ALFP e-magazine issue 3: Arts and Society

Visual Arts, Society and Politics in Sri Lanka
Sasanka Perera (Sri Lanka)
Professor, South Asian University / ALFP 2010 Fellow

As seen in my recent work, I am confident that visual arts (by which I mean painting, sculpture,
installation and performance art), if they have taken as their point of departure a sense of politics,
can be seen as a repository of memory and commentary on evolving societal conditions andtransformations.1 This is the kind of work that might be loosely called “political art.” But in so far
as most conventional assessments of art are concerned, the relationship between art and politics
is not always clear. For instance, simply because socio-political instability might be a fact of life ina particular country at a specific time, this in itself does not necessarily mean that politically
expressive art will be generated from that context. Due to the lack of personal safety suchconditions might usher in, art that comes out of such conditions might self-consciously become
politically noncommittal or aesthetically sedate. It is this kind of situation that Landauer refers towhen she notes that periods of cultural and political upheaval do not intrinsically produce art“affectively addressing that ferment.” 2 The relative lack of political engagement within avantgarde art circles in New York in the 1960s, despite considerable political crises impacting not
merely the United States, but the world in general at the time, typifies this possibility. 3 Susan
Sontag described the New York avant-garde’s nonengagement with the Vietnam War as an“aesthetic of silence.”4But this is not the only possibility between art and politics. For instance, Pablo Picasso’s rather
obvious critique of war, violence and fascism embedded in his well-known work Guernica andGeorge Grosz’s satirical sense of visuality are merely two of many examples of artists whoengaged with the politics surrounding them through their work. In general, however, many artists
do not wish to engage with politics in their work due to the risk of such politically engaged work
being labeled banal or naïve.5
It is in this context that I would briefly read post-1990s art in Sri Lanka as a form of selfconscious politics. The specific genre of art I have in mind is called the “Art of the 1990s” or the“’90s Trend” which very deliberately opted to deal with the evolving politics in the country thatvaried from issues of war, violence and nationalism at one level of expression to matters of selfidentity, relationships among the genders and issues of urbanism on yet another level ofexpression. As Weerasinghe has noted, many of the artists who represented this trend emerged asa “group of people living with memories of violence, dispossession and despair, on the one hand,and on the other, as the casualties of the alluringly strange beauty and the evasive nature of urban

1 For more information, see Sasanka Perera, Violence and the Burden of Memory: Remembrance and Erasure in Sinhala

Consciousness, (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2016).
2 Susan Landauer, “Countering Cultures: The California Context,” in Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in
California and Beyond, Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 1.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
© 2019 International House of Japan and Japan Foundation

ALFP e-magazine issue 3: Arts and Society

culture.” 6 Generally, some of the artworks produced by these artists tended to reorganize
situations of chaos into a seeming sense of order, while others presented “perplexity as a rationalconsciousness.” 7 Others presented situations of chaos and perplexity in a surreal and mythic
visual language.8

Figure 1: Barrel Man.
Photo courtesy of the Theertha International
Artists Collective Archives, Colombo.

In this context, the series paintings andinstallations by Chandraguptha Thenuwara
under the general theme “Barrelism,”containing images of camouflage-painted
barrels as a well-established sign of war, invited
viewers to ponder over Sri Lanka’s civil war
and the human destruction it brought alongwith it. Pala Puthupitiye’s series of works,
focused on soldiers who acquired heroic statusin Sinhala society during the war, asked viewers
to explore how the war itself negatively
impacted soldiers through death anddebilitating injury, while Bandu Manamperi’sperformance work often referred to ideas ofviolence (see Figure 1).

A considerable body of Jagath Weerainghe’s
work also dealt with issues of organizedpolitical violence and the complicity of
institutionalized religion and formal mass
media in this violence (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Snakes and Mikes.
Photo courtesy of the Theertha International
Artists Collective Archives, Colombo.

Many such artists did not see their work as asimple matter of transforming their memories
and experiences into aesthetic commodities
that had a market value. However, some ofthese works sold well, particularly among
members of the Colombo-based expatriate
community, while a number of museums inJapan and Western Europe also acquired suchworks. Due to the negative cultural value
linked to themes such as death and violence in

6 Jagath Weerasinghe, “Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka,” in Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and thePacific, ed. Caroline Turner (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005), 183.
7 Ibid., 189.
8 Ibid.
© 2019 International House of Japan and Japan Foundation

ALFP e-magazine issue 3: Arts and Society

Sri Lankan culture, which most of these works dealt with, there were very few local patrons forthese works. But as a collective discourse, these works ensured that certain kinds of discussion on
the issues they dealt with took place in public. In other words, they became a consistent
repository of Sri Lankan politics of violence and nationalism in very overt ways.
Today, Sri Lanka’s political history of the recent past will be incomplete if the histories narrated
by these kinds of artworks are not taken into account. That is, political art in the Sri Lanka
context needs to be seen as a methodology of accessing socio-political information that would
enhance our understanding of local history and politics. In this sense, political art in Sri Lanka
goes beyond mere aesthetics, and enters the more difficult and contested terrain of political andhistorical interpretation.

The contents of this article reflect solely the opinions of the author.
© 2019 International House of Japan and Japan Foundation