Theme

A Performance Platform

Performance art is an offshoot of visual arts where the artist uses his/her body as a medium of communication. Performance art is a very powerful form of art and one could find well developed performance art practices in many of the countries in Asia. However, due to many reasons performance art did not evolve within Sri Lanka as a popular mainstream art practice, even though the first recorded performance took place as far back as 1994. This is due mainly to lack of attention given within the art educational institutions to performance art, lack of patronage and not having a well- developed discourse on performance as an art form among artist. None of the Sri Lankan higher education institutions have recognized performance art as an area of interest in the visual arts. Although Sri Lanka boast of highly developed performative elements within its religious rituals, the art audiences are not familiar to the use of body as a medium in visual arts in Sri Lanka. Though we have a long tradition of performing arts we have not felt the need to pursue performance art as visual art form within the Sri Lankan art scene. As an initial attempt of addressing this neglect of performance art we are planning to conduct a performance event in Colombo in March 2015.

Concept note for the Performance Festival: ‘Borders and lines: the temporality of landscape’

Participating performance artists are encouraged to work within the theme of ‘Borders and lines: the temporality of landscape’. Borders and lines while being different in their function are inseparable from each other as visual metaphors and lived experiences. Borders, while signifying the presence of a space it invokes the exactness of the concept of line into its signification process. Borders are deeply embedded in movements and dynamics of linearity, and spatiality. As such the concepts of border and line are entwined with the temporality of the landscape and by implication they become embodied concepts.

Thinking in these lines – oscillating between the concepts of border, line and landscape – the complex concept of landscape becomes the ‘world’ as it is known, as it is experienced, and as it is imagined by those who dwell therein – those who journey along the paths connecting lines and borders constructing webs and networks of associations – networks of ownership. Imagining space couched within and defined by borders and lines is, I would argue, is an essential nature of the subjectivity of the nation-state inhabitant. This perhaps lies in the center of contemporary anxieties of knowing and experiencing the world and life.