True Being

 I had a good time to visit the exhibition ‘True Being’ at the Art Circle, Department of fine Arts University of Jaffna.  Three young artists gathered the viewers together inside the gallery. Who are the graduates from university of Jaffna and also they exhibited their artworks with their group in May 2018 at Saskia Fernando gallery Colombo. That exhibition was titled ‘Being and Becoming’ and curated by T.Shanathanan.

Vimal is practicing different mediums like fiber, waste plastic objects and textiles to make his sculptures. The sculptures looks like assemblages made by the parts of human body. He tries to tell the sexual violence which happen often in his society. He discribes the human body as an object of violence. So he uses the shapes of sexual parts of the human body and produces new alienate sculptures. Catharina creates paintings of coral stones. There a lot of variety of corals in her paintings in difference shades of ash, black and blue. She represents herself as corals and she argues “the corals are look like stones but they have the soul they breathe, they grow…. But we can’t see through our naked eye. I feel myself as like coral because I am not sure about me that I am alive or not”.

Shironi makes very tiny works to take the viewer very close to the frame. She does not paint or draw them. She sews very tiny figures on a soft cloth surface. She tries to find out her identity and makes questions herself. Some situations make her to live in different places. In this condition she fights to find out her own being. She includes her own experiences and turns them tiny stitching. She uses the shapes of Kitchen utensils, furniture, dresses and some other objects in the works and composes them in a surreal view.  According the works of these three artists I could see they are trying to find the true. In the other hand if it the works look like self questioning or self talking they also talk about the social issues. In this point of view the self is also created by the society. Again we want to ask for whom or to whom we true being??