Curator's Note

The Kitsch and the Expressive: recent works  of Anura Krishantha

by Jagath Weerasinghe

For many years Anura Krishanta has been working with a selected number of visual motifs: chairs, tables, flowers and wreathes. His preoccupation with chairs and tables has its genesis in early 2000 and with flowers and wreathes in the period 2003-2005 While tables and chairs as visual motifs present a shared social-cultural experience specific to them, flowers and wreathes present their own commonality. But what is fascinating is the simple and subtle ways in which Anura Krishantha combines these two different sets of experiences together in a single work giving rise to a visual reality that oscillates between being ‘trivial/kitsch’ and ‘serious/profound’

  

As such, I would suggest that Anura Krishantha’s works are a result of two distinct streams of thought that work in tandem. His early works on chairs and tables, which he exhibited in 2000 at VAFA Gallery, clearly illustrated his interest in Pop Art (at a somewhat superficial level) and the kitsch. In terms of thematic and content, this body of work contained a very ‘light and easy’ mood that created a certain sense of decorative triviality; the sign of being kitsch (kitsch in the Oxford English Dictionary is defined as works of arts or objects that are popular but that are considered to have no real artistic value and to be lacking in good taste). For us, it was this sense of triviality that  made Anura Krishantha’s work very interesting and cutting edge in the context of contemporary Sri Lankan art of first few years of the new millennium. His works were considered an important contribution, though modest, by his fellow artists. Those works gave no indication what so ever to an artistic personality that had any interest in political or national issues. They, as art works, were in every sense outside of Sri Lankan modernist discourse, and had no signs that could be labeled as ‘typically’ Sri Lankan. Perhaps this might have been the reason why his works drew no attention either from local art collectors or from art curators from the ‘developed’ world (!).

Tables and chairs, in a way, defined Anura Krishantha’s artistic personality; he came to be seen as an artist steeped in a pop-kitsch tradition. For some, the pop-kitsch had no sense of seriousness and lacked any depth of emotion. This, however, is far from the truth. Behind his preoccupation with chairs and tables, there is a story, a very personal one laden with emotions as illustrated by the statement that accompanied the work he did at the Artlink 2000 workshop:

‘on another day a person I once knew sat in front of this table. This purely white tablecloth can’t be this empty. I tried to recapture the vibrantly colorful and beautiful world that I once knew’ .

Anura Krishantha’s attempts at incorporating emotional dimensions, in early 2001, within works that are largely pop and kitsch in appearance can best be seen in works where he had burnt some parts of the work adding an emotionally expressive edge to the work.

By 2003, with a new series of works consisting of flowers, wreathes and boxes that he exhibited in the ‘Charted Thefts’   exhibition, Anura Krishantha quite powerfully brought in an expressive dimension to his works that made explicit references to violence and death. These works titled ‘Stolen Wreathes’, where partially burnt wreaths that were placed within illuminated boxes with a glass front. They visually oscillated between a distant memory of a gravestone and a light-box found in commercial places that advertised various consumer products.  If in his earlier works the kitsch aspect was the main visual reference, then in these works it was the expressive element. The kitsch aspect had only a secondary yet very important role to play in the discursive visual-ness of the works.

Four years later, a much experienced Anura Krishantha, in the current exhibition presents us with a body of works where he has been able to amalgamate the two aspects of his artistic repertoire: the kitsch and the expressive. In doing this he falls in line with a small yet a strong sub-trend which can be identified as ‘Political Kitsch’ within the art of the ‘90s Trend’ that emerged in the mid 1990s. This sub trend which is highly political and expressive in terms of its thematics and content is heavily indebted to popular media and kitsch art of the late 20th century consumerism. The earliest example for a successful formulation of the basic features of ‘Political Kitsch’ art could be seen in Prasanna Ranabahu’s highly acclaimed work titled ‘The Beautiful Explosion’, which he showed in the ‘Made in IAS’ exhibition held at Barefoot Gallery in 2000 . The other artists who exhibit Political Kitsch are Kusal Gunasekera, Pala Pothupitiya and Sanath Kalubadana .

For the current exhibition at theertha Red Dot Gallery Anura Krishantha is showing 30 multi dimensional works that look like chairs, tables and boxes. These scaled down chairs, tables and boxes carry flowers, toy weapons and printed images of such items making the current body of work truly and essentially ‘Politcal Kitsch’.

Image Gallery