What Has Gone Wrong?

By Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan -September 13, 2013

Dr. Charles Sarvan

“What has gone wrong?” (Ben Bavinck) 

By chance, different strands came together in my mind, the first two leading to the third and most important, namely, Sri Lanka’s poor placing in the UN’s ranking of nations according to the degree of happiness experienced by its peoples. There are many factors which explain this uncomplimentary and unfortunate positioning, and I focus on the willingness to deny the full humanity of the other. Specialists with far better knowledge of political, economic and sociological factors, will explain better and more comprehensively.

These are days when Callum Macrae’s ‘No-fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka’ is very much in the news. The savagery of those final days must horrify and move to pity any and all possessed of even a modicum of humanity. Apart from the mass-killing, why were the helpless victims first humiliated and tortured? Here and elsewhere, Tamil Tigers about to be executed are shown to have been stripped naked. Perhaps, an explanation is there in Into That Darkness, the book resulting from Gitta Sereny’s interview with Franz Stangl, Commandant of Treblinka, largest of the five Nazi extermination camps. At these camps, it was not only the mass killing but that the camps were so organized as to achieve the maximum humiliation and dehumanization of the victims before they died. But why, Sereny asked him, if they were going to kill them anyway? What was the point of all the humiliation? Why the cruelty?  Stangl’s simple but chilling explanation was: “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did” (emphasis added).                                                          Read More

Vimukthi Sahan’s Big Bang At Paradise Road Galleries

By Janaka Samarakoon -

Janaka Samarakoon

A refreshingly new art show is now on at the Paradise Road Gallery Café. It’s refreshing for several reasons. First of all, the young artist hailing from the District of Kurunegala is almost an unknown entity in Colombo (despite a first solo exhibition he held at the Lionel Wendt Gallery in 2012). Then comes the highly personal and constant style of this new prospect who makes a strong statement with each of the 23 paintings that hung on the Alfred-House-Road-Gallery’s walls. Not to forget the nonchalance with which he puts into question the contemporary society and its waywardness through his art as a senior campaigner.

Vimukthi Sahan is a compulsive artist. The starting point of his paintings is a physical confrontation with his easel. His canvases look like battlefields. When one sees his multi-layered, mix-media, multi-technique and cosmopolite compositions, he/she feels the resonance of this confrontation in which the artist engages himself with his canvas.  What is undoubtedly most interesting about his recent works is their relentlessness. He draws his figures freely (at least with an apparent ease) and colours them even more freely. When neither lines nor colours seem satisfactory enough to express his ideas, he would not hesitate to use words and phrases within the composition. Some of them are handwritten in graffiti-like manuscript and the others are printed on the canvas following various forms: circles, spirals etc. Sometimes he would even bring, right into the middle of his compositions, impertinent objects from the real world: pieces of plastic or cartons. Even if this practice of collage / assemblage has nothing new in contemporary art, the way he assimilates and masters the technique is prodigious. His use of these unconventional elements is so natural. They fit into form and content of his paintings so much so that you would hardly notice, at the first glance, that there are outside elements incorporated within the paintings.                                                      Read More