A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Friday, May 5, 2017
Artists Of South Asia Tell A Tale Of Two Cities
By Dev N Pathak –May 3, 2017
The art project A Tale of Two Cities is scheduled to reach Colombo, Sri
Lanka, in August this year for an exhibition at Red Dot Gallery of
Theertha Artists’ Collective. Based on it’s recently concluded show at
Indira Gandhi National Center for Arts in New Delhi in March 2017 the
following rumination could be an anchor for the Sinhala audience.
The
artists in South Asia are beginning to make concerted effort toward
creating a discourse, that can become stimulant for scholars of cultural
politics in the region. An effort of similar kind is an art project
titled A Tale of Two Cities began in 2015. The project brought
together artists from Sri Lanka and India to revisit two cities of
profound civilizational significance, Anuradhapura and Varanasi. These
cities belong to folklore, history, and memory immaculately coloured
with religiosity. But then, they are not frozen in time and space, and
hence they have acquired novel facets in the scheme of contemporary. The
art project hinged on the insightful conceptualization of Renu Modi
(Director, Gallery Espace, Delhi) resulting into over a yearlong
collaboration of Serendipity Art Trust (Delhi), Theertha Artists’
Collective (Colombo) and Gallery Espace (Delhi). In the kernel of the
concept was the idea of ‘sacred geographies’, an intellectual stimulus
for the artists to explore the two cities in this research-based
art-making process. A collaborative project of this nature is indeed a
befitting response in the wake of cultural globalization. It yields a
possibility to re-imagine artists’ South Asia, entailing border
crossing, nuanced networking, and empathy for the socio-cultural and
political contexts across the modern cartographies. The artists and
groups ought to be commended on this front of engendering artists’
regionalism, a nebulous institutional arrangement for more creative
version of solidarity in the wake of endangered international relations
of nation-states. The
aesthetic consequence of the project is exhibition of artworks, first
held at Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa in December 2016, second at
Indira Gandhi National Center for Arts in New Delhi in March 2017, and
third is scheduled in August this year at Red Dot Gallery in Colombo.
The exhibition makes an emphatic statement for an art-lover, critique,
historian and anthropologists of art: shared sacred is more important
than security threats in the region of South Asia!
Image courtesy: Gallery Espace, New Delhi
Nature of Shared Sacred
The
exhibition persuades that the idea of sacred is not enshrined in the
religious canons alone. The artists’ tale of two cities brings about a
fusion of personal subjectivities and impersonal sacred emblems. Thus,
the notion of sacred arising from the exhibition connects histories,
biographies, and philosophy in the larger anthropological framework.
Anoli Perera’s work titled Geographies of Deliverance dwells upon the famous twentieth century Sinhala song Dano Buddhunge (Those
who know Buddha’s Dharma), in order to narrate what she calls ‘mental
mappings of the pilgrims’. Anoli underlines an emotionally rooted and
experiential sacred in her artworks. It amounts to enabling the artists
to narrate- what they saw, what they believed in, and what shook their
belief. Pala Pothupitiye, another critically acclaimed artist from Sri
Lanka, goes to the extent of suggesting that ‘history of Sinhala
Buddhism has been history of violence’. And thus his installation, Victory Dome,
performs a meaningful heresy of doubting the presence of any sacred
relic whatsoever in the aggressively protected Buddhist domes in Sri
Lanka. Gazing at Bandu Manamperi’s Moonstone and Charcoal,
one begins to believe that belief in sacred is as vulnerable as the
materiality of the signifiers. For anyone versed in the language of
semiotics the ensemble assumes poignant promises.
Image courtesy: Gallery Espace, New Delhi