Talking to Anuradha Henakaarachchi about his work "The Death of the Twins", I was briefly transported back to the days I was still a mere journalist. Roaming the remote jungles of this world to talk to people who had been waging a war their whole lives, I often found they had nothing to say about it. That is: nothing meaningful.
Anuradha's photo installation "Death of the Twins" grabbed me for its effective simplicity. The image of the New York twin towers, burnt onto everyone's retina, was recreated by the artists with the use of straw mats and a toy airplane.
AH is a sculptor, so he first constructed the towers out of mats, then photographed them from a low angle, against a blue sky, let a toy plane enter the frame, hit the towers and burn them down.
I thought I could easily read his message as follows: The attack on the twin towers shocked the West, seeing itself no longer as the aggressor but as the aggressed. However, for many decades numerous countries and cultures had their 'straw mats' attacked by Western powers. These attacks were equally devastating, just less media coverage.
The straw mat as a metaphor for all non-western countries is a powerful one. Not in the least because the straw mat is a damn nice and useful household gadget. And just like the cultures it is generated by, seriously undervalued. But alas! no such thing was part of the artists analysis. Speaking trough a translator, AH said he just wanted to create the world event as part of his own experience. He had not been there, not on the plane and not in the towers. By reconstructing the event -during an Art Camp mind you, so plenty of guidance on hand to help the struggling artist along- he recreated the experience for himself.
Okay....there must be something missing, either in translation or in my comprehension, but I felt a pang of disappointment at this explanation.
AH is a member of the loosely fitted artist group Colombo Artist. Overall they had a good exhibition, with a number of interesting entries by Amarajeewa and Kingsley Gunatilleke, whose book project will feature in a separate blogpost.
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