Anoli Perera’s ‘Memory Keeper’ in Delhi

Anoli Perera’s exhibition ‘Memory Keeper’ opens to the public on 20 January 2013 in the Shrine Empire Gallery, New Delhi. Anoli Perera is one of the most renowned contemporary female artists from Sri Lanka and is currently based in Delhi.

Her exhibition deals with remembrance, recollection the danger of erasure. In terms of its conceptualisation, in this exhibition the artist relates a story she has seen unfolding. She notes in states concept note that: “I am the ‘memory keeper.’ I have become a memory keeper because I was born wedged between the sun set of one era and the dawn of another.”

For her and many others of her generation, “existing between eras is to live in a liminal space where people forget to keep records because they are eager to forget the past and move on to the future.” She further observes: “The last vestiges of the previous era and the transition itself become insignificant moments and footnotes of history, not worth remembering in the larger contexts of events.”

These conceptual considerations and lived realities as the artist has seen and perceived them are articulated through a number of artworks where the focus is on installations. One of her works titled ‘Left Behinder’ has a canopied bed enmeshed by lace panels; on the bed, a trunk with a video installation is placed surrounded by a webbed-in constellation of bottles with food recipes encapsulated as posthumous references to the lost community of Burghers (Sri Lankan Eurasians). The title, ‘Left Behinder’ is taken from a poem by Jean Arasanayagam, a Dutch burgher Sri Lankan writer.

 Arasanayagam’s poem by the same title is embroidered by Perera on the bed cover. The whole work tries to remember the diminishing presence of the burghers; most of them left Sri Lanka due to the uncomfortable political environments of the post Independence era (post 1948).

On a wall close to the bed installation, one could see another work titled ‘Rose Wall Paper’ consisting of large layouts of wallpaper from where semi-faded figures emerge referring to a bygone era already lapsing from the collective memory of the present.

Another artwork series titled ‘Ghosts of SwarnaBhumi’ consists of three black, headless, tall, ghostly female figures seemingly pregnant inviting the viewers to another dimension of memory that goes beyond the individual and the intensely personal towards the collective and the public.

The figures are motionless with no heads and no feet. The swollen belly seen through a magnifying glass carries images of Sri Lanka’s recently concluded and immensely destructive civil war; Three more womb like forms are positioned on the floor connected by three umbilical cords to the standing figures. They too carry images of a violent past.

Perera’s exhibition takes viewers to and beyond private and public memory mediated by the passage of time as well as war, and traverses through a number of other discourses that includes migration, globalisation and advent of homogenous cultural forms and the expelling of the local.

However, in all cases, the artist’s point of departure and obsessive focus is what is remembered and what would lapse from memory.  As she observes: “What we lost was our innocence and our common sense… we, for sure lost the trust. Then it stopped… soon the pain and what was lost might well be forgotten too… amnesia sets in… people want to move on. I keep memories for posterity...”