‘Watch this space: Framing the past, untying the future’
Bringing together artists from around the world, the ‘Art of Peace’ exhibition offers an emotive and incisive commentary on post-conflict societies
Sanjana Hattotuwa is a day away from the launch of his latest exhibition when he sits down for an interview with the Sunday Times. As the curator of ‘Watch this space: Framing the past, untying the future’, Hattotuwa designed an exhibition in collaboration with the UK based Artraker, created a programme of panel discussions and lectures, and commissioned an original performance by the Floating Space Theatre Company titled ‘Forgetting November’. The exhibition, the panels and the performances will all feed into and off each other.
To begin with, the exhibition seems particularly promising. The catalogue brings together an influential group of artists from countries like Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali, Northern Ireland, Myanmar, and Iraq to offer an emotive and incisive commentary on post-conflict societies. Those featured were all shortlisted for the Artraker Award of 2014 and to their number Hattotuwa and Saskia Fernando have added a carefully curated group of local artists. Their selection includes established names like T. Shanaathanan, Chandraguptha Thenuwara and Jagath Weerasinghe, with room for relatively new faces M. Vijitharan and G. Samvarthini.
Artraker describe their ‘Art of Peace Exhibition’ as a conversation, between the works of selected Artrakers, local artists, performance artists and intellectuals from various backgrounds. They see art, within this framework, as inspiring the imagination ‘critical to create new narratives.’ The exhibition comes to Colombo from London and will travel on to Yangon in Myanmar.
The panel discussions that Hattotuwa has planned kick off with a keynote from Dr. Radhika Coomaraswamy on ‘Going beyond war and violence: How can we imagine a just peace?’ The panels that follow tap into the zeitgeist - all these conversations happening in Sri Lanka today about transitional justice and the challenges of memorialisation. On the programme is a panel focussed specifically on the role media plays in pursuing transitional justice. Hattotuwa asks bluntly: ‘Can a media landscape undergirded by commercial and corporate interests really interrogate violence and its sources?’
Other panels include conversations around sites of memory, the art of memorialisation, transforming politics for transitional justice and the challenges of writing about transition.
Counted among the panelists, moderators and respondents are Member of Parliament M.A. Sumanthiran, Executive Director at U.S-Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission Tissa Jayatilaka, academics Vangeesa Sumanasekara and Dushyanthi Mendis, writer Thisuri Wanniarachchi, lawyers Rohan Edrisinha, Selyna Peiris and Deanne Uyangoda, artists T. Shanaathanan and Chandragupta Thenuwara, performers Ruhanie Perera and Jake Oorloff, photographer Abdul Halik-Aziz as well as ‘techonologists’ and commentators Nalaka Gunawardene and Mohamed Hisham. More than one person on this list wears more than one hat, and Hattatowa is counting on the depth and diversity of their interests to enrich the conversation. Each panel will be record- ed and uploaded to Groundviews where the debates will continue to have lives online.
For the final element, that of the performance, Hattotuwa turned to the Floating Space Theatre Company. “Floating Space has always been for me a company that has been on the cutting edge of what theatre can and should be,” he says now, referring to previous collaborations like ‘OverWrite’ which was performed at the British Council library in 2014. Now Hattotuwa is anticipating that ‘Forgetting November,’ will be a triumph for the company. We will see Ranmali Mirchandani and Peter D'Almeida take the stage with Ruhanie Perera. Jake Oorloff directs. “It is an original script that will look at the themes of the exhibition which are memory, memorialisation, loss, reflection and identity,” says Hattotuwa.
Hattotuwa is best known as the editor of the citizen journalism website Groundviews. For ‘Watch this space’ he returns to what he describes as the leitmotif, “the one binding thread,”that has characterised all his previous forays into curating – the urge to critically question. “What I really wanted out of this is not just that we interrogate the past…but that we be forward looking. So to look at what we want to be in contradistinction to what we have been,” he says.
Taken together ‘Watch This Space’ brings under its umbrella an ambitious assortment of platforms and modes of expression. Hattotuwa concludes: “For me it’s interesting because this event then combines art, including sculpture, debate, discussion and keynotes, as well as theatre. So it’s multiple perspectives grappling with some of the issues that I think are absolutely pivotal for us to be engaged with, if only because a lot of those issues should play a role when we cast our ballot on August 17.”
Watch this space: Framing the past, untying the future is on at Park Street Mews, Warehouse D until August 17.‘Forgetting November’ will be staged on August 27, 28, 30 and 31. Tickets priced at Rs.1000 are now available at the Lionel Wendt Art Centre.