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Art of Anoli Perera: Comfort Zones
Art of Anoli Perera : Comfort Zones
The Sri Lankan art scene is mostly 'inhabited' by members of the 'male
species' rather than by its opposite sex. I am reluctant to use the
word 'dominated' here, as it may not accurately reveal the historical
and social processes and anxieties that have caused the presence of
more men in the world of Sri Lankan art. It is a context where there is
an almost complete absence of art historiography, no art publication in
general, no tradition of art criticism, and no art museum. Furthermore, it is
a context where the success in the art market is more decided by one's
social links to the English speaking upper-middle class 'society' in
Colombo, rather than by innovativeness or criticality in art. In the
contemporary art scene of Sri Lanka, it is Anoli Perera who has
contributed most, unbridled for the past 12 years to formulate the idea of a 'woman artist', who is consciously
engaged in the construction of an artistic personality / identity by
way of themes, materials, techniques and issues that are embedded in
the discourse of 'the feminine', 'the
beautiful' and 'the family'.
The interventionist nature of Perera's artistic personality first came
into focus in her late 1990's series of paintings titled 'Aditi'. Since
then, she has deployed her creative-critical energy to investigate
issues pertaining to the roles expected to be played by women in a
society that is neither modern nor traditional, but largely
para-modern. Her works present us with two distinct lines of inquiry
into the 'being of woman'. On the one hand, she has been questioning
the position of woman as a social being, within which she is expected to wear the burdensome marks (signs /traits)
of a culture depriving them of their sense of agency as individuals. On
the other hand, she has been looking into the role of women as 'mother'
or 'bride', or as the person who faces the
brunt of the tension of conflicts inside the 'home-family' domain. Her
past works such as 'Dinner for Six' (which is also exhibited in the
current show) and 'I am the Queen' have been mostly directed towards
investigating the intriguing and coercive roles imposed upon women by
the cultural discourse of family.
In her recent works, the sculptures titled 'Silent Grievers' and the
series of paintings named 'Comfort Bodies' she has reinvestigated with
a certain sense of poignancy, the life of women caught in the discourse
of family.
Anoli Perera is at her best when she engages in making labor-intensive
art works, an exercise in which she locates herself in the intermediate
zone between craft and art. Perera constructs her work by weaving, by
placing or by suturing a single unit, piece by piece together as if she
were solving or making a puzzle carefully. At the end of this process
of solving/making a puzzle, she leaves a sense of tentativeness on the
works in terms of the possible visual pleasures that the work can offer
to its observers!
This rather evasive aspect of her works is most evident in the 'Silent
Grievers', a series of sculptures and in the series of paintings,
'Comfort Bodies'. The macabre and ornamental ' Silent Grievers' could
be seen as metaphor for fecundity. They can also stand for the
‘consequences' of fertility in the context of which aging women long
for the closeness of children at the end of their life marked by grief.
Through a closer examination one can sense that the signs of femininity
are belied by the fractured and sutured surfaces that silently grieve
due to ‘pain’. These works that are both
bizarre and beautiful marks a fresh turn in Perera's career.
Jagath Weerasinghe