Something refreshing, something variable and something that brought together a melange of materials and multiple expressions. Blueprint 12 had something to savour in terms of melding Indian as well as South Asian artists. Far from the staple of famous names and run-of-the-mill identities, here was a set of artists waiting to be discovered for novel representations and explorations. Artists from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh are the four nations united in created islands of brilliance.
Mandira Lamba’s slender fingers were settling the aged pages of books that had tiny toy humans by Sri Lankan artist Kingsley Gunatillake. Titled Protest, 2022 this was a quaint installation of used books and copper toy figures measuring 17.5 cm x 21.5 cm x 5.5 cm each as an installation of 20 books. In an unconscious way, viewers were looking at an elegant elegy.
The beauty of the ensemble was the kinetic signature that it held together. The ordering of little toy figures had about them an insignia of deeper rhetoric in the documentation of protests. At once the thoughts flowed of India and Sri Lanka not differing too much in social and cultural fabric.
A leading abstractionist of his country, Kingsley Gunatillake has a dual practice – of canvases and paperworks exploring forms and colour theories, and artist’ books, which focus on the long and terrorised history of Sri Lankan civil war that lasted for over three decades, leaving a trail of dead memories and empty bullets amidst promises of reconciliation by politicians in its wake. The ensemble of human figures carry questions on the aftermath of war, consequences of destruction and explosion, and the rationality left in their inheritance. Sensorial and sensitive hidden notes of violence create their own pattern of pathos.
According to Lamba the spine of his book practice is inspired from the burning of the Jaffna Library in 1981, which is reiterated through a meditative practice of burning and cutting; an act of remembering and that of a witness.
