Curator's Note

Pala Pothupitiya's Art

by Anoli Perera

Ancestral Dress, is a series of work that has consumed Pala Pothupitiya‘s artistic energy for a long time through which he explores a number of interpretations on identity within a discourse of  ancestry, tradition, authenticity, urbanity and the dynamics of contemporary art practices. The embryonic attempt at formulating Ancestral Dress was seen in 2002 in a work titled Self Portrait where Pothupitiya attempted to create meaning by paying homage to his own ancestry stemming from a family of traditional ritual dancers while trying to find a satisfying equilibrium that would also allow his personal identity to emerge without distancing or valorizing his own historicity within it.  These early works found as the ‘object’ of their concentration the image of his father who is a traditional ritual dancer. The central portrait with traditional headgear done in relief form was a reference to his father with a photographic portrait of Pothupitya pasted on the pupil of its eyes.  Photocopied images of his father were repeated a number of times as a motif within the same work, and parts of the map of Colombo were pasted in the background making a collage which hinted to an overall change of artistic treatment and the difference in context, from privileging the ‘traditional uniqueness’ to the ‘uniqueness in urban mass productions’. Always, the headgear was made out of throwaway urban refuse. Here, Pothupitiya intervened by shifting his ‘reverence’ for the craft of traditional dancing from its historic authenticity and its cultural exclusivity to that of accepting it as a profession, a craft of art. In this new context, his own identity as an artist can be more easily negotiated as it is delinked from its historic and cultural prefixes.

In his latter works, the central image was clearly a reference to his own face, sculpted at different times either in terracotta or in fiber, dressed in the traditional dancer’s head dress made with cannibalized parts of electrical items, light bulbs, buttons and beads intricately woven and stitched that was reminiscent of sewing practices of women and intricate decorativeness of craft.  The central images in some works were depicted wearing ties and shirts defining their current location as the urbane contemporary world with neon lights, business suites, littered junk, bazaars and larger-than-life size adverts on billboards, a fast shifting new world where boundaries of identities are more fluid than fixed. In this world of flux, Pothupitiya’s art is an attempt to reinvent and stabilize his own identity through a re-invention of traditional dancing gear, a symbolic act that also created anomalies in the notions of what is ‘authentic’ and what is not. In that sense, his reinvention of his own identity too creates other interventions that destabilizes and blurs the boundaries within which identities get fixed. Weerasinghe explains this situation in the following words:

“ …Pala’s  constructs become ‘an original’ on its own terms, while confronting the established attributes of being ‘original’  within the discourse of ‘Art’.  The process of assigning the status of ‘original’ and ‘art’ (as opposed to ‘craft’) to Pala’s work gets even more problematic as the traditional headgear of the southern dancers, from which Pala had made his headgear remains an ‘original’ as well. What is outrageous here is that we have two ‘originals’ that look quite similar to each other.  However, as indicated above, the traditional headgear and that of Pala’s become two different objects from each other as they claim two different kinds of histories and traditions.  Pala’s ‘My ID Series’ plays on this aspect by placing his own identity within the equations of ‘traditional = authentic’ and ‘modern = simulated/copies’ where most contemporary art are valued or devalued or interrogated.  Not denying his historical lineage to traditional dance, Pala embarks on a journey of blurring the clear boundaries that divides traditional from the modern” (Weerasinghe, 2003).

Pothupitiya’s work needs to be understood within the changed status of Sri Lankan sculpture that transformed in the mid 90s from being a representation of comfortable ‘modern’ ideals and tenets of art making to that of an intensely unsettling socially engaging endeavor. This new genre of sculpture largely investigated identity, politics of gender relations, and manifestations of global – local tensions, youth anxieties and enigmas of the consumer world. The raw material changed from conventional to the everyday objects and industrial waste material, and methodologies questioned the art-craft hierarchies.  In his works, Dress Made to My Measurement (2004) and more recent works, My ID Series (2007-8)   he takes the idea of reinterpreting identity into other dimensions such as ‘nationality and citizenship’ while tracing the anxieties of the interpretive process that make uncomfortable dents in the notions of ‘identity, authenticity, tradition, respectability’ of art-craft hierarchies and the status quo of the so called high art culture.   The repeated images of the ‘lion’, the central image of the Sri Lankan national flag makes the background of Pothupitiya’s  recent series, My ID. This motif also appears in the back ground of the state issued national identity cards. By appropriating this motif and using it in his work Pothupitiya ironically and purposefully turns his personal identity into a national issue aligning the personal and the national on a horizontal grid.  This can explore many layers of meaning and interpretations in a context of check points, ethnic marginalization, exclusivist nationalisms and politics of global mobility while still privileging the artist’s anxieties of his own identity negotiated within his ancestry, family history and the workings of his art practice.

Anoli Perera
October 2008