theartsdesk in Colombo: Sri Lanka's inaugural Art Biennale

It is a stinking hot afternoon. In an unventilated shed seemingly purpose-built for breeding mosquitoes, I am walking round and round a stone spiral. A benign-looking woman has assured me it is the way to peace. Despite my scepticism, I follow her instructions, pausing every few feet to read the peace-themed quotations carved on each of the rocks. Some are moving, some purely poetic. Most tread Oprahishly along that that very fine line between simple brilliance and childish naïvety.

As an artwork, it is uncomplicated stuff, but it gives one pause – not least because several of the inscriptions are in Sinhala. Eventually, I make it to the centre. “There is no way to peace,” says the last stone. “Peace is the way.” MK bloody Gandhi.

The curators of the inaugural Colombo Art Biennale - the brainchild of Annoushka Hempel, daughter of the actress-turned-luxury hotelier Anouska Hempel, now resident in Colombo - came up with the theme for their project back in February, at the height of Sri Lanka’s 26-year war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. They chose “Imagining Peace” – a fitting, not to mention marketable subject for a tropical paradise paralysed by decades of civil conflict. And then in mid-May government forces stormed the remaining LTTE strongholds, the nation rejoiced, and the Colombo Art Biennale found itself caught between its remit and a hard place. Their timing couldn’t have been worse.

Then again, Sri Lankan artists have spent so long “imagining peace” it seemed unlikely that the CAB curators would struggle to fill the five disused Park Street warehouses – natural enough hanging spaces with just the right level of boho squalor – that form the hub of the festival.

Thus the Peace Spiral. Likewise Jagath Ranindra’s Inside Out, featuring a galaxy of bullets which surround a walk-through human head: “destroying the killer within.” And in their Reading Wall Sanjeewa Kumara and Sujeewa Kumari (a husband-and-wife team) have had evident fun turning warmongering images and newspaper cuttings into pacific motifs.

But as far as peace goes, that was about as far as it went. An editorial in the CAB catalogue promises a festival based on “unified expressive conscious”.  Naturally, there was plenty of “expressive conscious” on display, but “unified” it was not. The net result is that the CAB, featuring the work of 50 artists, winds up looking less than the sum of its parts.

I attend a debate on "Art and Politics". One of Sri Lanka’s leading architects praises the CAB’s “subtle” handling of the theme, and defends the artists’ failure to address, coherently, the sudden outbreak of peace. “The peace we were imagining before the war ended,” he says, “is different from the peace we are imagining now.” True, but several artists have made little or no attempt to comply with the CAB’s brief. As I walk around, I puzzle over the ways in which some of the exhibits might be imagining peace. There is a wall made out of industrial cotton bobbins. Some Asiatic Beryl Cooks look like acid-trip Rorschachs. A rectangular curtain – denoting “exclusion” – is decorated with household objects, with a scarecrow body lying at one corner. A corpse? Portraits by one prominent artist suggest that he has instead spent the war imagining young men with their shirts off. The Colombo Artists group go so far as to theme their work under the title, It is an Affront on an Artist to impose a Theme.

Other pieces waffle round the edges of the topic, without ever explaining themselves. A pile of water bottles poses as a statement about resource wars. An installation of destroyed books is not, apparently, a commentary on censorship. Otherwise arresting works are over-explained in jargon-ridden catalogue entries which feature erratic spelling (“Imagining Piece”) and sub-philosophical blether. “Listen to the cry of a broken pearl,” goes one (Sri Lanka is known as both “teardrop” and “pearl”). One artist expresses the wish that he should have “been there” on 9/11. Not, presumably, flying one of the planes, so why? A curator refers to “war” in inverted commas. My sympathy slightly evaporates.

The undoubted low point is your [sic] just another part of me. This consists of a mirror on which visitors are invited to write their own peaceful imaginings. It is inspired, the adjacent placard informs us, by the elaborately painted ancient rock-fortress Sigiriya (fair enough), Arundathi Roy (spelled wrong), and Michael Jackson (what?!). Needless to say, it solicits graffiti of the most impeccable fatuousness.

Such is the lazy group-think you can expect at a metropolitan art festival far from the fighting. The words “war” and “peace” are bandied about with complacency by artists who have no part in fighting the former or achieving the latter. I dread to think of the response if artists had tried this war-is-bad spiel in the Sinhalese heartlands of the south. Lynchings?

There is no doubting the sincerity behind the CAB project. But after a couple of rooms full of peacenik sloganeering, I begin to suspect that some artists are spoiling for a fight. "The politics of the CAB is not the politics of the country,” argues one of them. In the debate I attend, someone does actually ask where all the pro-war art is.

Pace Gandhi, a vast majority of Sri Lankans believe with good reason that there is indeed a way to peace. From the overcrowded IDP camps in the North to the security paranoia which pervades in the capital, all is still far from well in Sri Lanka. It’s certainly true that not enough is being done to secure lasting peace. A love-in for the Colombo artistic fraternity doesn’t necessarily seem the place to start. Especially as only artists and expats seem to know the CAB is on.

“Did you know,” someone says to me, “that they’re planning to do it again in two years?” For the Sri Lankan arts community, as for the nation as a whole, the proof of the pudding will be in the repeating. What, if anything, will be the theme of the second Biennale? You can only hope it won’t still be “imagining peace”.

After my time in the Park Street warehouses, I visit the Neelan Tiruchelvam memorial. It has nothing to do with the Colombo Art Biennale, but they have put it on their map anyway. A simple steel installation featuring a bust of a murdered Tamil parliamentarian, it remains the most powerful call to lay down arms in Colombo. Below is an inscription taken from one of Tiruchelvam’s last speeches. “We cannot glorify death whether in the battlefield or otherwise.” Behind it is a mural of doves fluttering around the words, “Secure the sanctity of life”.  As I stand looking at it, a security guard emerged from a nearby lane and came over to join me for a moment of quiet contemplation. And then he goes back to his post.

Colombo Art Biennale site