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.