Left: Gallery view of the exhibtiion 'Maze' by Bandu Manamperi and G.R. Constantine held at the Lionel Wendt Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka.

November 2006.

The Context

What came to my mind when I saw ‘The Maze’ during its opening night were the

opening words in Lawrence Langer’s 1996 essay, ‘The Alarmed Vision: Social

Suffering and Holocaust Atrocity.’ Even though talking of another context,

Langer’s central concerns are also central to the foundational ideas of ‘The

Maze.’ Langer noted that “until we find a way of toppling the barrier that

sequesters mass suffering in other regions of the world from the comfort and

safety we enjoy far from its ravages, little will be done to rouse the attention of

our political or professional leaders, to say nothing of our own. Domestic calm

encourages distancing from foreign pain.” The relevance of Langer’s words

would become apparent when we pay attention to the ideas and local

experiences that gave genesis to the ‘The Maze.’ ‘The Maze’ is a collaborative

performance art and installation art project by Bandu Manamperi and G.R.

Constantine that was hosted by the Theertha International Artists’ Collective at

the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery from 2 nd to the 5 th November 2006. Writing the

conceptual clarification upon which the basic premises of ‘The Maze’ was based,

Anoli Perera made the following observations in the catalogue produced to mark

the event:

“Ours is an anesthetized society. We are oblivious to the other’s pain.

We have lost our capabilities of either empathizing or sympathizing.

The weapons of “mass instruction” give us the view of a distant theater.

Our living rooms become the safe pavilions for watching far away wars

and killings. We are the cheering spectators.

We have found psychological mechanisms to justify our collective

amnesias and have anesthetized ourselves to block out traumatic

experiences of the society.

Once we are in this world of decadence, we lose all rationality where

priorities get misplaced and extreme emotions govern the order of the

day.

This is the maze we have entered into” (Theertha 2006).

Left: Artists Bandu Manamperi and G. R. Constantine in a performance during exhibition opening.

Right: audiance attaching flowers to installation as a participatory activity.

If Langer was talking of a situation in which pain and suffering in far away places

were not perceived in the comfort zones of the West, ‘The Maze’ was referring to

similar situations of loss, destruction, pain, chaos and collective amnesia in our

own context. As this review progresses it would be self-evident that Langer’s

critique is not structurally any different from the critique of the two Sri Lankan

artists. Manamperi’s and Constantine’s visual narrative is not merely an

unusual art project in the Sri Lankan context but also a powerful critique of the

social and political currents in our midst at the moment, which has also been an

uncomfortable aspect of our reality for a considerable period in the recent past.

This is why a review of ‘The Maze’ has to be located within the wider context of

contemporary Sri Lankan politics. Both artists are amply qualified to comment on

the issues of destructive politics and their consequences that they have opted to

comment on. One has been very familiar with the politics of loss and destruction

in the North while the other had similar experiences from the South. For both

artists, what they were commenting upon through their art was a part of their

lived reality from the past that they were also seeing in the present. Both

represented the contemporary visual art trend now known as the Art of the

1990s , which as a movement has a serious preoccupation with the politics of

violence in their art. On the other hand, both are among the handful of wellknown

‘performance artists’ currently in the country who identify themselves as

such. Performance art, which has not captured much imagination and attention in

Sri Lanka, is essentially a process of art where visual artists such as painters opt

to use performance as their main method of art-making while often making the

body itself and its movements as the object of art. Installation art on the other

hand, is more commonly seen in contemporary art events in Colombo. It

combines different elements that sometimes include paintings and sculpture to

formulate and construct a site-specific artwork that would often cease to exist at

the end of the exhibition period.

In this sense, ‘The Maze’ actively combined a very visible installation and a

staged performance by the two artists. It was exhibited at a time when the issues

it beacons us to ponder over have become central issues in our society while the

kind of amnesia that it attempts to critique are also clearly at work.

Structure of ‘The Maze’

‘The Maze’ as a work of art constitutes of a number of elements: the central

attraction is an area, a veritable comfort zone of a living room with luxurious

leather sofas and chairs, a coffee table stacked with newspapers and television

screens flashing ‘news’ from around the world. Encapsulating this area almost as

a cocoon is a somewhat surreal domain filled with life-size mannequins and body

parts with medicated bandages covering most parts of the bodies. Large reams

of surgical gauze stretched from one injured body to another and from one

injured limbo to another, making an intertwined, hospital-like, sedate, scary and

surreal socio-scape. This is the maze. Exterior to this installation, a stereo was

blaring out the sounds by now very familiar to this kind of socio-scape where the

end results are death, injury and destruction: police and ambulance sirens,

machine gun fire and racing vehicles. As the main component of the staged

performance itself, mingling among the crowd, G.R Constantine was offering

artificial red rose buds to visitors making a request to pin them on any of the

curtain-like pieces of gauze they could reach. Deconstructing the notions of

superficial and commercialized love that red rose buds are nowadays supposed

to indicate in this area of globalized velentinism, these rose buds were supposed

to symbolize the many dead and injured in the Sri Lankan civil chaos. While

some did what was excepted of them, may opted to take the artificial rose buds

home perhaps to be used as a memento of the exhibit or more likely as yet

another dust collector in the standard middle class living room cabinet. At the

same time, Bandu Manamperi was selling the sounds of our times already being

played in the background recorded on CD for Rs. 100.00 apiece, perhaps

indicting the monitory value of death, destruction and uncertainty. Both artists

had their hands wrapped in ‘benzoin’-doused gauze and bandage.

On the one hand, the artists were interested in commenting on the death and

destruction amidst ourselves. On the other hand and more importantly, they

were also commenting on how fast these issues become mere distant realities

for those people not immediately touched by this chaos. It was not too long ago

that the battle for Sampur and Mavil Aru and the early spectacular military

successes in the most recent bout of choreographed violence between the Sri

Lankan armed forces and the LTTE enthralled many individuals who were glued

to their television sets as if they were watching a series of war movies. It is

precisely in this kind of context that television programs bring into our living

rooms news bulletins, live coverage of events, experts’ commentaries and

interpretations, candle light vigils of professional protestors and so on that we

can watch in comfort and security while enjoying our evening tea or scotch as

they case might be. It is that same comfort zone that we too become military

experts and political pundits making our own trivial opinions that would make no

difference to the people who are directly at the receiving end of violence. We

have become cheering spectators of our own destruction not really fathoming

what is actually going on. That is essentially the crux of the narrative that the two

artists were narrating. They hoped that the people who entered the Lionel Wend

Gallery while the exhibit was on going would go into the mock living room,

browse through newspapers and watch television while being relatively oblivious

to the sounds and scenes of destruction evident in the overall structure of the

maze. Some did exactly this. But others had a more attractive distraction on the

opening night. The wadai, helapa, sandwiches, soft drinks and beer available to

visitors at one corner of the gallery proved to be a highly successful attraction in

the context of which the awe of the destruction and the depth of narrative that the

very vocal exhibit was attempting to narrate was drowned and marginalized from

the collective vision and perhaps the conscience of the spectators. It was quite

clear that consumption had the capacity to subvert senses of many of our

citizens. Constantine and Manamperi were hoping this would in fact happen that

would further prove their point.

In addition, as part of the national security regime currently in place in the city,

the Police Department on its own accord had mounted its own performance to

augment the work of the two artists. They were diligently ensuring that no car

was parked outside the gallery, and in fact hardly allowed individuals to slow

down their vehicles. When the rain poured down it appeared that the constables

abandoned their performance indicating perhaps that their script contained an

MOU between the government and the LTTE that no bombs would be

transported, installed or exploded when it rains. When taken as performances

however, the impromptu performances of the Police Department and the hungry

public were more dynamic in making the arguments that the two artists were

attempting to articulate than the staged performance of the artists itself.

It almost appeared that rather than a mere commentary on the politics of our

times, the artwork of Manamperi and Constantine was a scaled down simulation

of our times, politics, collective stupidity and structural amnesias. Indeed we are

in a maze where reality is not seen for what it is. In that maze, television would

always be the purveyor of fabricated news as truth and we would be the

spectators. We were enthralled by the movie serial, ‘Battle for Sampur’ and are

still talking about the latest blockbuster, ‘The Murderer of Raviraj’ without really

knowing who the director might be. In the comfort of our living rooms, these are

mere flickering moments that do not touch us while we would hardly ponder to

think about those directly involved, touched and hurt. This evening we might

watch a protest march on TV against disappearances and killings in the city. But

we need to go to bed early as we have to go to UK in the morning on the cut rate

tickets offered by Sri Lankan Airlines. We are indeed in ‘The Maze’ and would

seldom see any reality other than our own inverted realities.

Published in The Island, 15 th November 2006.

Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka, Novermber 2006.