Living Sculpture- Photo series
Living Sculpture is a performance did in Gampaha train station in Sri Lanka 2004.The body covers completely with colorful Saris and confront in silently.
Skin of the White Tea Bags
Performance / Video 2003
Time- 03:25
‘ Skin of the White Tea Bags ’ is a registration of a Performance on the Beach of Sheveningen in the Netherlands.
The video opens by zooming in on some used tea bags. In close-up they look like a landscape. Suddenly ‘she’ appears while at the same time the scene transforms into an urban landscape, then into gloomy coloured seawater. She is wearing a cloth, fully covered with used brown tea bags. She keeps turning around and moving back and forth in slow motion between urban architecture and the salt water of the sea. Meanwhile the camera also captures the reaction of three passers-by confronted with her dreamlike appearance in this environment. The images are accompanied by a soundtrack with sounds of the sea at low speed.
Looking through the Father’s window –this is a photo installation generally project on one wall. This work consist 14 digital photos with sound and wards. Loop.
“Photography and art- Current Developments
In the contemporary art scene of Sri Lanka, photography is not the most prominent medium. However, more and more young female artists like Dhanuska Amarasekra or Sujeewa kumari dedicate their work to this medium. In her art work, Sujeewa Kumari combines Paintings, video and photography. Since her working stay in the Netherlands, Kumari’s artwork especially deals with the notions of personal and social identity of women in a post –colonial context. Making use of the differing possibilities of painting and photography, Kumari addresses de-realized memories, cultural images and artistic styles , which emerge as complex terms in tensions between the local and global. in this perspective, her self –portraits gain a universal demand with a critical stance, such as in the series “Looking through the Father’s Window” (2003) where she combines digital colour photographs with sound and words. The portraits are presented in different positions. The appearance of the face is changed by pressing the head on a window screen. The deformation of the face, in combination with a stunning sound and the individual connotations of the words and phrases on the photographs, give a flittering imagination of the seen questioning the reality of the image.”
Quote from -Picturing Paradise and Beyond
By Dr. Sabine Grosser
Postdoctoral Lecturer, Department of Fine Arts
University of Paderborn, Germany
Reading Wall
Reading wall is a Mix media work –collaborative work with Sanjeewa Kumara
Colombo Art Biennale
The stranger within
Marian Pastor Roces
The first thing that needs to be said about Sujeewa Kumari’s work is that words will not mediate ably between artist and viewer. Her images confront calmly, with no exorbitance, indeed with quite the opposite quality: her images are almost like an utterance en passant. They produce in the viewer a very subtle sense of having been reflected in some kind of strange mirror—but only in a quiet, private, and circumspect way. For this reason, text can only have a crushing relationship with the work: the inevitable “hardness” of prose will constrict what is subtle, and solidify what is fluid.
By inhabiting a liminal space that might be most accurately described as quiet—a space in which ideas do not coalesce as words, much less text—Kumari activates a critical imagination that first of all subverts text as the Janus-face, so to speak, of art. However, it must be quickly pointed out that this wordlessness is a subversive effect, and not an a priori provocation, of a practice that creates fleeting, disturbing stillness. (Even the word “subversive” seems inappropriate; too focused on projected design.) One recognizes the site of artistic intent, not in a scheme, but in the fact and the moment and the ironic quiet/disquiet of encounter with difference.
Kumari pictures difference as self moving within and without (and through) the specificities of ethnic, gender, and class givens of her country of origin, Sri Lanka. While well-crafted, the work does not look belabored, as though the meditations that led to her works had a slightly self-distancing, off-hand character. Yet that same distant quality also reveals emotional intensity. Thus the surprise: it is precisely the lack of stridency that conjures the possibility of depth of understanding. Thus the afterthought: that depth of understanding is possible to realize outside the channels of talk. And thus the moving effect: in the silent, momentary locking/looking of image and viewer upon each other—difference, one realizes, is fluid, unpredictable, negotiable, lively, and strangely familiar. Strange-ness is a paradoxical mood.
Most importantly, the strange one is not, after all (or not solely) the person in the image. The stranger is someone within the viewer. And the someone who made the image. Here again, text is potentially entrapment. It needs mentioning, also en passant, that Freud’s thoughts on the uncanny, the moment of unheimlich, the point at which one sees the stranger within oneself, seems relevant in this connection. Cautionary word: the grand machines of interpretation will stifle the fugitive unease and delight of Kumari’s images. Best to confront them, and remain still. The stranger within will be flitting between self and other.
Marian Pastor Roces
Quezon City, Philippines 2004
Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic from the Philippines who works, lectures and writes internationally. Her theoretical work is grounded in the politics of cultural representation, mainly in museums, but also in relation to larger agendas dealing with indigenous cultures, the traumas of modernization, and power as it operates in urbanization. Her recent curatorial work includes "Sheer Realities: Body, Power and Clothing in 19th Century Philippines" (Asia Society, New York City, 2000); "Laon-Laan," which deals with the politics, science, and culture of rice in the Philippines (National Museum, 2003); and "Science Fictions," a major international exhibition of contemporary artists who are critiquing the orders of knowledge promoted by specific sciences (Earl Lu Gallery, Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore Art Museum, and the Esplanade, Singapore, 2003)
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