{"id":92791,"date":"2013-06-23T14:35:52","date_gmt":"2013-06-23T09:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=92791"},"modified":"2013-06-29T04:44:55","modified_gmt":"2013-06-28T23:14:55","slug":"sri-lanka-colours-of-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/sri-lanka-colours-of-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka: Colours Of Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Lewis Garland<\/a><\/span> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Lewis Garland<\/p><\/div>\n

Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London –<\/strong>\u00a0Colours of Change: Stephen Champion\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

‘Colours of Change<\/a><\/span>‘ is\u00a0 a retrospective of\u00a0 the\u00a0 photographer Stephen Champion’s work in Sri Lanka\u00a0 over the past 28 years.\u00a0 It is immediately clear that this exhibition is not the work\u00a0 of a shoot and run fly-by, but of an artist intensely dedicated to his muse, the island and its peoples,\u00a0 in all of\u00a0 its contradictions.\u00a0 In his own words,\u00a0 his long-standing relationship with Sri Lanka\u00a0 has taught him to\u00a0 \u201clove the plastic as much as\u00a0 sea\u201d.\u00a0 Champion’s work not only displays a great passion for the country but an acute understanding of\u00a0 its diversity and nuance: geographical, historical, political and cultural.<\/p>\n

Champion’s depth of knowledge, combined with his ability to\u00a0 ask questions and\u00a0 allude to wider\u00a0 narratives within a single frame, has\u00a0 some fascinating results.\u00a0 One photograph that particularly stands out in this regard, pictures a\u00a0 group of young\u00a0 Buddhist monks\u00a0 strolling, seemingly unnoticed, past sun-soaked western tourists.\u00a0 What makes this composition\u00a0 clever is that, through a simple,\u00a0 understated comical\u00a0 juxtaposition of characters, volumes are spoken about the uneasy relationship between\u00a0 Sri Lanka’s rapidly growing tourist industry and its\u00a0 traditions.<\/p>\n

As with the above mentioned photograph, Champion’s eye for capturing the island’s idiosyncrasies and the subtle\u00a0 absurdities of the day-to-day\u00a0 is present throughout much of this exhibition: The young man posing\u00a0 like an 80’s pop-icon\u00a0 beside a ramshackle\u00a0 bus stand; the auto rickshaw emblazoned with\u00a0 London’s East end colloquialisms-\u201dLovely Jubbly, Del boy, Geezer\u201d; The charming grin of a Nuwara Eliyan worker, clad in a lilac suit jacket and sarong with a chemical sprayer tucked under his arm.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Vavuniya farmer<\/p><\/div>\n

Another common Motif in Champion’s work is the placement of solitary human figures within landscapes, often silhouetted or turned away from camera and\u00a0 frequently involved in agricultural activities- Fishermen\u00a0 in Jaffna and Puttalam Lagoons, a farmer gazing across his land in Meddawachchiya. This device provides these picturesque, catalogue-friendly landscapes with a human context, not only breathing\u00a0 life into the images but also providing us with a glimpse into the particular\u00a0 regional relationships between\u00a0 the \u00a0people\/s and their natural surroundings, soil or sea.<\/p>\n

A reality that cannot be ignored about this retrospective is that the period it covers aligns closely with\u00a0 Sri Lanka’s civil war. Unsurprisingly therefore, the spectre of war and\u00a0 of the country’s\u00a0 \u00a0fragile post-war peace loom large. At times war and its impacts are inferred to rather than approached directly-war is treated as an ever-present rather than a subject in itself.\u00a0 This is particularly true of many of the images from Jaffna, from the razor-wire fence that cuts across our view of Jaffna Lagoon to the uncomfortable emptiness of the city after curfew. At other times\u00a0 Champion deals directly with the conflict, both in its corporeal brutality and its wider costs. This area of his work undoubtedly includes the\u00a0 most immediately evocative imagery in the exhibition: a\u00a0 child tagged with the words ‘wounded calamity’; the trickle of blood emerging from beneath a closed door; the twisted, blackened carnage of war.\u00a0 One\u00a0 inspired piece of curatorship\u00a0 is the pairing of two images.\u00a0 In the\u00a0 first, a young female LTTE<\/a><\/span> (Tamil Tiger) cadre struggles to hold up her rocket launcher as if dragging around an unwanted extra-limb; in the second a young women with a prosthetic limb glares directly into the lens. This is a story in need of no further explanation.<\/p>\n

Given the scope of this exhibition, both in terms of time scale and subject matter, there are moments when one yearns\u00a0 for a\u00a0 more contextualisation. Having said this, Sri Lanka is not a country lacking in polemicists and perhaps, in allowing the\u00a0 space for interpretation, Champion has purposefully sought to avoid becoming embroiled too closely in the island’s politics-to remain the artist-observer.<\/p>\n

‘Colour of Change’, taken as a whole, provides a compelling visual record of a tumultuous period in Sri Lankan history, an insight into the essence of\u00a0 everyday life within the country, and, more than anything, the story of an artist’s ever changing relationship with his muse.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A former female LTTE cadre<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tourists and monks on the beach<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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