Arts
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| Dancing
and drumming for peace In commemorating Dr. Tiruchelvam’s birth with a cultural event focused on promoting peace and reconciliation through performing arts, the NTT has invited world renowned artistes, Anusha Lall from India, Papu Saeen from Pakistan and Upeka de Silva Chitrasena and Ravibandu from Sri Lanka to participate at this year’s event. The India-Sri Lanka Foundation is sponsoring the Indian performer, Anusha Lall and her troupe. The NTT is deeply rooted in Sri Lanka and supports peace building efforts. It funds several local capacity-building and peace awareness programmes and gives priority to peace building, both at a local level and through the strategic engagement of civil society and the private sector. Papu Saeen, is an inspirational Sufi musician and considered the leading Dholl Master. He has performed throughout the Muslim world and in Germany, Switzerland and England including the Royal Albert Hall. A student of Padmashree Leela Samson, Anusha Lall’s training was in the classical dance form of Bharata Natyam. She has worked with prominent international choreographers Makoto Sato, Constanza Macras and Jayachandran Palazhy and also collaborated with artistes from other disciplines such as theatre, video, architecture and sculpture. Recently she assisted with the research and production of ‘Nagarika’, a research and documentation project on Bharata Natyam. Performing along with these artistes is Ravibandu Vidyapathy, a virtuoso percussionist, who studied under Piyasara Shilpadipathy and Punchi Guru. He is the Director of the Sri Lanka National Dance Troupe and performed at the inaugural WOMAD festival of drums in Sri Lanka. Upeka de Silva Chitrasena, will perform the Saraswathi Pooja. Daughter of the legendary Chitrasena, Upeka has a long list of accomplishments including solo performances created for her and performances at the Theatre Du Soleil and the Montpellier Dance Festival. Unsettling
and haunting The works on display at Paradise Road Galleries form part of two series, ‘High Security Zones in North-East’ and ‘Diaspora’ (http://shanaathanan.blogspot.com). These are visually demanding works, made so in part by the combinations of media used by the artist. Shanaathanan’s paintings are constructed through paint on paper and canvas used in combination with pieces of metal and cloth attached to, and built into, these arresting pieces. This use of mixed media brings the works alive in three dimensions, as does the artist’s choice to build up certain portions of the canvas with reinforced ridges and sutures, creating a topography upon the surface of the paintings. Moreover, the fragments of metal and cloth used within Shanaathanan’s works evoke a series of powerful associations related to the personal experience of landscape and territory. Scraps of human memory, traces of land once known, and the signs of destructive technology are woven into Shanaathanan’s paintings of human figures. One of the striking features of many of these works is the mottled and paint-marked character of the paper on which the artist’s cartographic meditations occur. By forcibly creating such a visual field, suggestive of antique maps marked by the natural spoilage of time, the very background of Shanaathanan’s work communicates a painful irony about landscapes of a recent past too quickly rendered obsolete by the unnatural forces of war and migration. In two particularly striking pieces (Kanthari 2005 & Untitled II 2005) female figures are composed within the cartographic lines, their bodies marked by the fissures and divisions of territory. Both figures signal the impact of war upon the generations. Men, too, exist in relation to Shanaathanan’s fractured landscapes. ‘Vamana’ (2004) is framed by the figure of a man in motion, his body bisected by a strikingly raised and sutured boundary marker. The weighting of the body suggests his movement forward into another landscape, riven less by fissures and fragments. Despite his bifurcation, there are sufficient continuities between both the landscapes inhabited by this figure to understand him as, at least, a gesture towards the possibility of continued or renewed habitation within a land of familiarity. Other figures, however, offer no such consolation. In ‘Migration’ (2005), for instance, a man is depicted poised for flight, his wings a strikingly mixed evocation of organs and topography: does he draw breath from the land carried with(in) himself? The pair of paintings titled ‘Inner Circuit I’ and ‘Inner Circuit II’ (both 2005) offer further meditations on the problem of human functioning within the context of uprooting. ‘Inner Circuit I’ presents a physical organ, the heart, embedded within one of Shanaathanan’s cartographic landscapes, its arteries and veins active within a field framed by barbed wire. ‘Inner Circuit II’ however, offers an entire faceless male figure, detached from all landscape, his circuitry elaborate but abstract; separated from his vital organs which surround him externally. This man occupies a sea-like space, akin to that of ‘Migration’ further suggesting the severance of man from the land. In ‘Grandma’s Courtyard II’ (2004), however, separation and memory are elegiac. This is a haunting piece made so by careful use of colour in the representation of remembrance. A darkly coloured figure seated on a garden swing observes land portrayed in soft romantic colours. This sharply contrasted colouration conveys the remembrance of things past from the dark and painful position of the present. Of all the mixed-media paintings displayed within this exhibit, only ‘Grandma’s Courtyard II’ brings Shanaathanan’s cartographic meditations to life in soft colours with the addition of unthreatening textures and fabrics. This gentle sensuality is undone, however, by the small yet powerfully dark figure that observes the scene. Shanaathanan’s work makes powerful use of varied surfaces, textures, and media to arrest the eye and provoke strong reactions in the viewer. These are unsettling, haunting paintings by an artist of great skill and complex vision, who is Lecturer in Art History in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Jaffna. It is deeply sad to see them now, as each day in the island brings further news of violence, the rupture of homes and families, and the need to grapple anew with the horrors of displacement and migration.
-Anne M. Blackburn, |
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The
62nd birth anniversary of the late Dr. Neelan Tiruchelvam falls
on January 31. To commemorate this event and celebrate his contribution
to promote peace, reconciliation and human rights in Sri Lanka,
the Neelan Tiruchelvam Trust (NTT) in partnership with the International
Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) and the Law and Society Trust (LST)
will be hosting a two-day cultural event, on Tuesday, January 31
and Wednesday, February 1, at the Bishop’s College Auditorium.
