The Colombo Art Biennale (CAB)which was co-founded in 2009 by Annoushka Hempel, will have its most prominent showcasing yet this August at the renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and also very much in the planning stages for an ever strengthening and larger showing at its fifth edition set for 2018.
This showing at Fringe will be CAB’s most prominent international showing to date, preceded by Serendipity Revealed at the Brunei Gallery SOAS in London in 2014, and a Pala special exhibit at the Saatchi Gallery in 2015. With In search of stillness being hosted at the invitation of the founders of the coveted Summerhall, a ‘Fringe Firsts’ award-winning and top press-attended venue with a knack for spotting must-see and accolade deserving shows, there are high hopes for all participating and Sri Lanka’s diverse art talent pool at large to get its moment to step from the fringes to the global spotlight.
Pala Pothupitiya is one 15 artists whose work will be part of the CAB helmed contemporary Sri Lankan art showcase to be exhibited at the world’s largest arts festival - Scotland’s ‘Fringe.’ This is the first comprehensive locally curated showing in the Fringe’s 70 year history and comes at a time when given both the festival’s banner year, and the global state of political and social upheaval, the Fringe looks to revisit its founding principle ‘to heal the wounds of war through the language of the arts’ - a conversation Sri Lanka is well-suited to contribute to.
Curating under the title RETURN: in search of stillness, Hempel has selected artists from the CAB catalogue, starting from the biennale’s inception in 2009 up to present, who were up to both the challenge of creating under a theme that seeks to encapsulate feelings of catharsis, displacement, exit and stillness - emotions identified as focal points in Sri Lanka’s ongoing journey to move away from the continuing cycles of violence that have too long plagued it and move towards seizing the opportunities of stabilizing its yet tenuous peace in order to achieve both healing and progress. It’s a big task, and on the curatorial front it requires courage in envisioning how works and perspectives that both complement and contrast can get an equal hearing within a shared space.
As part of In search of stillness, established artists such as internationally acclaimed live performance artist Venuri Perera, and pioneering feminist and colonial discourse artist Anoli Perera will present alongside emerging artists KaneshThabendran and Vijithiran M., both from Jaffna, who from their respective mixed-media and painting standpoints speak about what has gone missing, and the trauma of the end of the war.
To this artistic dialogue also enters photojournalist Abdul HalikAzeez whose work straddles both documentarian and artistic inclinations to speak of manifestations of community targeted that violence that persist in the post-war period. Next to him Al Jazeera and BBC featured filmmaker Kannan Arunasalam will present shorts, including those of vinyl collecting priest and, that speak to different shades and tones of Sri Lankan identities. Researcher Radhika Hettiarchchi will amplify the voices of Sri Lankan women from across the island through ‘Herstories,’ while Anup Vega will harness energies for healing through his life arts installation informed through multi-religious rituals from Sri Lanka. Sujeewa Kumari will create her own space in which audiences can access nature and stillness within themselves.
Rounding off the visual arts programme will be diaspora artists’ Rajni Perera’s take on the politics of cultural identity, and Maya Bastian’s new-media collage dealing with dissonance and reconciliation within shared family memories of the 80s. Acclaimed playwright and director Ruwanthie de Chickera will collaborate with British visual artist and academic David Cotterrell to look at contexts of objectification and distance. Finally, there is Alex Stewart, the British artist who has been visiting Sri Lanka since 1993, crafting storytelling exhibits that celebrate both the whimsical and hard-truths of Sri Lankan life and folklore to much local acclaim.
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