In this attempt to trace the present position of visual art in Sri Lanka and the dynamics that are at play, it is necessary to place in context certain historical moments and events that have influenced the art scene and artists. The 1940s was a significant decade for Sri Lanka, both culturally and politically. It saw the birth of the Sri Lankan modern movement in the visual arts, as well as the transformation of the country’s political structure, with independence from the British in 1948. In the visual arts, as in all areas of social interaction, implications arising out of colonisation have always remained in the background. Most of the developments that have taken place since the late 1940s and some of the issues that dominate the contemporary art scene today were either initiated by, or are the outcome of, events that took place in the pre- and immediate post-independence periods.

During this time mainstream politics was preoccupied by the state’s image-building project and the balancing of ethnic politics in relation to independence.  Cultural activities, including the visual arts, also reorganised themselves according to the demands of the time. The Sri Lankan modern movement emerged out of this situation. This was followed by a cultural revival that prioritised the indigenous arts and crafts, and defined visual arts in the context of a discourse dominated by notions of a re-created history and national ‘authenticity’.
The Sri Lankan modern movement was initiated by a group of artists known as the 43 Group, in defiance of the prevailing ideology of painting which promoted a restrictive academicism and the imitation of European Victorian naturalism. The artists of the modern movement were anti-colonial, but not anti-European. The 43 Group’s exposure to aspects of European education allowed them to absorb influences from western art, while at the same time borrowing from Indian cultural movements to add to their cocktail of visual language. In this fashion a new hybrid visual vocabulary was created, one more palatable within the local context than the restrictive and culturally alien easel-painting tradition that had been introduced by the British.

This outward-looking focus changed somewhat in the 1950s. As part of the identity-building project, an attempt to secure a national authenticity in the Sri Lankan cultural geography was pursued from the immediate post-independence period until the 1980s. This was most clearly manifested in the merging of the notion of ‘national’ with the hegemonic ethno-religious and cultural category of ‘Sinhala Buddhist’. This combination created a restrictive aesthetic ideology in which non Sinhala Buddhist traditions and practices were not seen as adequately ‘authentic’ or ‘national’. Whatever experimental and hybrid characteristics the modernists had established in the 1940s were purged, and the aesthetic epistemology of the visual arts was encased within a rather narrow and introversive nationalistic rhetoric which drew inspiration from a restrictive and singular interpretation of the past as popularly perceived by the socially and politically dominant Sinhala Buddhist ethnic majority.

A visible change in the art scene had been evident since the beginning of the 1990s. Artists with new ideological directions have emerged, breaking from the tenets of art making professed by Sri Lankan modernism. By the 1980s a few artists had made their presence felt by holding successful exhibitions associated with the better manipulation of mass media. Another recent phenomenon is a general democratisation in art production. There has been a shift in the class and socio-economic background of artists: from the urban elite of the pre-independence era, to urban lower-middle class, middle class and those from a rural background. As such, most of the artists who captured public attention in the 1980s and 1990s came from very different social and economic backgrounds to the 43 Group artists, who were generally part of the urban elite and resident in the capital. Moreover, as a result of the open economic policy initiated in 1977, art audiences have expanded to include a newly affluent strata who have accumulated wealth in the business and service sectors.  They also wield a considerable amount of buying power and sociopolitical clout.

Changes have been occurring since the early 1990s in the Institute of Aesthetic Studies - the only state-sponsored art academy in the country - with the recruitment of a handful of new lecturers who offer different ideological perspectives.  The main figures are the artists Jagath Weerasinghe and Chandragupta Thenuwara who, soon after completing their training in the United States and Russia respectively, joined the Institute of Aesthetic Studies as visiting lecturers. Jagath Weerasinghe’s 1992 exhibition ‘Anxiety’, which included the first installation work to be exhibited in Sri Lanka, offered an alternative to the formalist stance of the modernists’ credo. This exhibition disclosed the possibilities of artistic manifestations reflective of broad political and social implications, yet operating within a deeply personal context.
Subsequently, many young artists have been enticed into diversifying their aesthetics and methodologies to include installation, conceptual and performance work.

Since 1993 the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts (VAFA), an art institute initiated by Chandragupta Thenuwara, has provided an alternative, more pluralistic space for art education, and has stressed the need to revise some conventional art practices. The institute has become a hotbed of progressive, motivated and experimental work and an inspiration for a younger generation of artists interested in change. On another front, organisations such as the German Cultural Institute, George Keyt Foundation, Alliance Francaise and the British Council have begun to provide significant patronage to local artists, particularly by sponsoring and organising exhibitions. A few private galleries have also emerged, opening up spaces for young artists to exhibit their work.

A group of young, mostly Colombo-based artists who rally under the name No Order Group (also known as the NO group) is the product as well as part of this continuing process of change. Members of the group include Jagath Weerasinghe, Chandragupta Thenuwara, Kingsley Gunatilleke, Muhanned Cader, G. R. Constantine and Anoli Perera (author of this essay). Their bold, radical methodologies and ideologies have created a rupturing effect in the rather stagnant and constipated art scene. As individuals and together, the NO Group has provided the impetus to move forward and diversify the visual arts.

The NO Group held their first group exhibition at the VAFA Gallery on 8th August 1999 where a manifesto was released to the public giving the group’s ideological position in arts.  The group very clearly articulates the need to question the rather outdated positions of modernism upon which much of contemporary Sri Lankan art is still based.  The group considers in relation to visual art as a body of knowledge while they also insist that art is the “transformation of material and technology in relation to a cultural moment.  In this context, the NO Group also argues that artists are cultural producers “who produce material situations in relation to a cultural moment for cultural consumption/ communication” where the work of artists refer to their exchange value in the market. On the other hand, the NO Group rejects the universality of the art object and insists that “the primary basis of producing an art object should be to deal with a specific context.” The group also insiists that this context may be geographical or conceptual but always situated in relation to the artist.  Further, the group promotes two fundamental approaches to visual arts: 1) the art of felt experience, 2) the art of intellectual experience.

There is a crucial difference between the 43 Group and the NO Group.  Even though both emerged as epistemic breaks in the process of art production, the former was involved in a project of totalising, while the latter is concerned with fragmenting.
The VAFA has become an institutional base for the No Order artists, who have close affiliations with it, both ideologically and physically: some are members of the administrative committee, while others have taken up regular teaching assignments at the academy.
Over the past two years, Colombo art audiences have seen an increase in non-mainstream art exhibitions. One of the most politically interventionist of these was Jagath Weerasinghe’s 1997 exhibition ‘Yantra Gala and the Round Pilgrimage’ at the Heritage Gallery in Colombo. It offered art audiences a new experience, as Weerasinghe tried to transform the viewer’s role to that of a participant within a politically defined context. The installation and surrounding paintings became signs and the locus of memories, pain and loss caused by political violence and suffering. Weerasinghe fixes the meaning of his work within a Sri Lankan context in which the personal and political are merged. His more recent works have tried to move away from this politically interventionist theme to a more personal stance. In two exhibitions held in 1998 and 1999 Weerasinghe allegorised and metamorphosed his anxieties arising from loneliness and the sporadic emotional upheavals of life in a series of paintings.  Weerasinghe’s work has been included in the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, in September 1999.

Chandraguptha Thenuwara is another NO Group artist whose work reveals a political sensitivity towards a war-weary society. Violence and the confrontations of war are the backdrop for his work. Camouflage barrels, which are installed at frequent security checkpoints in the city of Colombo and elsewhere, are the objects of Thenuwara’s obsessive attention in his 1998 exhibition ‘Barrelscape’. Taking this object of war and designating it an object of art, he restructures the barrel’s semiotics. He questions the conventional notions of the art object and, at the same time, uses his rearrangement of meaning as a protest or intervention against the organised violence of war. It is a moral stance. The barrel is appropriated and removed from its threatening, arresting apparition as a defense for the army, and humanised as a non-threatening entity within a space designated as non-violent. As Thenuwara observes: ‘to us, the immediate perceptive onlookers, living space has been gradually taken over by barrels. In Colombo, barrels have gained a prominence no political issue ever has.”  His work on ‘Barrelism’, a fifty-eight barrel installation, was included in the First Fukuoka Asian Triennial 1999 at Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan.
G. R.  Constantine’s work too, is engulfed with acute political and social implications. His solo exhibition  “Existence” at the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts Gallery in July 1999  takes as its subject matter, the very ‘existence’ that is  challenged in the traumatic circumstances of war. His personal experiences living in Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka as a youth partly forms the strength of his conceptual intensity. Interested in literature and theatre, he has been regularly contributing cultural writings in the Tamil language to ‘Sarinihar’, a weekly newspaper and ‘Thisai’, a literature and art periodical in Jaffna. He also has published a book written in Tamil titled ‘History of 20th Century Art’.
Among the NO Group artists, Kingsley Gunatilleke is perhaps closest to the modernist methodology of painting, but with a conceptual strategy of a postmodern mind. He is engaged in a process of fragmenting and refracting the time/space/form relationship. His 1998 exhibition ‘Year Planner’ was a re-formulation of the sense of time imposed by calendars. His work gives an alternate reading, where personalities in society are players performing the time game. Their social agendas become the rules of the game. His metaphor is the bomb blast that destroyed part of a historical temple in Sri Lanka and the counter-reaction of social forces, which are on the verge of unleashing violence that continues to threaten the time and space of the social individual. Gunatilleke takes burned pieces of wood - remnants of the destructive bomb blast - and arranges them anew, denoting an ‘alternate year planner’.  In this installation, the elements are jarring and fragmented, supporting the artist’s concept of ‘uncertainty in spite of the illusive certainty of the planned time’.

A graduate of the Kendall College of Art and Design, Michigan, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Muhanned Cader’s three-dimensional sculptural constructions create harmony out of the most disparate elements. The realisation of his art is whimsical. He is a maverick whose work has a ‘patched together’ look created by using an eclectic gamut of household junk. He adds to an object to dismantle or neutralise its original meaning, shifting the identity of the object. Cader observes: ‘in my paintings I combine modern gadgetry with everyday experience. I draw from today’s technological distractions: graphics, cartoons, children’s toys, household objects, assembled pieces, etc. Though they are amusing and childlike their forms are simplified and distorted.’

As the only female member of the No Order Group, I am becoming more and more aware of myself both as a woman and an artist working in Sri Lanka. My 1998 exhibition ‘The Vehicle Named Woman’ was an attempt to explore how female sexuality is manifested in society, as well as how female sexual scripts are reformulated and reinvented. In this exhibition I used the car as a metaphor for the multiple dynamics of sexual politics. In my most recent work my own body has become the focus of attention. On one hand, my approach takes the form of an intellectual investigation, while on the other it takes the form of an inquisitive voyeur of one’s own experience. My methodology relies on the use of conventional material as well as junk metal, automobile parts, etcetera.

Tissa De Alwis is another artist who is closely associated with the NO Order Group and its ideology. An excellent miniaturist, he uses plasticine, clay, parts of toys and many junk items. His most notable work is a series of war planes and submarines that he created from plasticine, incorporating broken plastic toys and pieces of throwaway material. His work was included in the First Fukuoka Asian Triennial 1999 and the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1999. The other new wave of young artists who have made their presence felt also include Pradeep Chandrasiri, Nilanthi Weerasekera, Pushpakumara Koralegedara and Sarath Kumarasiri.  Their work deals with themes such as anxieties of living, social identity, consequences of political  violence, sexuality and gender.

These artists represent diverse aesthetic principles and methodologies, but are united in their creation of ideological perspectives that traverse beyond the modernist conventions established by their predecessors, the 43 Group. These contemporary artists base their work in physical contexts located in the present, rather than with the metaphysical and spiritual concerns of modernist art.
Such derailment of popular acceptance and appreciation of aesthetics does not always bring the endorsement of the masses, nor of the art connoisseurs of Colombo. The NO Group artists’ work has often drawn severe criticism and ridicule: it is obvious that a vast gap exists between this new art and the taste of art consumers.  It will take great effort to convince the masses to accept the work of the NO Group, and similar work of other artists, and to reconcile the gap that exists in their appreciation of art.