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Connecting cultures

India-Sri Lanka project shows how two ancient cities have more in common than their age

tapestry

Anoli Perera, details of work 'Trajectories of Deliverance - tapestry installation (detail)', part of the project 'A tale of two cities - India and Sri Lanka'

Ritika Kochhar
A Tale of Two Cities” is a two-year-long, cross-cultural project that brings together eleven Indian and Sri Lankan contemporary artists to look at Varanasi and Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka. Their selection lay in being the oldest inhabited cities in the world, as well as their close ties to Buddhism. The resulting exhibition discusses South Asian history, religion, politics, commercial trade lines, fundamentalism and the role of institutions. 

Artists Anoli Perera, Bandu Manamperi, Chintan Upadhyay, Jagath Weerasinghe, Manisha Parekh, Manjunath Kamath, Pala Pothupitiye, Paula Sengupta, Pradeep Chandrasiri, Ram Rahman and Riyas Komu spent a week together in each city last year, as they shared formal presentations on their works as well as holding documented discussions.  A year later, the works, which range from textiles to huge installations, are being displayed at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, and from there will travel to Delhi and Colombo in 2017.
 
A ceramic Buddha artwork by Manjunath Kamath.
A ceramic Buddha artwork by Manjunath Kamath.
Renu Modi, who envisioned the project, agrees that the artists form an eclectic mix. “I selected them because of their varied art practices. Sengupta works with embroidery on silk screens and she’s been hiking on the Buddhist Trail for years, as well as following Tibetan Monks in exile. Kamath’s works are quirky and witty. They link traditional crafts, natural resources and history,” says she. Parera’s works, she adds, looks at the intimate, private spaces of women as well as the utopian and institutional.  Chandasiri spent years in jail as a political prisoner, which has gone on to shape his work. 

“I’d done something similar in 2001 and when we wanted to repeat the experience with Varanasi, Jagath mentioned Anuradhapura. It allowed us to look past the boundaries of India into Southeast Asia whose history, politics and religion has been connected with ours over centuries,” says Modi. 

Home Shrine-4 by Manisha Parekh
Home Shrine-4 by Manisha Parekh.
The artworks that have finally been displayed at the Adil Shah Palace in Goa, include Perera’s embroidered tapestries depicting the role of women and institutions, Sengupta’s traditional hand-pulled pankhas depicting a mapping of eight contested Buddhist sites including Sarnath near Varanasi, Parekh’s biomorphic homage to small roadside shrines with rudraksh-like knots on wood, Komu’s huge installation of a tilted cabinet containing an Ashoka pillar with Mahatma Gandhi benignly looking on , Pothupitiye’s tiny ceramic thrones that form a wheelchair, Kamath’s ceramic Buddhas and, Weerasinghe’s paintings which have come to depict the violence that has been precipitated by religion.

Ram Rahman’s photograph-based artworks are what bring the exhibition together, insists Weerasinghe. Rahman has used ancient texts transcribed over photographs to depict the philosophy, symbolised by the lotus and the Bodhi tree, a sapling of which was carried by King Asoka’s daughter to Anuradhapura in 285 BC. He also depicts the fraught relation between politics and religion, including the space that Buddhism once offered for cultural and political reform — such as B R Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism by a Sri Lankan monk, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) attacks  that took place on pilgrims at Anuradhapura in 1985, or even the shift of the lotus between a religious and political symbol. 

Rahman says that he was drawn to this project by the fact that the artists were allowed to make whatever they chose, as well as the intense discussions that took place during the initial stages. To Modi, one of the most important and sustainable parts of the show is the book and documentary that will be released in the capital in March 2017. "It’s not just an art exhibition, it's about artists coming together and starting a conversation in response to their own country, and each other's”, says she.



“A Tale of Two Cities -- Varanasi Anuradhapura” can be viewed at the Adil Shah Palace, Panjim, Goa till January 15, 2017; at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, between March 10 and March 28; and at the Red Dot Gallery, Theertha Artists Collective, Colombo, in July, 2017 

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First Published: Dec 23 2016 | 11:04 PM IST

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