In the beginning  of 2020 I experienced the first artist residency of my career. It was the Pepper House Residency, organized by Kochi Biennale  Foundation. These are the digital documents as reference of my residency.

  

 The first solo exhibition at the university...

Loss and Existence..

My current residence in Jaffna is the result of multiple histories of displacement and travel. In 1995, my family was displaced from Jaffna to Vavuniya. When we returned to visit Jaffna 27 years later, our home was no longer there. While my family continues to reside in Vavuniya, I returned to live in Jaffna as a university student to study art. Jaffna became an important site for my practice, and I decided to stay once I finished my studies. This decision required that I seek residence in a place I once called home. Most of my childhood is now linked to Vavuniya, and I often feel torn between these two locations and residences. This exhibition is an examination of this tension by looking to the stories and emotional attachments of residences throughout the Jaffna peninsula.

Though there is an abundance of new wedding halls and shopping complexes in the North, residential properties make up a significant portion of property collection. Yet many families, including my own, have struggled to keep a house as their permanent residence. There is also an abundance of abandoned homes and residential structures. What is the future of these emptied residences? Will they live long in their abandon, or eventually deteriorate and disintegrate? Will anybody come to live in them? Or will they forever remain a property for display?

21.08.2019

 Sea Change

Colomboscope is Sri Lanka’s only interdisciplinary art festival. For the first time I heard about the art festival in 2013 when I was studying in the university, but I couldn’t visit to the exhibition because I was immature to travel to Colombo. Later on the festival continues every year and I started to visit the sites and got chances to talk with the artists and the curators but I didn’t exhibit my works. The artists were selected to the exhibition through the process of proposal writing in the previous exhibitions and some were selected by studio visits. In the middle of 2018 I had got call from the curator Natasha Ginvala, to take part as an artist for the 6^th edition of Colomboscope in 2019.

After the meeting with the curator I was asked to work under the theme of ‘Sea Change’. It made me to think about my personal connection with the ocean. I was born in 1990 in Vasavilan, Jaffna and also moved to Vavuniya in 1995 because of the civil war. At that time all roads were blocked so we had to move from one district to another, with in a country by the Ocean. Later on I realized that the Ocean is not only the rout of international connections it also works powerfully as a temporary rout of our people and it continually happened for three decades. So I started my research from self questioning. And I visited all the places around the seaside in Jaffna. The reason I visit those places is to collect the visual materials and also to discuss with the people who live the places. So I talked with some fishermen they said about their experience of fishing between the boarders. Actually the visits help me to gain more ideas for create my drawing in an interesting way.  Also I like to say something about my visit of the exhibition venues which I did In the middle of October. That made me to think about the connection of the display of my work and the surrounding. In the end I complete the works and hand over them for the display. Finally the festival started on January 24^th 2019.

The festival was absolutely a nice podium to meet other international artists and curators. All the artists had worked around the concept of ocean in various medium like performance, multimedia installation, video art, sound, and mixed media too. Even though we worked individually, I could see there were a lot of similarities behind the works based on the theme. I realized that the locations may be difference but the issues are always being same in the all subcontinent countries. Some works spoke louder about the death of the environment of the ocean. Sissel Tolaas, the smell researcher, artist, and chemist from Germany her practice is focusing on smell as a way of researching in different communities. She installed a set of collection of smell taken from the ocean in tiny silver tubes. It questioned about the health of the seascapes and the lives of the future of our generations. There were a performance of mermaid by Henry tan and his team from Thailand and also it was the opening play of colomboscope absolutely made sense to the audience. It made to think about the world in underwater and personally it made to think about global warming.

Actually when we start to think about the ocean, also need to understand there is a connection with human beings. They may be the community who live with, the travelers who survive and keep their business over it, and also the people who visit to get a nice breathe around it. The art book with blue prints of drawings with the sound by Fazal Rizvi, the artist from Pakistan was like an emotional description of the ocean. When we open the book with listening the voice we could feel our self as a sea traveler. The arrangement was very flexible to go around with the book and the headphone to observe the entire book. In the ground floor there was a work of artist Firi Rahman called ‘taste karathe’, an installation of drawings in a vending cart was about the people who live in Slave Island and their relationship with Galle face beach. Most of the people from the certain community spend their time in Galle face to gain money with small business. The drawings include the stories of their life. And the Pakistani artist Hira Nabi’s short film about the massive ship and the workers talked about pollution, construction and labourism.

The Sri Lankan artist Mohanned Carder had made a set of flags by big photographs of the seascapes of Sri Lanka. The young artist Hemashironi’s stitched maps of Sri Lanka were displayed in the pieces of frames were very fascinated. And Abdul Halik’s work was filled the walls with tiny images those taken from Instagram images of people mainly related with tourism and pop culture.

In this way the festival had several types of talks, discussions, cooking section, and workshops. It was continued for a week and finally it came to the end with a musical concert. I hope it opened up a space to consider on the ocean and also it support the artists to expand their works to the next level.  

I had a chance to publish my works on BRICK literary journal issue 102. These are the images of the journal. 

 

 Let art take you places...SAF 2017.

The first time I went to the place which celebrates art magnificently is Serendipity Art festival. I had a chance to participate as one of the young subcontinent artists. The preparation of the artworks was the first process of the festival. I got good financial support from the festival team for materials, research and the transport. Riyas komu’s curation allowed me to work widely with confident and freedom. For me SAF was the first international travel, so I went with lot of expectations. It was a good platform to find out my identity, creative and strength. The same time I could capture the realism of being an artist in the South Asian country. The presentations and conversations were useful to understand the situations of the subcontinent countries. And the discussions made me to think about my role as an artist. I met many other subcontinent artists and had a strong friendship with them. Many curators visited to the venue which I displayed my works. It was a good chance to familiar with them followed by I had chances to display my works in some galleries. The theatre performances, dramas, night time concerts with colorful lights, the park concerts and culinary arts also were wonderful. Especially the yellow shuttles push me to think about the value of art. I am really proud to say that ‘I participated as a young subcontinent artist at the serendipity arts festival in 2017’.

 The documentary of my first ambitious exhibition.

‘Self Portraits’

Saskia Fernando gallery, Colombo

January 2017.

Fences

When I was a child I was thrilled by the running fences on both sides of a moving vehicle. A fence is made to give a sense of protection and demarcate the boundaries between us and the other, private and public. In Jaffna, there is a long history of neighbors and relatives fighting with each other over disputes connected to boundaries and fences. In the Thesavalamai law of Jaffna, which was compiled during Dutch rule, there are regulations connected to making and maintaining fences . But the relationship between the fence and me became personal when my family was expelled from our native village Vasavillan, because of the expansion of the boundaries of the military high-security-zone.

During the 1995 exodus from Jaffna, when I was five years old, my family moved to Vavuniya. There, I was surrounded by several kinds of fences. Every day I was kept waiting for many hours with my family, in front of a police station fence, for the renewal of our temporary residential pass to live in Vavuniya. People used roofs of the school where they found shelter, to build small fences to protect their little gardens in the refugee camp. Some people made fences near the tube well as a screen to have a bath. After few years of life in refugee camp, we were settled in government sponsored housing scheme, where we made new fences.

When I travelled to Jaffna for my University education I encountered massive military fences with power and aggression. Now the government has released a number of lands belong to civilians from military controlled high security zones in the North. But the military occupation had led to the removal of fences of individual properties and to the erasure of boundaries. That produced new tension among the resettlers. There are many disputes now regarding the identification of earlier boundaries. Many people still carry the sense of displacement even after they were allowed to resettle on their own land, because they are unable to connect the boundaries in their land deeds with the actual location. In Tamil ‘veli’ means fence; veli is also traditionally associated with the boundaries of ‘respectable’ woman.

Medium-Pen on paper

14.5x76cm