Making art in the aftermath of civil war

"If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony. We have all been witnesses and we all feel we have to bear testimony for the future.”

 —Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor

Contemporary art in Sri Lanka, like holocaust literature, is not one that can console with its beauty. Rather, it gnaws at you as the artists grapple with post-war reality.

Nine contemporary Sri Lankan artists — Anoli Perera, Bandu Manamperi, Janananda Laksiri, Koralegedara Pushpakumara, Lakisha Fernando, Pradeep Chandarasiri, Pradeep Thalawaththa, Prasanna Ranabahu, Thisath Thoradeniya — are currently displaying their works at 1.Shanthi Road gallery in Bangalore. This exhibition is part of a three-year collaborative art project, titled Sethusamudrum, between Theertha International Artists Collective, Colombo, and 1.Shanthi Road.

According to art historian Suresh Jayaram, curator of 1.Shanthi Road, this project seeks to “engage with and address a highly complex and variegated history and emotions surrounding the concept of Sethu Samudram and foreground the links, similarities, and shared anxieties, emotions and histories between the two geographical areas.”

The artists from Sri Lanka are quite like their contemporaries in India. They struggle to make ends meet, experiment with material and medium to express ideas, and they grapple with the same third-world challenges.

But the key difference is the trauma of war that speaks through their works — sometimes as the central theme, sometimes as the backdrop, and at all times present.

Trauma of war
In Anoli Perera’s photographs, the male is conspicuous by his absence. Using colonial studio photography techniques, she has built matriarchal family portraits. In Perera’s staged images, women pose in beautiful rooms, decked in fine clothes and jewellery, but their hair veils their faces.

Thisath Thoradeniya has sketched a series on a somersaulting jester, and Lakisha Fernando has embroidered delicate webs to portray the anguish of women trapped in helpless situations.
Koralegedara Pushpakumara’s sketches, titled ‘Goodwill Hardware’, explore territories of conflict. Barbed wires wound together in a maze, and framed in yellow and black stripes, evoke police barricades — a common curfew sight.

For Bandu Manamperi, a performance artist who works with multimedia, his body is his language. In a performance, he destroys beautiful work that he had created earlier. That is war at its core, he believes.

Janananda Laksiri digitally manipulates his self-portraits, freezing them into screams. His other image is of an impossibly complicated electrical contraption.

All of them address the contemporary reality of the island nation.
“At Theertha, the artists often talk about the war and our post-war realities. We want to ask, is this real peace, or is the seeming peace around us real,” says Lakisha Fernando.

The narrativisation of trauma is tough, and making sense of it tougher. Whether deep trauma can be represented in art, turning testimony into narrative, memory into art, history into story, is a question that non-mainstream contemporary artists are dwelling on, she says.

Theertha was established in 2000 to facilitate the local community of artists in innovation, experimentation, exchange and dialogue within Sri Lanka. There are 17 artists in the collective, but all of them do other jobs to fund their art.

Sadness and acceptance
For a long time, in Sri Lanka, as in other post-colonial countries, modern art was largely influenced by European styles. Most Lankan artists pursued their fine art studies in Delhi, Baroda and Shantiniketan, and therefore had similar styles — landscapes, portraits, abstracts etc.

Things began to change post-1977, when the government adopted an open economy, leading to mass protests. The universities in the country witnessed student revolts. “In 1983, the Jaffna library was burnt. In 1989, Leftist parties organised protests, and artists began to participate in them actively. The civil war, political unrest, and all the violence began to be reflected in the art,” says Bandu Manamperi, who was arrested in the early ‘90s for taking part in protests.

Says Pushpakumara, who also spent time in jail, “Artist Jagath Weersinghe - one of the founders of Theertha — who kickstarted the nineties’ new wave in Lankan art scene famously remarked: “I see dead bodies on the road every time. My work has to speak what I see.” How can I draw abstracts, when life isn’t abstract?”

Conceptual art dealing with realistic themes is different from mainstream art in Sri Lanka, which is about beauty, and therefore, sells, adds Thisath Thoradeniya. “Each of us has lost either some family member or someone we knew, in the war. The violence had become a part of our daily lives. There is much sadness, but there is also a form of acceptance,” says Fernando.

These artists from Lanka do not provide an easily comprehensible portrait of what their country and its people have endured, and continue to live through.