Silenced Shadows
When I first travelled to Sri Lanka in the nineties, the country was still recovering from the shocking violence of mass disappearances in the late eighties.[1] It was difficult for people to talk about this period and sometimes friends would close down, the memories were simply too raw. It was only years later that I learnt a close friend had lost half his school friends in 1989 – an event so shocking and so far from my own teenage experiences. As I started to develop an awareness of the complexities of Sri Lankan history it was Sri Lankan artists that prompted me to explore what was hidden from plain view.
I had the privilege of attending exhibitions in Colombo and enjoying exchanges with some of the artists who went on to launch the ‘No Order Manifesto’ (1999). One artist whose work stood out is Chandragupta Thenuwara whose Barrelism series played with the ubiquity of war culture. The idea of surface and hidden meanings was explored through camouflage brushstrokes that hinted that things were being made to vanish – alluding to a trend of tragic disappearances and unlawful killings. In this period art emerged that seemed overtly interventionist using art to surface histories of violence.
Many of the artists that were at the forefront of the ‘90s art trend such as Jagath Weerasinghe acknowledged that violence had touched them personally. His exhibition ‘Yatra Gala and the Round Pilgrimage’ was hosted by the Heritage Gallery. On entering, the visitor had to walk across dry rice encouraging an interaction with the installation. The exhibition took the viewer on a journey across Sri Lanka with a mother looking for her son. She visited Suriyakanda and other mass grave sites creating an alternative pilgrimage. The artist notes:
“The idea for this work first occurred in my mind, in February 1996, when I was at Embilipitiya, a village in the south of Sri Lanka, organizing a ceremony for a group of parents, whose children had disappeared and been murdered in 1989-90 at torture camps in Embilipitya. The ceremony was organised as part of the ‘Shrine of Innocents’ monument which is being built to commemorate these lost children…To this ceremony most of the mothers came wearing white sarees and holding a picture of their lost child. These women reminded me of mothers going to temples with flowers, held in their hands. Their white sarees made it so severe a feeling. Instead of flowers, now they are carrying the photograph of a child who is murdered.”
