Aug 28 2015

Field Trip: Cinnamon Colomboscope 2015

by Jyoti Dhar

Bias is a curious thing. One is almost always aware of it when writing about art. Yet one is rarely conscious of it when viewing artworks. Like many in the peripatetic art world, I have become increasingly skeptical of the large-scale-exhibition-with-a-lofty-title format—which often over-promises and under-delivers. As one of Sri Lanka’s main arts festivals (the other being the Colombo Art Biennale), the third edition of Cinnamon Colomboscope has thankfully managed to avoid many of the pitfalls that can be expected of such major exhibitions and mini-biennales. Spread over seven floors at the politically poignant site of the Rio Hotel and Cinema complex in Colombo—which opened to glory in 1965 as the city’s first 70mm cinema, but was tragically burned, looted and abandoned after the Black July Riots of 1983—Colomboscope showcases a thoughtful mix of global, regional and local artists. The curators, Natasha Ginwala and Menika van der Poorten, collaborated effectively to apply their international experience and local knowledge in sensitively reinvigorating the site. While the Rio’s scarred physicality serves as a permanent reminder of a troubled past, it does not dominate the works displayed in the festival. Additionally, the participating artists have also avoided responding to the exhibition’s theme, “Shadow Scenes,” in ways that are too literal or fixed. Rather, as visitors walk through the layered building complex—and into their “hotel rooms”—they see that each of the exhibited works and ideas are given an individual space in which to remain intimate and discrete, but also converse with one other in a fluid manner. Ginwala and Van der Poorten provide a platform from which to see what can happen when a variety of artists, from Jaffna and Colombo to Berlin and Mumbai, are given a chance to respond to a historically loaded context and draw from it a new set of relations.

The Rio Cinema and Hotel in Slave Island, Colombo’s first 70mm cinema where adult films are now shown. All photos by and courtesy Govind Dhar.

After the Black July Riots of 1983 the Rio complex lay abandoned until 2014. It has since been used for sporadic cultural events, including Pettah Interchange, for which the wall drawings and paintings seen here were made. Colomboscope is the first exhibition to make use of the entire space, including all of Rio’s hotel rooms.

One descends a makeshift staircase to see CAMILLE HENROT‘s video Le Songe de Poliphile/The Strife of Love in a Dream (2011), in a semi-derelict cinema hall, featuring scenes of crowds at a pilgrimage, the manufacturing of medicinal pills, and images of snakes in mythical and real forms. Here, one is effectively introduced to some of Colomboscope’s recurring motifs: fact and fiction, and time and history.

The curators selected and commissioned works by a number of international artists, made in response to the festival site. Such works included the multimedia installation The leisure time of a firearm (2015), which focuses on the subject of student protests and the disarming of guns, by AGNIESZKA POLSKA in collaboration with WITEK ORSKI.

Works such as BANI ABIDI’s Funland, Karachi Series II (2013–14), which document two similar, derelict cinemas in Karachi, resonate wonderfully in the crumbling, concrete setting of the Rio.

JAGATH WEERASINGHE, artist, archaeologist and founding chair of the Theertha International Artists’ Collective, created a series called “Blood Wedding on the Mirror” (2015) for Colomboscope. The work comprises photographic portraits of several political figures on a reflective grid, which is so that the viewer could see a dissected shadow of themselves, as well as the portrait figure looking back at them.

Some of the works that stood out the most were those with strong formal qualities, such as KAVAN BALASURIYA’s Capital Complex (2015).

Similarly, Argentina-born Milan-based artist Alek. O’s framed cotton works such as Camel (2015), made up of pure lines and stars in a singular, bold tone, evoke a multitude of abstract concepts.

The charred facade of the Rio Hotel, where a handful of private residents currently reside.

Artists such as Colombo-based PRADEEP CHANDRASIRI had several conversations with the curators over a series of six months, conceptualizing and refining their proposals. The work seen here consists of branches, charcoal and barricade tape and is called Inside the Charcoal Mountain (2015).

For the festival, Lahore and Colombo-based PRADEEP THALAWATTA covered an entire room with shiny gold paper and damaged car side-mirrors. In these mirrors, he fitted faux reflections depicting several scenes from quotidian life in Sri Lanka.

One of the most striking works of the exhibition has to be MAHEN PERERA’s site-responsive sculpture Untitled (2015), which is evocative of a strange abattoir. Its primal forms, made up of fabrics, furniture and animal horns, are suspended with interconnecting ropes over a body of water.

ALAIN PARIZEAU and SHAMALEE DE SILVA PARIZEAU‘s installation “That Uncle” (2015) seems to be a reflection on, and an archive of, a retired school teacher’s life, and includes old cassettes, bottle caps, faded photographs, shoes, keys and clothes. Instead of a straightforward, staid piece, the work comes across as heartfelt and unresolved, as well as moving and disturbing.

ASVAJIT BOYLE and LALINDRA AMARASEKARA created an interactive light and sound installation entitled De (Generative) Processes (2015), into which viewers could only enter one at a time. Once in the darkened room, a striated pattern of lights on the wall react to the viewer’s movements—giving one the feeling of being followed—until at one point the lights suddenly become brighter, to the extent of being uncomfortable and inescapable.

Jaffna-based MARIYATHEVATHAS VIJITHARAN created a series of drawings and paintings called “Displacement” (2015), drawn from his real-life experiences in the Battle of Kilinochchi during the brutal final years of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009).

As you ascend the stairs and reach the seventh floor, there could be no better work to greet you than PEDRO GÓMEZ-EGAÑA‘s The Vimana Kiranaavarta Obervatory (2015). The viewer is invited to sit in a chair and listen to the artist’s poetic descriptions of a landscape made up of highlands, forests, mountains and lakes, while simultaneously looking out the window at Colombo’s mixed cityscape by the water, and feeling the sea breeze.