his long term interest kitsch and pop art
as well as his new found interests in politics of violence. The series of miniature chairs meant
to be ‘beautiful’ amalgamated images of wreaths, guns, fighter aircraft and camouflaged
colors took his narrative beyond the simple notion of beauty. They constituted a powerful
commentary on the routinization of instruments of violence in society and the seeming nor-
malcy they receive over time.
Much of Pala Pothupitiya’s early work had to do with constructions of identity and
its ruptures that stem from his own personal experiences. Coming from a family of ritual
dancers, which in the Sri Lankan context is a caste based profession, Pothupitiya’s long-
standing primary preoccupation was to see how the ritual paraphernalia used by his close
kin and ancestors could be re-formulated as art using the refuse that was produced by urban
culture. For him, this was a matter of re-orienting an old identity and infusing new meaning
to it, and finally dislocating its link to caste.
However, what is relevant to the present discussion are some of his latter series of
works. The more important of these is the series that Pothupitiya undertook in 2002 and
2003 called Rana Viru or war heroes that used the same technique as his major works com-
bining sculpture, linking it with a conventional theme, and a specific mode of presentation
that also has clear cultural meaning.
His aim in the series was to make a commentary on the underlying themes of war
using the image of the soldier as a metaphorical devise. In the nationalist discourse of the
state as well as at certain popular levels of articulation in Sinhala society, the soldier has
been given extra social capital as a privileged person over the last thirty years of war. Poth-
69
upitiya was trying to question this particular construct of heroism as well as the meaning
of war for soldiers. At a general level, Pothupitiya suggests that the aim of the series is to
“express the meaninglessness of the notion of war hero or the life of the soldiers that has
been hidden within that concept.”2 In a personal note, Pothupitiya further explains the ideas
that motivated the series Rana Viru as well as his conceptualization of the work and his un-
derstating of the context in which the entire spectrum of issues linked to war and violence is
located:
I think the society that created the notion of ‘rana viru’ (war hero) has surrep-
tiously hidden the pains of soldiers within that concept. On the other hand,
most of the children of powerful members of society never directly have links
to experiences of war. Often, they would be studying in a foreign university
or other such institute or would be more gainfully employed. But they do not
have any sense of the pains in the lives of the soldiers who are directly associ-
ated with war. The pains of the soldiers have been hidden within the military
cultural concept of ‘rana viru’ or war hero that they have constructed, which is
also used to perpetuate the war. Through this concept, the hunger, pains and
the brutality of death that soldiers feel as human begins have been rendered
relatively invisible. At the same time, another idea has also been created with-
in this concept. That is, the promotion of an idea of heavenly life and divinity
for soldiers after death. As a result, I believe that the right held by soldiers’
kin and friends to moan over their deaths has also been hidden within this
concept.3
Pothupitiya is clearly not articulating a sense of anger or repulsion towards soldiers. Coming
from the rural south which produced many of the soldiers who fought in Sri Lankan military
units, he was quite familiar with their public personality as well as their private pains. His
attempt is an invitation to discover the private shades in the life of soldiers which were gen-
erally unarticulated in the dominant public discourse.
He also executed an earlier series of paintings between 1999 and 2000 based on
the same ideological premises, but were methodologically different as were they visually
less captivating. For instance, the painting Wheel Chairs consisted of four wheel chairs set
in the background of camouflaged colors. But the wheel chairs were depicted not in the
usual drab and very ordinary design features attributed to these devices in the local context.
Instead, they were similar to thrones or expensive decorative chairs. Here too, Pothupitiya’s
interest was to capture the contradictions between notions of heroism and the realities of
war, using the disabilities caused by war and the heroism attributed to such disabilities and
death, as his point of departure. Like in his latter series, he was also critiquing the invisibility
of the suffering soldier. These ideas were articulated in the concept note written for an ex-
hibition in 2000:
Why is it that a soldier is not a soldier anymore, but a ‘ranawiruwa’? If so,

why do we let our heroes die meaninglessly? ... The soldier is my brother,
and I know that he is a suffering human being like you and me (Made in IAS
2000: 12).
70
It is important to note that like most artists who represent the ‘art of the 1990s’, Pothupi-
tiiya is also ideologically opposed to war. At the same time, that opposition is also based
on his experience as a member of society living in extreme conditions of political violence
in the south in the late 1980s where soldiers -- perceived cultural heroes of the Sinhalas in
the context of the war in the northeast -- became one part of the equation of terror that
was directed at members of their own ethnic group. On the other hand, he also comes from
an economic and social background marked by chronic poverty and a lack of upward social
mobility commonly shared by most soldiers. In this context, Pothupitiya’s project is not to
elevate the perceived heroism of soldiers which is commonly articulated as a hegemonic
political construct by the state and some segments of society operating at popular levels. He
attempts to critique this construct, and in that process unravel the humanity of soldiers that
has been made invisible both in the context of war and within the hegemonic articulation of
the idea of war hero.
In the construction of the visual narrative in his second series of works, Soldier,
Where are you? (2002), Pothupitiya has adopted the images of the divine and of heaven.
In this series of works, soldiers are depicted as emerging from clouds or surfing in the air,
sometimes with their military insignia but more often with flowers in their hands and in the
background. In some forms, both flowers and guns could be seen in the hands of soldiers.
The divine and angelic qualities that have been infused into these paintings are unmistak-
able. Except for the differences in color and gender identity, their general poses are like the
angelic maidens in the frescos of the 5th century rock fortress Sigiriya. The association is
one that Pothupitiya deliberately makes. The hand gestures in some of the forms are indica-
tive of compassion, if one looks at them from a Buddhist iconographic perspective. The
divinity articulated in these images also creates an unmistakable air of death. These are not
representations of heroism but of military men after death who might have ascended to the
heavens. Pothupitiya’s exercise is both a deconstruction and a mockery of the notion of war
hero while re-articulating the pain and humanity of soldiers.
Sanath Kalubadana’s work is very much related to Pothupitiya’s thematic orienta-
tion described above. For him also, the soldier is not a purveyor of evil but an individual he
knew as a friend, as a fellow citizen or as someone’s lover (Weerasinghe 2007). His initial
work, represented by the series My Friend in the Corner Stand (2003) constructed a subtle
narrative of memory as well as erasure. In many Sri Lankan households, a corner stand was
traditionally a place upon which selected crockery, flowers vases, family portraits, and reli-
gious icons as well as many ‘curios’ in general were placed with no particular order. But usu-
ally, if religious icons were placed on these three or four rack-structures, they were on the
topmost rack and it became a site of domestic worship. Kalubadana took this mundane item
of household furniture as a point of departure and proceeded to narrate the story of its func-
tional transformation in the midst of war. As the war progressed, the topmost rack became
the place where photos of sons and daughters in the military were placed. When they died
in action, additional images, military honors they might have received, framed newspaper
clippings of their heroism and other such residues of memory were added to this space, in
the process of which in some instances religious icons were displaced. Often, the corner
stand became a secular shrine for family members killed in war; it had become a place of
memory. It is this transformation of a mundane household item to a space of memory that
Kalubadana was narrating through his series My Friend in the Corner Stand. His next major
71
work, Soldiers Come, Soldiers Go (2006) expanded his earlier efforts.

However, it was in his 2007 series presented in his solo exhibition at the Theertha
Red Dot Gallery that the criticality of his work became more apparent while exhibiting en-
hanced signs of maturity. The issue that he was attempting to articulate was that the soldiers
who were his friends and fellow citizens were approaching what he called an ‘uncertain
reality’ (Kalubadana 2007: No pagination). This meant that he was acutely aware of the
under-articulated narratives of the official articulations of heroism which included issues
such posttraumatic stress and other psychological conditions, permanent physical disability,
ruptures in inter and intra family relationships, economic hardships and death. The artworks
presented in the 2007 exhibition subtitled by the curator as “love that cannot be expressed:
the war, soldiers and the memories in everyday life’ (Weerasinghe 2007: No pagination) con-
sisted of white life sized partial images of soldiers executed on MDF boards which appeared
to emerge and disappear through the walls of the gallery into oblivion. The whiteness of the
works also made them almost invisible within the well-lit white interior of the gallery. Inter-
estingly, all the works remained untitled adding to this haunting sense relative invisibility. If
the 2003 exhibition was narrating a story of memory, this was almost as if the narrative had
become one of erasure where words had ceased to exist. This makes sense in the context of
Kalubadana’s lamentation. He observes that in the context of the dominant discourse of the
heroism of the solders mandated by the state and popularly accepted, it is not possible for
him to narrate the dangers and the difficulties in their lives that he sees and feels: “I can’t
utter a word against it; my love is made inexpressible” (Weerasinghe 2007: No pagination;
Kalubadana 2007: No pagination).
Prasnnna Ranabahu is not known to be a prolific producer of artworks, and up to
August 2005, he had only three significant works to his credit. Nevertheless, one of these
works titled The Beautiful Explosion is an important statement directly linked to experiences
of violence and its acceptance or tolerance in society. Ranabahu explains the concept of his
installation in an exhibition catalog published for a group exhibition at the Star Fort in the
southern town of Matara in the following words:
War is cruel. It can never be charming and beautiful, but the state machinery,
the media, and the fascists have made it a beautiful and an acceptable phe-
nomenon. They have made it sound ‘heavenly’. For them, war is an oppor-
tunity to make heroes, to earn more money, and to stay in, or come to power
(Made in IAS 2000: 18).
Essentially, this work is a simple installation consisting of a plastic sheet upon which a cross
is demarcated. In the middle of the cross ten red cones and white diagrammatic markings
moving outwards from the middle indicate an explosion. The work’s major features indicate
order and beauty using a simple and minimalist method. In many ways, Ranabahu’s nar-
rative is very similar to the critique offered by the pictorial narrative of Pala Pothupitiya.
However, his point of departure is the critique of society’s acceptance and tolerance of vio-
lence as something beautiful and heavenly. For him, the consequences of this process of
beautifying or tolerating violence can be seen in the production of war heroes, vast fortunes
that are made as a result of war and the manner in which war is used as a mechanism to con-
solidate political power. The contradiction of tolerating and anesthetizing violence is brought
72
out effectively both within the structure of the narrative that the installation has created as
well as in the somewhat sarcastic title, The Beautiful Explosion.
Whether society and political authorities recognize the fact or not, the artists and
their works of art that I have described in this chapter have made their collective imprint
on society. They have done so by using the simple but effective method of transforming
the meanings of city and landscapes and images of ordinary things thereby commenting on
political violence and its consequences.
End Notes
1. Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts (VAFA) was initiated in 1993 as a non state studio-based art training in-
stitute, and was located on the outskirts of Colombo in Kotte. The dynamism and presence of Vibhavi
in Sri Lankan visual arts had effectively died out by 2011.
2. Personal fax communication, 10th August 2005.
3. Personal fax communication, 10th August 2005.
73
Chandragupta Thenuwara, Three Women and Barrels (above top); Three Women in Bar-
relscape (above bottom).
74
Chandragupta Thenuwara, Barrelscape.

75
Chandragupta Thenuwara, Barrel Installation (above top), Barrelism (above bottom).

76
Chammika Jayawardene, Camouflaged Landscape (above top); Beds (above).

77
Anura Krishantha, Stolen Wreath.

78
Anura Krishantha, Wreath on the Chair Series 1.

79
Anura Krishantha, Chair I.

80
Pala Pothupitiye, Soldier I.

81
Pala Pothupitiye, Soldier 2.

82
Sanath Kalubadana, Charcoal Dinner Table (above top) and My Friend the Soldier Series
(above).
83
Sanath Kalubadana, Moving Soldier Series.
84
Prasanna Ranabahu, Beautiful Explosion.

85
86
Visual Moments and Events

as Repositories of Memory
In this chapter, I would like to place in context four key visual art events and moments, in-
cluding one important exhibition as potential repositories of memory as well as narratives of
violence, war and peace. That is, rather than the work of a single artist, these are collective
efforts that often involved the public. Even though many of the exhibitions of the artists dis-
cussed earlier in this book can also be taken as visual moments and events that has relevance
to the issue of violence and memory, the events I discuss here are collective efforts involving
many artists that also had clearly articulated political or social interventionist goals. Two of
them, the Flag Project of the Artists Against War and the Peace Train Project of the Neelan
Tiruchelvam Trust were not regular art events, but public sensitization projects that used art
as a method of intervention and communication.
Artists Against War: The Flag Project
The Flag Project was initiated by a loosely organized entity called Artists Against War that was
formed with the backing of another loosely organized collective known as ‘Nuthana Situwam
Wansaya’ (which the organizers had translated into English as ‘Chronicle of Contemporary Sri
Lankan Art’). The importance of the project is located in the fact that this was the first publicly
organized event in recent times that commented on the consequences of war and political
violence using art as the main avenue of communication. The driving force behind the proj-
ect was artist Indrajit Wewalage whose track record of creative works unfortunately subsided
after this event. The major attraction of the event was the hoisting of a series of specially de-
signed flags that were executed by a group of individual artists and were later transferred into
cloth using screen-printing technology. They were designed to be displayed in open air rather
than in a regular art gallery in order to attract maximum public attention. As such, the first
public event of the Flag Project was staged outside the Railway Station in Colombo Fort on
September 13th, 14th and 15th 1998. The station itself has traditionally acquired a reputation
as a site for expressing protest and political disagreement. As such, it has been for a consider-
able time a place where many political groups have staged strikes, pickets or initiated protest
marches from. Given this history of the place, from the beginning the Flag Project had an air
of opposition and protest directed at the political status quo and the consequences of war.
However, while the theme of the project was clear-cut, this was not a mere protest event. It
was also an attempt to change the direction and politics of art in order to bring a particular
type of art into public space from the more restricted space of the conventional art gallery,
87
and thereby transform art into political objects. These political and methodological goals
were clearly spelled out in the brochure that was published to mark the event:
The art produced in Sri Lanka is singularly for the Art Gallery. Only a ‘certain’
group of people enters into these quite buildings with special light effects.
They do not only enjoy these paintings but they also buy them. After that,
these paintings adorn their living rooms and that is how it goes. Yet there is
a mass of people out there, who never enter these galleries perhaps due to
lack of time or even if they do have the time, they avoid it. Who are they?
Can we not find a public space where those who don’t come to galleries and
those who do, could meet? The search for such a place will end at a bus halt,
railway station, shopping complex or parks and roundabouts. Well, we decided
upon the space in front of the Fort Railway Station. The Fort Railway Station is
an interesting place that changes and renews frequently with different people
coming and going almost all the time. A new dialogue will open about the form
of art itself, when bringing it out into an atmosphere, which is not ‘designed’
and ‘controlled’ by art organizers. This attempt is to take the ‘flag’ as a form of
art. But before the painting begins, we all must agree upon a subject matter.
Everyone will agree that ‘war’ is something we all feel, something all talk about
and something that changed all our lives. And thus begins ‘Artists Against War’.
An exhibition of flag paintings of the size of 15 X 5 begins for the first time in
Sri Lanka. We believe that it is time to take art into the open space and oppose
the war that is continuing in the country. This is our contribution to that task
(Artists Against War 1998).
The interest in creating wider tradition of art appreciation that is more accessible to ordinary
people can partly be understood in the context of the Marxist ideological leanings of some of
the main figures who conceived and implemented the project. On the other hand, it can also
be understood in the context of the general background of the artists of the 1990s who came
from non-elite social and economic classes, and this was an attempt to take a certain form
of their art to people from their own background(s). Finally, this also needs to be set in the
context of the limited but important debates that emerged at this juncture which critiqued
the elite context of art production and appreciation that has been a feature since colonialism
introduced the tradition of contemporary secular art. In this particular case, ideology and
methodology worked as a good combination, and the organizers managed to combine the
three day exhibition of ‘flag art’ with music, street drama and discussions on art as well as
war (Artists Against War 1998). The flags which gave the space the appearance of a regular
political event albeit that the flags used were much more interesting, arresting, and colorful
than regular drab political flags, attracted many people to the site. These included train and
bus commuters, taxi drivers, small time merchants in the area and students and many others
who either specifically came to see the event or were simply passing by. The strategic loca-
tion of the Railway Station aided considerably to the success of the event. The discussions
also attracted many speakers from the crowds, some of whom justified war and condemned
the effort of the artists as ‘antinational’ or unpatriotic while others supported it. Supporters
of the project included an injured soldier who took part in the discussion, and opposed the
88
continuity of war and talked on the authority of his personal experience.

After this first exhibition, the flags were taken to different parts of the country in-
cluding to the Tamil-speaking Eastern province with varying degrees of success. However,
despite the significant interventionist mode of the project, it waned over time as a result of
its main initiators getting involved in other projects and also because the project was not
rooted in an established organization to guarantee some degree of continuity. However,
sometime later, some of these flags and a series of new ones were used by the Vibhavi Acad-
emy of Fine Arts in a similar public project to commemorate the first death anniversary of
Neelan Thiruchelvam who was assassinated by the LTTE in 1999. This second manifestation
did not have the ideological direction and commitment of the first project, and became a
mere colorful, decorative and rhetorical accompaniment in a series of events organized to
mark the slaying of a local leader.
The Peace Train
One of the most visible events that received much public attention was the Peace Train
Project initiated by the Colombo based Neelan Tiruchelvam Trust (NTT) in conjunction with
the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) in 2002. The primary aim of the
project was to transform the ‘Yal Devi’, the train that once operated between Colombo and
Jaffna into a ‘Peace Train’. At the time the project was undertaken and for about a decade
before that, it has not been possible for trains to travel to Jaffna as a consequence of war.
However, in an earlier period devoid of inter-ethnic conflict and its armed manifestations,
Yal Devi was more than a mere train. It was like the umbilical cord that linked the Sinhala
dominated south with the Tamil dominated north. As such, it had significant symbolic con-
notations evoking specific kinds of memories. These symbolic readings would have played
an important role in the selection of the train for this project out of all available trains that
crisscrossed the country.
When seen from the perspective of financial contribution to the project and its fa-
cilitation, many individuals at the time considered it as an average civil society1 peace project
funded by a bilateral funding agency. Yet, the project could not simply be identified as such.
For instance, while the aim of the project was to paint the train “with slogans and images to
promote peace” (Swaris 2002), its artistic conceptualization and execution was undertaken
by the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts and a group of loosely organized artists affiliated with
the academy known as the Artists for Peace who had already organized at least one visible
public art event that opposed war. In this sense, this was as much a civil society project as
it was an artistic intervention. An information bulletin about the project published in the Is-
land of May 20th 2002 noted, “peace is more than the mere absence of war” and further ob-
served that the “need of the hour is for social transformations, which would create climates
which would transform cultures of violence and war into a culture of peace” (Island, 20th
May 2002, quoted in Swaris 2002). The Lankadipa also of May 20th in a brief report noted
that the aim of the project was “to create a public opinion favorable to peace” (quoted in
Swaris 2002). In this context, it is clear that the aim of the project was not directly affiliated
with the notion of memory or representation of violence in the past, but championing the
need for peace, albeit in a somewhat didactic fashion. Nevertheless, the project itself was
a visually arresting one given the fact that one of Sri Lanka Railways Department’s usually
89
drab mud-brown colored trains was painted gleaming white and festooned with images and
slogans representing notions of peace. It was also an interesting idea given the fact that this
was a train that was supposed to travel as far as Vavuniya from Colombo along the original
pre-war track, but could not proceed further towards Jaffna due to consequences of war. So
surely a great degree of visibility could be guaranteed.
Nevertheless, this is also a project that has generated some criticism in the public
domain with reference to the funds utilized for the project itself and also with regard to an-
ticipated impact. Columnist Nalin Swaris, in a sharp critique published in the Sunday Times
suggested that:
... a Peace Caravan has been put on rails. Who conceived this vision and what
prompted this missionary zeal? The possibility of tapping foreign funds or a re-
sponse to a genuine social need? And most importantly, who are the principal
target group of this project? Whose culture of violence and war do the organiz-
ers hope to transform into a culture of peace? Surely not the Tigers, because
the Peace Train, only passes through areas where the Sinhala Buddhists are in
the majority. It grinds to a halt at Vavuniya and turns back. There are no tracks
leading to LTTE controlled areas ... (Swaris 2002).
Swaris’ criticism arises from a number of issues related to the project, which has nothing to
do with its artistic merits but has to do with its political visions and their extensions. One
critical issue he brings out is the notion that the train as an intervention only seems to focus
on changing the frames of mind primarily of Sinhala people given the fact that the it can-
not and will not venture into LTTE controlled areas. He also critiques the notion that the
consciousness towards peace of the average person is presumed by the organizers of the
project to be in need of transformation. He further critiques what he perceives as the naive
conceptualization of the project:
Who in heavens name, except those totally out of touch with the everyday
realities of ordinary men, women and children could conceive the fantasy that
a white train, chugging its way across the countryside will catalyze a change
in the presumed false consciousness of our people? People whose lives have
been disrupted and shattered do not need teach-ins about the need for peace.
From Anuradhapura to Vavuniya the train will be passing, perhaps at safe dis-
tance, the hellholes where thousands of displaced people, of all communities,
have fled for refuge. Where mothers give birth in the most unhygienic of condi-
tions ... (Swaris 2002).
As strident as the criticisms above are, the brief social history of the Peace Train would indi-
cate that the project was misconceived not due to its artistic merit but due to its relative lack
of political street-smartness. The issue here is not whether peace is a much-desired goal or
whether art could not be combined with transport mechanisms to deliver a message. The
real issue is whether such an issue could be delivered effectively for a sustained period of
time without leaving room for unhelpful interpretations. It is in these areas that the project
failed. For instance, despite the vast amounts of money spent, neither the artists nor the
90
facilitators and funders of the project had any control over the train once it was transformed
from being an ordinary passenger train to an artistically and ideologically imbued train that
was expected to achieve certain political goals. For the politics of the Peace Train to make
sense, it had to be maintained as an integral mobile artwork – as a whole train. However,
it was evident very soon that this was not possible, and much depended on the day to day
operational needs of Sri Lanka Railways. Soon, parts of the train were dismembered and
distributed among different train routes whenever demands for additional carriages and
needs for replacements surfaced. Very soon, the visual vocabulary used in the artwork as
well as the textual interpretations that referred to slogans of peace lost their integrity as a
whole. Pieces of the peace train were running all over the country, making no sense in its
fractured new existence, but seeming more like an accident than a seriously conceptualized
art and ideological project. In its new fractured incarnation it looked more like the perils
that awaited the peace process itself. Nevertheless, the varying fortunes of the peace train
project places in context the calamities that could engulf any ideologically motivated public
art project when the individuals or groups that conceive and execute the project do not have
control over their work after execution. In such a scenario, the original intentions of the
project could be irrevocably lost as in this case.
Aham Puram Exhibition: A Collective Discourse on Felt Experience by Insiders and

Outsiders
A comparatively better conceived, longer lasting and more sophisticated visual arts event
that marks an important moment in recent Sri Lankan art history that is also located cen-
trally and powerfully in the context of memory and political violence is the Aham Puram
Exhibition. The exhibition was a complicated logistical operation that was undertaken as a
joint venture by the Colombo based Theertha International Artists’ Collective and the Jaffna
based SETHU Study Site for Visual Culture, and was held at the Jaffna Public Library between
September 5th to October 5th 2004. What is significant in terms of memory and political
violence is not merely the themes of the works of art that were exhibited but also the exhibi-
tion venue itself. The Jaffna Public Library was an important site with reference to the po-
litical and social history of the Tamil people, particularly from Jaffna. The importance came
not only from the fact that it was a well organized public library, but also because among
its collection were numerous priceless manuscripts that had much to do with the cultural
and political history and identify of the people of Jaffna. In that sense, one could argue that
the Jaffna Public Library was central to the identity of the people and the region of Jaffna
and beyond. Nevertheless, indicating one of the most crucial moments in the worsening of
the inter-ethnic conflict and the miliatarization of that conflict, the library was set on fire
and completely destroyed on 8 December 1985 by Sinhala thugs from southern parts of
the country in the aftermath of the District Development Council Elections in Jaffna. The
destruction was orchestrated under the instigation and clear political leadership provided by
powerful members of the then ruling United National Party government. The arsonists were
transported to Jaffna specifically for this purpose. Since then, the burning of the library has
been referred to as ‘cultural genocide’ in many Tamil popular and nationalist publications
dealing with the period, and has remained a particularly painful moment of memory in the
collective conscience of the people of Jaffna. Even though the library was refurbished by
91
the Kumaratunga government as a gesture of goodwill, it too was mired in controversy. This
was mostly because the credit for the refurbishment was claimed by various politicians in
the south, particularly by President Chandrika Kumaratunga, and these claims were viewed
with suspicion by many people in the North. As a result and due to pressure from the LTTE as
well as general popular disapproval, it was not possible to officially re-open the library even
at the time of the exhibition though it had been functioning since 2003.
Given this emotionally charged social and political history of the library, it was both
a controversial as well as an appropriate venue for an exhibition of artworks consisting most-
ly of works by southern based Sinhala artists that dealt with issues of political violence, loss,
pain, war and memory. Many of the works presented in this exhibition have already been
commented upon in the preceding discussion, and as such, my reading here will mostly be
focused on the politics of the exhibition as a whole rather than commenting on individual art-
works. Interestingly, the themes these artists dealt with could be immediately appreciated
by the local people who visited the exhibition in unprecedented numbers. This was possible
mostly because of their own experiences with war. It was the first time a public exhibition
of such magnitude had been organized in Jaffna in over fifty years. The exhibition involved
a major and hitherto un-attempted cultural program that had to be realized by dealing with
and testing various political rituals and systems of control which had come into place as a
result of war and its consequences. In other words, in preparing for the exhibition as well as
in transporting the material to Jaffna, and later dismantling the exhibits and re-transporting
to Colombo, a complex logistical operation had to be devised and implemented. This meant
negotiating with the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defense and military units at field level as well
as the LTTE bureaucracy and its military and civilian structures that had been put in place
in areas under its control. The exhibition was the result of an invitation from SETHU Study
Site for Visual Culture to the Theertha International Artists’ Collective. The rationale and the
concept of the exhibition has been explained in the following words by the two co-curators,
Jagath Weerasinghe and Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan:
In Tamil, aham means ‘inner’ and puram means ‘outer’. These words have a
long history and tradition in Tamil literature. In Sangam literature of the second
century AD, love and heroic poetry have been classified as aham and puram re-
spectively. Aham also means ’inner self’ or ‘insider’, and puram means ‘other’
or ‘outsider’. Aham and puram can also be interpreted as home and the world.
Even though these two are popularly perceived as natural opposites and polar
concepts, they constitute of and interchange with each other.
In Sri Lanka, the consciousness of insider-outsider as in many other post-tra-

ditional societies in Asia is a highly complex one. Its roots can be traced to the
social hierarchies constituted by the traditional caste system and to the social
anxieties created by several centuries of colonial rule. In the post indepen-
dence era, the consciousness of aham and puram became associated with and
found expression entangled with Sri Lanka’s ethnic and religious identities. The
way and how one locates oneself within the abstract structure of aham-puram,
constitutes and informs of his or her identity. Each ethnic or religious group
in Sri Lanka sees the other as puram, and with aggravated ethnic tensions
92
between the major ethnic groups, the gap between aham and puram has wid-
ened and has become very intense.
However, after experiencing years of social chaos and violence, having endured
an endless process of losses and sufferings, and yet not losing the spirit of life,
the notions of aham-puram that have been in the core of Sri Lankan culture
seem to have gained newer meanings or facets of existence: aham has become
the mirror image of puram. In other words, the existence and meaning of aham
is dependent upon and inclusive of puram. Therefore, an insuppressible yearn-
ing to grasp the subtleties of aham takes us to the wider world of puram. The
anxieties of suspicion and fear that ensue when confronting puram makes us
realize the meanings of aham.
The works in this show, more than 60 pieces of paintings, sculpture and instal-
lations can be regarded as a definitive, yet modest manifestation of a minor
shift that has occurred in the thinking layer of the Sri Lankan society. This exhi-
bition is solely an attempt at bringing ‘meanings’, however fragile the meanings
could be, to a present that is demoralized. This show does not look either at
pasts or at futures; its main focus is on the transition phase of aham-puram
(Weerasinghe and Shanaathanan 2004).

As this curatorial note explains, a significant component of the ideological project that sus-
tains this endeavor is the interest to understand the concerns, experiences and the fears of
the ‘other’ while offering the ‘other’ one’s own experiences. It was in many ways a project
of re-discovering the ‘other’ who was lost in over twenty years of intense military conflict. It
is precisely this aspect that Ambalavanar has emphasized in the following words: “This quite
contemporary exhibition is formulated through the oldest of literary concepts in Tamil lit-
erature. Inner and Outer are not parallel worlds that do not meet. They not only touch but
are created in relation to each other and through transformation of each other. Each is also
discovered through the other” (Ambalavanar 2004). The artworks from the south addressed
a range of issues that had already emerged as thematic orientations in the art of the 1990s.
Ambalavanar has identified these themes as follows: “critical exposures of the construction
of femininity, landscapes, explorations of the militarization of society, critiques of Buddhist
nationalism, and depictions of the transformations, deformations, and continuities of tradi-
tion” (Ambalavanar 2004). Despite this variation in themes, Ambalavanar notes that many
of the dominant works dealt with political themes “more directly related to the conflicts that
have riven Sri Lanka” (Ambalavanar 2004).
In terms of subtlety and success of narratability, one could say that the exhibition
was highly successful. Some of the works, particularly those that could easily narrate the
stories of violence were immediately read by the viewers; according to some of the com-
ments written during the exhibition as well as stories narrated to the Jaffna organizers, some
people thought that the works by the Sinhala artists were in fact by Tamil artists narrating
the history of violence they were all quite familiar with. Some believed that the burnt
books in Anoli Perera’s work Broken Dialogue were books that were rescued from the Jaffna
Library itself. It was clear that in such cases, what was communicated was a shared memory
of pain and violence that could easily transcend ethnic and cultural boundaries. Yet, other
93
works that utilized LTTE atrocities as their points of departure, such as the paintings of Sujith
Ratnayake and G.R. Constantine were critiqued by some viewers. Here too, the ideas were
easy to narrate, but they were too familiar and too difficult to deal with when displayed in
public. Therefore the critique of these works was also a method of pushing away an unpleas-
ant reality that was too proximate; it was nevertheless a reality directly associated with the
Tamil community.
Of the sixty works in the exhibition, the main installation called History of Histories
was the only contribution from artists of Jaffna that included T. Shanaathanan, S. Kannan, K.
Tamilini, K.S. Kumutha, and R. Vasanthini in collaboration with selected people from the city
who had experienced war. It was specifically designed for the library taking into account its
importance as a site of memory, and was set in the background of a large black and white
photograph of the shell of the burnt out library itself. This powerful, haunting and emotion-
ally charged work consisted of 500 transparent plastic bottles that once contained soft drinks
but were now transformed into containers of memory. In each of these containers, the top
was cut off, and a personal item that belonged to a victim of war was deposited, and sealed
off with the top portion of the bottle that was initially cut off by re-inserting it neck down
into the bottle. These 500 bottles, with their cargos of personal items and memories of indi-
viduals contained such things as “an electrical plug, a camera, scissors, a doll’s foot, a baby’s
pair of shoes, ID cards, an army arrest certificate, fragments of artillery shells, sea shells,
masonry, wood work, broken spectacles, sand, pieces of clothing, family photographs, Saiva
and Catholic figurines, newspaper clippings, books, and a bottle of Old Spice” (Ambalavanar
2004). In a specific case, where one woman only had her story to offer, had scribbled it on
a piece of paper and deposited it in a bottle” (Ambalavanar 2004). These items, which as a
collection looked like the exhibits in a zoological laboratory, were placed in empty bookcases
in the library. The book cases were empty and served the purpose of these artists because
the books that were destroyed in 1985 could not be replaced. On the other hand, adequate
numbers of new books had also not come to the library to fill the new bookcases that were
more easily replaced. Despite the resemblance to lifeless laboratory specimens, these items
were quite alive, and they spoke to and moved the people who shared such experiences
who visited the exhibition.
As explained by the co-curator of the exhibition and one of the senior artists from
Jaffna, T. Shanaathanan, the concept of the work History of Histories takes as its point of
departure a narrative from a Buddhist Jataka2 story as well as the lived experience of the
people of Jaffna marked by a familiar Hindu religious (Saiva) practice:
In one of the Buddhist jathaka stories, one mother requested the Buddha to
give life to her son, who had died by snakebite. The Buddha told her that if she
was able to get a handful of rice from a house where no death has occurred,
he could then be able to give life to her son. Then, this mother went to each
and every house in the village to get the rice, and found that there was no
house where death had not occurred. This story brings us to the contemporary
reality of northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka, which are the battlefields of
conflicting histories, which had also seen war over the last twenty years. Loss,
destruction, despair, disappearance, suffering, death, exodus and nostalgia be-
came part of mundane and ordinary experience. There is no house or street
94
or village or town without the touch of war. They are affected physically or
psychologically. Even though the people restarted removing the physical de-
structions of war and engaged in reconstruction, they still live with their inner
wounds in the ‘no war’ time (Shanaathanan 2004).
Just as much as the conceptualization of the work effectively utilized a narrative from Bud-
dhist mythology, the process of executing the work used the idea of house visitation for
alms, which was part of a well-known Saiva religious practice. It was in this context that a
conscious decision was made by the artists to visit people’s homes and request from them
personal items of individuals who had been intimately touched by war. The combination of
an idea from a Buddhist Jataka narrative and a Shiva practice was also a brilliant conceptual
strategy to re-link notions of aham and puram (insider and outsider) and their inter-depen-
dence. However, the execution of this artwork clearly needed to be a cautious and sensitive
process given its emotional backdrop and the potential to rekindle painful memories. Sha-
naathanan explains the process as follows:
This artwork, ‘History of Histories’ was specially done for the Jaffna Public Li-
brary, which was burned, and itself became a memorial for the civil war. Like a
local Hindu madipichchaikaran who goes from door-to-door and collect rice in
order to organize an offering at the temple as part of his vow, we collected ma-
terials from 500 houses (randomly chosen within the Jaffna peninsula). These
materials represent the owners’ history and memories of the last 20 years of
their lives in this land. In the process of collecting these materials, they shared
their experience and memories in relation to these objects. We have arranged
these materials in the form of a museum where we have tried to amalgamate
these small parts and the ordinary things into a factual history of this society.
Like the way madipichchaikaran shares his food, in the end we too share our
experience with others. The viewers of these memories may construct numer-
ous histories through the process of viewing this work (Shanaathanan 2004).
This particular Saiva ritual practice of the madipichchaikaran, who visits people’s homes look-
ing for alms and the artists who went from house to house looking for items that belonged
to people who were touched by war has significant social and cultural associations. The rice
that the madipichchaikaran “gathers from different homes propitiates both his sins and that
of the donors” and the Jaffna artists creatively combined these distinct religious concepts in
evoking “the suffering that every household in the Jaffna peninsula has undergone and yet
make a collective offering of hope” (Ambalavanar 2004). History of Histories was clearly a
very powerful and emotional exhibit as Ambalavanar’s following words explain:
The artists asked the viewers to be free to let the conflict of histories play
out in their interpretations. The written responses were overwhelming. They
all spoke of a common theme that the story of their suffering was being told,
made public. Even the person who commented on painful memories stirred
anew, thanked the artists for making this open so that others could share in
these memories. Many wrote repeatedly of bringing back to the present what
had been forgotten (Ambalavanar 2004).
95
Seen in this manner, the History of Histories was a highly visible and politically sig-
nificant narrative of violent memories on the one hand and a public and almost cathartic
reclaiming of such memories on the other. In addition, the Aham Puram exhibition as an ex-
perience was also an important event in methodological and logistical terms. As explained
by Ambalavanar “what exhibits like this show is really the emergence of new links, of new
relationships being formed. This is a new generation of artists getting to know each other”
(Ambalavanar 2004). What is important here is to note that in a society so fractured and dis-
tanced and marked by suspicions based on memories, old relationships are often no longer
viable in organizing the future. As such, much would depend on these kinds of new relation-
ships that are formed on the basis of some shared ideological and political commitments
and an understanding that violence can form no part in the political and social realities in the
future. On the other hand, the exhibition’s organizational success also depended on the fact
that these two groups of artists met and worked as equals sharing common ideas, devoid of
hierarchical and patronizing relationships while at the same time acknowledging “the par-
ticularity of each other and of the need to learn about each other” (Ambalavanar 2004).
The Maze3
The Maze is a collaborative performance and installation art project by Bandu Manamperi
and G.R. Constantine that was hosted by the Theertha International Artists’ Collective at
the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery from 2nd to the 5th November 2006. Writing the conceptual
clarification upon which the basic premises of The Maze were based, Anoli Perera made the
following observations in the catalogue produced to mark the event:
Ours is an anesthetized society. We are oblivious to the other’s pain. We have

lost our capabilities of either empathizing or sympathizing. The weapons of
"mass instruction" give us the view of a distant theater. Our living rooms be-
come the safe pavilions for watching far away wars and killings. We are the
cheering spectators. We have found psychological mechanisms to justify our
collective amnesias and have anesthetized ourselves to block out traumatic
experiences of the society. Once we are in this world of decadence, we lose all
rationality where priorities get misplaced and extreme emotions govern the
order of the day. This is the maze we have entered into" (Perera 2006: No pagi-
nation).
Essentially, The Maze is a visual and performative narrative about violence, memory and
amnesia. The conceptualization of The Maze as well as its presentation brings to mind the
words in Lawrence Langer’s 1996 essay, ‘The Alarmed Vision: Social Suffering and Holocaust
Atrocity.’ Even though talking of another context, Langer’s central concerns are also central
to the foundational ideas of The Maze. Langer noted that "until we find a way of toppling the
barrier that sequesters mass suffering in other regions of the world from the comfort and
safety we enjoy far from its ravages, little will be done to rouse the attention of our political
or professional leaders, to say nothing of our own. Domestic calm encourages distancing
from foreign pain" (Langer 1996). The relevance of Langer’s words would become apparent
when attention is given to the ideas and local experiences that gave genesis to The Maze.
96
If Langer was talking of a situation in which pain and suffering in faraway places
were not perceived in the comfort zones of the West, The Maze was referring to similar
situations of loss, destruction, pain, chaos and collective amnesia in the local context of Sri
Lanka. A reading of the exhibition indicates that Langer’s critique is not structurally any dif-
ferent from the critique of the two Sri Lankan artists. Manamperi’s and Constantine’s visual
narrative is not merely an unusual art project in the Sri Lankan context but also a powerful
critique of the social and political currents in our midst. This is why a reading The Maze
like all other art works referred to in this book has to be located within the wider context
of recent Sri Lankan politics. Both artists are amply qualified to comment on the issues of
destructive politics and their consequences that they have opted to comment on. We have
already read about the individual works of both artists in previous chapters; Constantine has
been very familiar with the politics of loss and destruction in the North while Manamperi
had similar experiences in the South. For both artists, what they were commenting upon
through their art was a part of their lived reality from the past that they were also seeing in
the present. They are also among the handful of well-known ‘performance artists’ currently
in the country who identify themselves as such.
In this sense, The Maze actively combined a very visible installation and a staged
performance by the two artists. It was exhibited at a time when the issues it invites view-
ers to ponder over had become central issues in society while the kind of amnesia that it
attempts to critique were also clearly at work. The Maze as a work of art constitutes of a
number of elements: the central attraction is an area, a veritable comfort zone of a living
room with luxurious leather sofas and chairs, a coffee table stacked with newspapers and
television screens flashing ‘news’ from around the world. Encapsulating this area almost
as a cocoon is a somewhat surreal domain filled with life-size mannequins and body parts
with medicated bandages covering most parts of the bodies. Large reams of surgical gauze
stretched from one injured body to another and from one injured limb to another, making
an intertwined, hospital-like, sedate, scary and surreal socio-scape. This is the maze. Exterior
to this installation, a stereo was blaring out the sounds which have by now become very
familiar to this kind of socio-scape where the end results are death, injury and destruction:
police and ambulance sirens, machine gun fire and racing vehicles. As the main component
of the staged performance itself, mingling among the crowd, G.R Constantine was offering
artificial red rose buds to visitors making a request to pin them on any of the curtain-like
pieces of gauze they could reach. Deconstructing the notions of superficial and commer-
cialized love that red rose buds are nowadays supposed to indicate in this era of globalized
Valentinism, these rose buds were supposed to symbolize the many dead and injured in
the Sri Lankan civil chaos. While some did what was excepted of them, many opted to take
the artificial rose buds home perhaps to be used as a memento of the exhibit or more likely
as yet another dust collector in the standard middle class living room cabinet. At the same
time, Bandu Manamperi was selling the sounds of our times already being played in the
background recorded on CDs for Rs. 100.00 apiece, perhaps indicting the monitory value
of death, destruction and uncertainty. Both artists had their hands wrapped in ‘benzoin’-
doused gauze and bandage.
At one level, the artists were interested in commenting on the death and destruc-
tion within Sri Lankan society. On the other hand and more importantly, they were also
commenting on how fast these issues become mere distant realities for those people not
97
immediately touched by this chaos. At the time the exhibition was held (2006), it was not too
long ago that the battle for Sampur and Mavil Aru and the early spectacular military success-
es in the most recent bout of choreographed violence between the Sri Lankan armed forces
and the LTTE enthralled many individuals who were glued to their television sets as if they
were watching a series of war movies. It is precisely in this kind of context that television
programs bring into local living rooms news bulletins, live coverage of events, experts’ com-
mentaries and interpretations, candle light vigils of 'professional' protestors and so on that
one can watch in comfort and security while enjoying the evening tea or scotch as the case
might be. It is in that same comfort zone that many ordinary individuals become military
experts and political pundits making their own trivial opinions that would make no differ-
ence to the people who are directly at the receiving end of violence. Many individuals have
become cheering spectators of their own destruction not really fathoming what is actually
going on. This then is essentially the crux of the narrative that the two artists were narrating.
Their hope was that while the exhibition was ongoing, the people who entered the Lionel
Wend Gallery would go into the mock living room, browse through newspapers and watch
television while being relatively oblivious to the sounds and scenes of destruction evident
in the overall structure of the maze. Some did exactly this. But others had a more attractive
distraction on the opening night. The foods and drinks available to visitors at one corner of
the gallery proved to be a highly successful attraction in the context of which the awe of the
destruction and the depth of narrative that the very vocal exhibit was attempting to narrate
was drowned and marginalized from the collective vision and perhaps the conscience of
the spectators. It was quite clear that over-consumption had the capacity to subvert senses
of many citizens. Constantine and Manamperi were hoping this would in fact happen that
would further prove their point.
In addition, as part of the national security regime that had emerged in Colombo,
the Police Department on its own accord had mounted its own performance to augment
the work of the two artists. They were diligently ensuring that no car was parked outside
the gallery, and in fact hardly allowed individuals to slow down their vehicles. When the
rain poured down it appeared that the constables abandoned their performance indicating
perhaps that their script contained a Memorandum of Understanding between the govern-
ment and the LTTE that no bombs would be transported, installed or exploded when it rains.
When taken as performances however, the impromptu performances of the Police Depart-
ment and the hungry public were more dynamic in making the arguments that the two art-
ists were attempting to articulate than the staged performance of the artists itself.
It seems that rather than a mere commentary on the politics of our times, the art-
work of Manamperi and Constantine was a scaled down simulation of our times, politics, col-
lective lack of wisdom and structural amnesias. Indeed we are in a maze where reality is not
seen for what it is. In that maze, television would always be the purveyor of fabricated news
as truth and people would be the spectators. In the comfort of our living rooms, these are
mere flickering moments that do not touch most people while most would hardly ponder to
think about those directly involved, touched and hurt.
98
End Notes
1. In this context, I use the words ‘civil society’ as a technical category to refer to the extensive network
of non-government organizations operating throughout Sri Lanka at present.
2. The Buddhist story referred to here is in fact not a jataka story. Jataka stories refer to narratives
of the previous lives of the Buddha. This particular story seems to be a reference to ‘Kisagotami Kata
Wastuwa’, which is supposed to be an incident that occurred in the time of the Buddha. Even so, the
story is that the Buddha requested the aggrieved Kisagotami to find mustard seeds (and not rice) from
a house untouched by death; it also does not refer to death by snakebite. However, a similar story, ‘Pa-
tachara Kata Wastuwa’ refers to a story which involves death by snakebite and approximately similar
circumstances in which the Buddha attempted to explain the nature of death. As such, though there is
a confusion with regard to the details of the stories concerned, it does not impact the curators’ use of
this particular storyline as a point of departure for the exhibit.
3. The description of The Maze in this chapter is a slightly edited version of my review of the exhibi-
tion originally published in the Colombo based daily, The Island on 15th November 2006. I would like
to thank the Editor of The Island, Prabath Shabandu for granting permission to publish the review in
this book.
99
Artists Agaist War Flag Project: Flags by Jagath Weerasinghe (left) and Arjuna Ranathunga
(right).
100
Artists Agaist War Flag Project: Flags by Bandu Manamperi (left) and Saman Liyanage (right).
101
Peace Train Project: Artists painting the train.

69
History of Histories, an installation by Jaffna artists exhibited in the Aham-Puram exhibition.

70
Art from southern Sri Lanka shown at the Aham-Puram exhibition.

88
Bandu Manamperi & G. R. Constantine, The Maze.

89
90
Going Beyond Memories of Violence

and the Emergence of Post War Art
It would be apparent from the preceding discussion that a significant number of visual
artists in Sri Lanka from the mid 1990s until about 2008 or thereabouts opted to narrate
stories and experiences of violence and painful memories through their artworks. This
become doubly important in a situation where such an attempt was never seriously and
consistently undertaken in other creative domains such as literature and poetry1 as was the
case in post-World War 2 Europe and post-Partition India. However, this does not mean
that this is the only preoccupation of artists during this period. In fact, many of them did
not paint or sculpt narratives of violence at all, even at the height of the most gruesome
periods of terror, as typified by the colorful and happy-looking images painted by artists
such as Iromie Wijewardena, Senake Senanayake, Marie Alles Fernando and many others.
This should hardly be surprising. The mere existence of a period of terror in any location
does not mean that it should or could be the only reality people in general or artists in
particular should address in their work. Social realities constitute of needs and phenom-
ena that are far more complex that cannot be reduced to a simple set of few realities or
perceptions. In fact, their refusal to paint memories of violence could indicate a number
of things: that they were dealing with other realities that were not unpleasant which they
personally experienced such as village life or uncomplicated family life; that they had no
personal experience at close quarters with violence which did not compel them to narrate
such stories visually; that they did not want to narrate unpleasant realities through their
works as a matter of choice or as a strategy of coping given the fact that violence was un-
folding all around them. In any case, whatever their reasons, they added to the complexity
of the creative dynamics in the country since the mid 1980s. But clearly, it is not their works
that this chapter is concerned with but with the works of artists who used their works to
explore a reality or world beyond violence while the violence itself was still very much pres-
ent in society as well as the works of those who explored the consequences of post-war
experiences. Naturally, the latter category of art emerged after May 2009 when the civil
war in Sri Lanka came to an end with the empathic military defeat of the LTTE in the hands
of the Sri Lankan military leaving in its wake a legacy of displacement, poverty, destruction
of property, imprisonment and so on.
Exploring Worlds beyond Violence in the Context of War
One could pose the legitimate question whether any of the artists whose works have been
91
discussed in the preceding chapters have traversed beyond narrating memories of violence
into other domains that might mark something more hopeful within the overall politics of
their earlier work. Most in fact have not though almost all of them have explored other areas
(eg., the lure of urbanity, issues of femininity and masculinity etc) which are unrelated to is-
sues of violence and memory; these diversions are exterior to the focus of this book. It is this
seeming absence and lingering attachment to an unpleasant and painful past that made a
southern visitor to the Aham Puram Exhibition to complain “that the exhibition was all doom
and gloom and that there was no hope in it” (Ambalavanar 2004). When this comment was
made, a faulty ceasefire was in place allowing some travel between the north and south. But
for many people it was not a tangible moment of hopefulness. In the end, they were proven
correct because it took five more years of devastating war for the military conflict to finally
end. Interestingly, Ambalavanar has lamented over this viewer’s inability to “accept that
the exhibit itself was an act of hope” (Ambalavanar 2004). This situation can be explained
as follows: in certain senses, many artists moved on; many did not map out a clear path to
their creative worlds beyond memories of violence or their exit from a preoccupation with
violence. But surely, since about 2007 (two years before the end of war) they have opted to
narrate stories of violence and war much less. This does not constitute a conscious and clear
end to a particular genre but rather a waning of consistency over time.
On the other hand, some works by Anoli Perera and Janani Cooray formulated in
2004 and thereabouts seem to suggest a conscious and clear effort to narrate the existence
of a world beyond pain and memory which those touched by these experiences could aspire
for. Both of these works were specially created for the Aham Puram exhibition. Perera’s
installation, Remaking (2004) consisted of flat aluminum containers filled with water and a
number of fragmented clay pots that had been painstakingly put together. For her, the con-
stituent objects in her work symbolized many things that had to do with the general idea of
‘remaking.’ Water and kitchen utensils were among the first things that displaced and war
weary people need when they opt to re-settle in a new location or in their old villages. On
the other hand, water also signifies purity and freshness in terms of both Sinhala and Tamil
cultural reckoning that can also be extended to fresh beginnings linked to such activities as
digging new wells and clearing old ones. Likewise, the re-constitution of fragmented pots
also metaphorically meant the re-affirmation of fractured and disrupted relationships within
and beyond one’s community and across ethnic and cultural boundaries. In short, her work
was contemplating on hope without losing site of the calamities of the past and the uncer-
tainties of the present. In 2004, when the work was done and exhibited in the Jaffna Public
Library, the clouds of war were very visible despite the ceasefire. On the other hand, even in
metaphoric terms, the reconstituted pots did not mean the making of a seamless ‘new’ pot
devoid of the cracks and holes. The pot was remade but it did contain many faults in much
the same way reconstituted relationships of the future across ethno-cultural divides would
still contain particular memories of violence, suspicion and betrayal.
Janani Cooray’s meditative performance titled Pasting the Pieces (2004) was carried
out in an extremely slow and patient pace throughout the opening ceremony of the Aham
Puram exhibition. The performance basically constituted of an object personifying a charred
body upon which the artist was pasting multicolored layers of cloth. While all the social and
political rituals of the official opening was on-going, Cooray engaged in her performance
as if untouched by the happenings around her. As described by Ambalavanar, “she car-
92
ried the charred corpse from room to room gently dressing it with colored pieces of cloth”
(Ambalavanar 2004). Ambalavanar interpreted her performance as "preparing the dead for
burial - an act of love amidst the brutality of the violence" (Ambalavanar 2004). While this
was certainly one possible reading out of a number of possible interpretations, the other
important interpretation metaphorically meant that she was putting color back on the body,
and therefore putting life back where it had vanished from, and attempting to bring back a
way of life that once existed. This was the interpretation offered by the artist herself.
However, one needs to be mindful of the fact that Cooray’s and Perera’s works out-
lined above were exceptions rather than the rule while the war was still continuing. Most
artists who were narrating memories of violence and pain did not consciously explore the
worlds beyond these unpleasant realities of the present and the recent past. It is also inter-
esting that both Perera and Cooray are women artists; one wonders if their gender identity
impacted upon their ability to reorient their work in a different direction.
The Art of Postwar
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 specifi-
cally, I will focus on Bandu Manamperi’s exhibition, Numbed (17th October to 9th November
2009, Red Dot Gallery, Pitakotte), Koralegedara Pushpakumara’s exhibition, Goodwill Har-
wear (14th November to 9th December 2009, Red Dot Gallery, Pitakotte), Sarath Kumara-
siri’s exhibition, Kovil Pansal (12th December 2009 to 4th January 2010, Red Dot Gallery, Pi-
takotte) and Chandragupta Thenuwara’s twin exhibitions, Black Paintings and Other Works
(3rd to 5th April 2010, Lionel Wendt Gallery, Colombo) and Vigil and Other Works (July 24th
to 29th 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 perfor-
mance. 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). Ac-
cording 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 gal-
lery, 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).
93
Through this exhibition, the artist’s intention was to suggest that individuals in so-
ciety cover themselves in different cultural, ideological and 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, individuals would dress themselves in different layers of political
meaning representing extremist and obsessive positions reflecting different versions of com-
petitive religions, histories and counter-histories, nature, patriotisms, self-absorption, ideas
of independence and media representations. This process 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 ca-
pacity 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 subtle and nuanced articu-
lation of the post war state of feeling in the country.
Though a key artist closely associated with the 90’s Trend, Koralegedara Pushpak-
uamara’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's 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 ‘material-
ity,’ 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 on
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 placed 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
94
or mark off areas which should not be trespassed in terms of their color like traffic or police
tapes. He 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 dan-
gers and unresolved issues of immediate post-war context are not always visible; they were
subsumed under various guises of the emergent national security state and its multiple dis-
courses. Ranabahu notes that this also underscores Pushpakuamara’s attempt at suggest-
ing 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 po-
litical 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
earlier in this book. 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 vio-
lence. 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 en-
trance 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 constructed such divisions
and their resultant fallout possible. In other words, this is an articulation of the omnipres-
ence “of extremist religious nationalism behind many dark episodes in recent Sri Lankan his-
tory” (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 ideo-
logical 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 regres-
sion.
The post-war work and the politics of Chandraguptha Thenuwara tend to be much
more blunt and resistant to over or under-interpretation than the work of the other three
95
artists disused in this section. This also means that Thenuwara’s work has the ability to com-
municate 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 Ex-
hibition 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 installa-
tions, drawings and paintings. In his own statement formulated to contextualize the exhibi-
tion, the artist refers to the postwar period in which it is held as a difficult and unique mo-
ment 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 a 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 imme-
diate 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 a
triptych (2007) based on three selected verses from Dhammapada.2 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 Imagining 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. Thenu-
wara 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 fac-
ing 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 exhibi-
tion, and were meant to address the issues of the current moment (Thenuwara 2010). For
96
him, the transition from prewar to post-war is effectively a ‘black moment’ where outstand-
ing 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 dark-
ness 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 rul-
ers 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 and Other Works (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 com-
memorate 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
97
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 nar-
ratives of memory and despair which now go on to explore the contradictions and hypocri-
sies 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 collec-
tive 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, mainstream postwar politics remain domi-
nated by nostalgia of victory in war to the extent of undermining essential postwar politi-
cal 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 expe-
rience 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 acquisi-
tion, 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
98
Culture, within which the National Art Gallery is also institutionally located. However, since
Independence, national governments have shown no serious interest in selective preserva-
tion 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 insti-
tutionalized, 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 or-
thodox 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 mat-
ter 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 ‘politi-
cal.’
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.
99
End Notes
1. A number of recent films have also taken the path these painters and sculptors have taken by pro-
ducing a number of highly successful feature films that take as their point of departure experiences in
war and related issues. However, given the fact that these constitute a relatively recent trend, they
have not been taken into account in this reading.
2. Dammapada literally means the ‘words of the Buddha.’ In canonical terms, they constitute the core
teachings of Buddhism.
100
Janani Cooray, Pasting the Pieces, a performance during the Aham-Puram exhibition.
101
Anoli Perera, Remaking, an installation work in the Aham-Puram exhibition.

102
Bandu Manamperi, Numb.

103
K. G. Pushpakumara, Goodwill Hardware.

104
K. G. Pushpakumara, Goodwill Hardware.
105
Sarath Kumarasiri, Kovil-Pansal.
106
Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Erasing Camouflage.

107
108
Bibliography
Ambalavanar, Darshan
2004. Our Lives are not a Tourist Postcard (Unpublished review of Aham Puram
exhibition).
Artists Against War
1998. Artists Against War (event catalogue). Rajagiriya: Nuthana Sithuwam
Wansaya.
Asia News
2010 (30 July). At Spero News (http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.
asp?id=37416&t=Sri+Lanka%3A+++Colombo+art+exhibition+to+remember+the+
war+and+black+in+July; Last accessed 23rd May 2011).
Bandaranayake, Senake.
1986 (2007). The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka. Colombo: Lake House.
Bandaranayake, Senake
1992. ‘Fusion of ‘Bleeding Heart’ with ‘Thinking Mind’’. In, Daily News (22nd
November 1992). Colombo: Lake House.
Bandaranayake, Senake and Manel Fonseka.
1996. Ivan Peries: Paintings 1938-88. Colombo: Tamarind.
Bandaranayake, Senake and Albert Dharmasiri.
2009. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust Sri Lanka.
Chandrasiri, Pradeep
2002. ‘Pradeep Chandrasiri’ (Artist’s Statement). In, Nakao Tommomichi, Yamaki
Yuko and Kondo Kazuya eds., Imagined Workshop: Fukuoka Triennale (Exhibition
Catalog). Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.
Constantine, G.R
2001. ‘Breaking the Limits: Commentary on Contemporary Sri Lankan Art Scene’.
In, Anoli Perera, Jagath Weerasinghe and Sasanka Perera eds., Theertha Interna
tional Artists’ Workshop 2001. Ethul Kotte: Theertha International Artists’
Collective.
Corzo, Miguel Angel
1999. ‘Introduction.’ In, Miguel Angel Corzo ed., Mortality-Immortality: The
Legacy of 20th Century Art. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute.
Dissanayaka, S.B.
1996. In, Ceylon Daily News ( July 1996). Colombo: Lake House.
Goonasekera, Sunil.
1991. George Keyt Interpretations. Kandy: Institute of Fundamental Studies.
Govinnage, Malini
1995, ‘Smaja Yataharthaya Desa Vicharakshiya Yomu Kala Nuthana Siththarek’.
In, Silumina (8th August 1995). Colombo: Lake House.
GroundViews
2010 (April 4). Black Paintings & Other Works: An Exhibition by Chandraguptha
Thenuwara (http://groundviews.org/2010/04/04/black-paintings-other-works-an-
109
exhibition-by-chandraguptha-thenuwara/; last accessed on 23rd May 2011).

Ismail, Qadri
2009. ‘Reading the Art of Jagath Werasinghe.’ In, Art of Jagath Weerasinghe: Ce
lestial Fervor (Exhibition Catalog). Pitakotte: Red Dot Gallery.
Kalubadana, Sanath
2007. ‘The Artist’s Statement’. In, Recent Works by Sanath Kalubadana (Exhibition
Catalog - Theertha Exhibition Season - 2007). Pitakotte: Red Dot Gallery.
Kanagasabapathipillai, Dushiyanthini
2010 (24th July). Vigil and Other Works: An exhibition of Installations, Drawings
and Paintings. At, humanityashore.com (http://humanityashore.com/ha/
archives/1057; last accessed on 23rd May 2011).
Landauer, Susan
2006. ‘Countering Cultures: The California Context.’ In, Peter Selz, Art of Engage
ment: Visual Politics in California and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Langer, Lawrence
1996. 'The Alarmed Vision: Social Suffering and Holocaust Atrocity.' In, Daedalus,
Vol. 125.
Macan-Markar, A.M.
1995. ‘Art of Protest’. In, Sunday Times (24th December 1995). Colombo: Wijeya
Newspapers Ltd.
Made in IAS
2000. Made in IAS: Contribution of the Institute of Aesthetic Studies to the (IAS)
to the Art of 1990s (Exhibition catalog for an exhibition of artworks at the Star
Fort, Matara, 11th to 20th August 2000). Dehiwala: Club Made in IAS.
Manamperi, Bandu
2005. Bandaged Body and Body in Ash (unpublished concept note). Kotte:
Archives of the Theertha International Artists’ Collective.
Perera, Sasanka.
2009. ‘Review of Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century by Senake Bandaranayake
and Albert Dharmasiri.’ In, South Asia Journal for Culture, Vol. 3, 2009; pp. 90-98.
Perera, Sasanka
2006 (November 15th). ‘Lost in the Maze’ (Review of the exhibition, The Maze).
In, The Island. Colombo: Upali Newspapers Ltd.
Perera, Sasanka
2005. Alternate Space: Trivial Writings of an Academic. Colombo: Yellow House
Publications.
Perera, Sasanka
2004. ‘Theertha Jathyanthara Kalakaruwange Wedamuluwa 2003: Preksha
kayekuge Prathichara’. In, ArtLab: Kalawa ha Urumaya Pilbanda Praka
shaya, Volume , 2004. Rajagiriya: ArtLab.
Perera, Sasanka
2003. ‘Public Space and (I)Mobility in the Context of Security and Insecurity in
Colombo: A Brief Biography of Political Moment’. Paper presented at City
One: South Asian Conference on Urban Experience, 9-11 January 2003, Delhi.
110
Perera, Sasanka
2001. ‘Spirit Possession and Avenging Ghosts: Stories of Supernatural Activity as
Narratives of Terror and Mechanisms of Coping and Remembering’. In Veena Das
et. al. eds., Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Perera, Sasanka
1999. ‘On Feeling and not Feeling Others’ Pain.’ In, World According to Me: An
Interpretation of the Ordinary, the Common and the Mundane. Colombo: Inter
national Centre for Ethnic Studies.
Perera, Sasanka
1995. Living with Torturers and Other Essays of Intervention: Sri Lankan Society,
Culture and Politics in Perspective. Colombo: Yellow House Publications.
Perera, Anoli
2011. ‘Imaging the Aftermath: Reading G.R. Constantine’s Art.’ In, Imaging the
Aftermath by G.R. Constantine (Exhibition Catalog). Pitakotte: Red Dot Gallery.
Perera, Anoli
2009. ‘A Prelude to an Exhibition.’ In, Art of Jagath Weerasinghe: Celestial Fervor
(Exhibition Catalog). Pitakotte: Red Dot Gallery.
Perera, Anoli
2008. ‘Women Artists in Sri Lanka: Are they Carriers of a Woman’s Burden? In,
South Asia Journal for Culture, Volume 2. Colombo: Colombo Institute for
the Advanced Study of Society and Culture.
Perera, Anoli
2008. ‘Sarath Kumarasiri’. In, Six Degrees of Separation: Chaos, Congruence and
Collaboration (Exhibition Catalog). Pitakotte: Red Dot Gallery.
Perera, Anoli
2006. ‘The Maze’. In, The Maze: A Collaborative Project by Bandu Manamperi and
G.R. Constantine (Exhibition Catalog). Pitakotte: Theertha International Artists’
Collective.
Perera, Anoli
2001. Threertha international Artists’ Workshop: Press Pack. Kotte: Threertha
International Artists Collective.
Perera, Anoli
1998. ‘After a Dialogue with Two Artists.’ In, Daily News (28th January 1998).
Colombo: Lake House.
Perera, Anoli
1997. ‘A Socio-political Reading of the Yantra Gala and the Round Pilgrimage.’ In,
Daily News (8th October 1997). Colombo: Lake House.
Perry, Roy A
1999. ‘Present and Future: Caring for Contemporary Art at the Tate Gallery.’ In,
Miguel Angel Corzo ed., Mortality-Immortality: The Legacy of 20th Century Art.
Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute.
Provost, Andrea
2001. ‘Hope Roles Out from Barrelism.’ In, Sunday Times, 27th May 2001, P. 6.
Colombo: Wijeya Newspapers Ltd.
111
Ranabahu, Prasanna
2009. ‘The Art of Bandu Manamperi’ (Sinhala language text). In, Numbed (Catalog
for an Exhibition by Bandu Manamperi, 17 October to 09 November 2009). Pita
kotte: Red Dot Gallery.
Ranabahu, Prasanna
2009. ‘The Art of Koralegedara Pushpakumara’ (Sinhala language text). In, Good
will Hardware (Catalog for an Exhibition by Koralegedara Pushpakumara,
14 November to 09 December 2009). Pitakotte: Red Dot Gallery.
Ranabahu, Prasanna
2009. ‘The Art of Sarath Kumarasiri’ (Sinhala language text). In, Kovil Pansal (Cata
log for an Exhibition by Sarath Kumarasiri, 12 December 2009n to 09 04 January
2010). Pitakotte: Red Dot Gallery.
Selz, Peter
2006. Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond. Berkley: Univer
sity of California Press.
Severini, Gino
1946. The Artist and Society. London: Harvill Press.
Shanaathanan, T.
2010. ‘Mapping the Location of Dislocation: A Reading on Post Traditional Art of
Jaffna.’ In, Sylvia S. Kasprycki and Doris I. Stambaru eds., Artful Resistance: Con
temporary Art from Sri Lanka. Altenstadt: ZKF Publishers.
Shanaathanan, T.
2004. ‘Aham Puram: Introduction’. In, Aham Puram: An Exhibtion of Visual Art. Ex
hibition Catalog (5th September to 5th October 2004, Jaffna Public Library). Pita
kotte and Jaffna: Theertha International Artists’ Collective and SETHU Study Site
for Visual Culture.
Supangkat, Jim
2005. ‘Art and Politics in Indonesia’. In, Caroline Turner ed., Art and Social
Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific. Canberra: Pandanus Books.
Swaris, Nalin
2002. ‘Peace Train or Gravy Train?’ In, The Sunday Times. Colombo: Wijeya News
papers Ltd.
Thenuwara, Chandraguptha
2010 (April). Black Paintings & Other Works: An Exhibition by Chandraguptha
Thenuwara. Unpublished artist’s statement.
2008. ‘On Barrelism’. In, Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist eds., Cities on the
Move. Vienna: HATJE (Verlag Gert Hatje).
1999. ‘On Barrelism’. In, Dialogue, August 1999, # 12. Victoria: West Space.
Turner, Caroline
2005. ‘Art and Social Change’. In, Caroline Turner ed., Art and Social Change:
Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific. Canberra: Pandanus Books.
Webb, Jen
2005. ‘Art in a Globalized State’. In, Caroline Turner ed., Art and Social Change:
112
Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific. Canberra: Pandanus Books.

Weerasinghe, Jagath
2008. ‘Anura Krishantha’. In, Six Degrees of Separation: Chaos, Congruence and
Collaboration (Exhibition Catalog). Pitakotte: Red Dot Gallery.
Weerasinghe, Jagath
2007. ‘The Art of Sanath Kalubadana: Love that Can’t be Expressed - The War, The
Soldiers and the Memories in Everyday Life (Curator’s Note). In, Recent Works by
Sanath Kalubadana (Exhibition Catalog - Theertha Exhibition Season - 2007). Pita
kotte: Red Dot Gallery.
Weerasinghe, Jagath
2005. ‘Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka’. In, Caroline Turner ed., Art and Social
Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific. Canberra: Pandanus Books.
Weerasinghe, Jagath
2004. ‘90 Pravanathawa saha Samakaleena Drushya Kala Bhavithaya.’ In, ArtLab,
Volume 1 (2004), 5-43.
Weerasinghe, Jagath
2001. 'Chandraguptha Thenuwara'. In, Ehibition of Paintings: Chandraguptha
Thenuwara, 16th May to 4th June 2001 (Exhibition Catalog). Colombo: Paradise
Road Galleries.
Weerasinghe, Jagath
1997. Yantra Gala and the Round Pilgrimage (Exhibition concept note). Colombo:
Heritage Gallery.
Weerasinghe, Jagath
No Date. Anxiety (Exhibition Catalog). No publication details recorded.
Weerasinghe, Jagath and T. Shanaathanan
2004. ‘Aham Puram: Introduction’. In, Aham Puram: An Exhibition of Visual Art.
Exhibition Catalog (5th September to 5th October 2004, Jaffna Public Library).
Colombo and Jaffna: Theertha International Artists’ Collective and SETHU Study
Site for Visual Culture.
Weeraratne, Neville
1993. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lan
tana Publishing.
113
114
115

Artists Remember Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Contemporary Sri Lankan Visual Arts

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Artists Remember Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Contemporary Sri Lankan Visual Arts

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Artists Remember;

This book is funded by

Concept, layout and graphic design by Anoli Perera.

Front cover image: Broken Hands by Pradeep Chandrasiri

Contextualizing Sri Lankan Visual Arts 17

Personal Experience in Violence as Narratives of Memory 27

Reformulating Landscapes, Cityscapes and the Ordinary:

Visual Moments and Events as Repositories of Memory 88

Going Beyond Memories of Violence and the Emergence of

There could be no severer condemnation of the bourgeoisie and the Fas-

In talking about Guernica, Severini is referring to both its methodological adaptations as

The Present: Visual Art as Repositories of Violent Memory

Personal Experience of Violence as

The basic intention of this installation is to conjure memories and experiences

In all of these works his thoughts manifest in psycho-dramatic images in hal-

and emotional dislocation of individuals in situations of war where familiarity is constantly

I use this form in my installations to symbolize multiple meanings. In one way,

Broken Dialogue emphasizes the disconnect between two communities that

2. Arahaths are Buddhist sages.

8. Personal email communication, 14th August 2005.

Jagath Weerasinghe, Broken Stupa (Anxiety Exhibition).

Jagath Weerasinghe, Long Necked Man (Anxiety Exhibition).

Jagath Weerasinghe, Yanthra Gala and the Round Pilgrimage.

Jagath Weerasinghe, Shrine of the Innocents.

T. Shanaathanan, Paradise Bed (International Artists' Workshop 2003).

T. Shanaathanan, Home for My Butterflies II.

R. Veidehi, Awaiting I (above top) & Awaiting II (above).

Pradeep Chandrasiri, Broken Hands.

Pradeep Chandrasiri, Sign of Violence.

Pradeep Chandrasiri, Broken Hands (above top); Wispering Mountain (above).

Bandu Manamperi, Barrel Man.

Bandu Manamperi, Bandaged Man.

T. P. G. Amerajeeva, Dont Measure Me.

Kingsley Goonatillake, Year Planner.

G. R. Constantine, Revisiting Guernica (above top) & Untitled (above).

Sarath Kumarasiri, No Glory.

Sarath Kumarasiri, Shirt.

Anoli Perera, Broken Dialog.

Reformulating Landscapes, Cityscapes

1. In two-dimensional form, consisting of paintings, drawings and photo-

Why is it that a soldier is not a soldier anymore, but a ‘ranawiruwa’? If so,

work, Soldiers Come, Soldiers Go (2006) expanded his earlier efforts.

2. Personal fax communication, 10th August 2005.

3. Personal fax communication, 10th August 2005.

Chandragupta Thenuwara, Barrelscape.

Chandragupta Thenuwara, Barrel Installation (above top), Barrelism (above bottom).

Chammika Jayawardene, Camouflaged Landscape (above top); Beds (above).

Anura Krishantha, Stolen Wreath.

Anura Krishantha, Wreath on the Chair Series 1.

Anura Krishantha, Chair I.

Pala Pothupitiye, Soldier I.

Pala Pothupitiye, Soldier 2.

Sanath Kalubadana, Moving Soldier Series.

Prasanna Ranabahu, Beautiful Explosion.

Visual Moments and Events

Artists Against War: The Flag Project

continuity of war and talked on the authority of his personal experience.

The Peace Train

Aham Puram Exhibition: A Collective Discourse on Felt Experience by Insiders and

In Sri Lanka, the consciousness of insider-outsider as in many other post-tra-

Ours is an anesthetized society. We are oblivious to the other’s pain. We have

Peace Train Project: Artists painting the train.

History of Histories, an installation by Jaffna artists exhibited in the Aham-Puram exhibition.