OMG Pettah! Freezing a fast vanishing landscape

Saturday, 17 August 2013 00:05 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

By David Ebert The Collective of Contemporary Artists (CoCA) held another innovative exhibition that looked at capturing for posterity the complex entirety of Colombo’s hustling and bustling Pettah culture through its very own depictions of art and sound. With large scale development plans in the pipeline, there are concerns that the landscape will forever be changed once the Government gets the ball rolling with the Outer Colombo Ring Road project. In this light, the artists of CoCA have taken the initiative to highlight and capture the immortal images that they have come to be familiar with on their visits into the centre of the city. The exhibition opened at the old Pettah municipal building, an icon in itself, from 8 to 10 August with a host of CoCA’s resident artists exhibiting their works that viewed the subject from a varied but refreshing and refreshing perspective. The artists included Chinthaka Thenuwara, Poornima Jayasinghe, Layla Gonaduwa, Julius Mitchell, Branka Ridicki and Lakisha Fernando.

Multicultural and multiethnic Using everyday Pettah images such as the iconic nattami hand cart that you would usually see plying the little alleyways transporting all manner of goods from one shop to another, was on display highlighting the tangled web of lifestyles and cultures that coexist and are affected in turn by any disturbance in a habitat that is seen as the commercial underbelly of Sri Lanka’s commercial capital. Explaining the cart installation, Poornima Jayasinghe said: “We used this as a canvas and different kinds of fabrics which makes different patterns because Pettah is a city that is multicultural and multiethnic with various groups of people living together and it is almost like a web. So they are all connected together and at the same time it is very fragile as when someone moves this cart, it can affect everyone connected. Some are strung very tight and some are very loose which depicts the way they live.” Pettah’s ‘eating houses’ Artist Layla Gonaduwa in her work used door hinges mounted on wood with images from her experiences exploring the various little ‘eating houses’ that dot the streets in Pettah, where she interacted with the people that patronise them. She used images that were layered over with fluorescent and black marker ink to denote both the colourful and the darker side of the city. “When you think of Pettah, you think of vibrancy and offset it with a bit of black to show that there is a dark side to it as well but once again, it was to record what is fast disappearing. Also, what I find is that when you go to these places and eat, none of the people there are shy to talk to you and there is a lot of interaction. The first couple of times I did go out among them, I was a bit inhibited but then now I am a part and parcel of Pettah which is nice. They know me now. That is what I have recorded. “This is basically freezing a moment of Pettah that is fast disappearing and I’ve concentrated on the eating houses of the city, little known places of Pettah and I have used movable scapes which are interactive and where we can see in-depth as to what’s going on in one particular place. I have also used anecdotes and what I have felt and the people I’ve met in that place. The door hinge is basically a window into a world that we normally don’t see.” Story boxes Story boxes, as Chinthaka Thenuwara calls them, are benches with stickers plastered all over them. What is familiar about the stickers is that everyone who uses Colombo roads regularly would recognise them from the thousands of tuk tuks that ply the roads. They stand out as a popular subculture and medium of expression with their various messages. Explaining the concept further, Thenuwara said: “These are what we call story boxes, where we have used stickers that have been a part of a popular culture in Pettah. If you look at the tuk tuks and lorries, the drivers use them to decorate their vehicles and when we spoke to people, it showed that they reflect their personalities and characters. “So what we did is we selected something that shows popular culture and tried to recreate the Pettah culture. For example, usually it is language that translates this culture and sometimes a person unable to read them will still get the flavour of Pettah. As an example, sticker messages such as this one which if I translate it to English, it would say ‘If my mother is the moon, then I am the sun’. What we realise is that Pettah is a very male-dominated world and even through this sticker, it shows their culture.” Long live Pettah! The collection also displayed a series of functional benches and tables that depicted the Pettah culture through the use of checkerboards painted on the surfaces as well as one installation that had an artwork painted on using the road map of the Pettah and Main Street stretch which one would take hours gazing at and instantly be able to point out locations most familiar to all of us. All in all, it was once again a very stimulating and mind-expanding collection created by the CoCA collective and I look forward in anticipation for their next show which should, if going by what I have seen so far from them, continue to challenge people’s perceptions of expression and how we view what is all around us. Long live Pettah! Pix by Lasantha Kumara