Sisil Fernando’s evolving artistic ‘aragalaya’

 

A year ago, Sisil Fernando, a visual artist, was asked to contribute a painting to ‘Artful Struggles 2024,’ an exhibition at the Gateshead Library Gallery commemorating the second anniversary of the ‘Aragalaya.’ The exhibition was presented by GemArts and Gateshead Arts Development Team as part of GemArts’ 2024 Masala Festival which celebrates South Asian art in the Northeast of the UK.  Sisil’s submission was titled ‘Alimankada’ and depicts a crow (quite a popular metaphor for corruption during those tense but exciting days) perched on a road sign indicating that elephants cross around that point. ‘Alimankada’ is a real place and is called Elephant Pass in English. Here it has more pronounced environment tones.  

Currently living in the UK, having completed an MA in Graphic Communication at the University of South Wales, UK, Sisil Fernando, at least in the context of this particular exhibition, is framed by the ‘Aragalaya.’ The ‘Aragalaya,’ translatable as ‘agitation,’ is and will be for a long time a word that describes a particularly turbulent moment in the political history of Sri Lanka, the mass protests against all kinds of depravations including fuel, electricity, food and lifestyle in 2022, which led to the incumbent president resigning and a regime-change of sorts.

It has meant many things to different people and this can be attributed to different objectives, political projects, outcome preferences and ideological bent. A common question that was asked thereafter was, ’what really changed?’ It is a valid query since a common demand articulated at the time was ‘system change.’  The ‘system’ was, so to speak, quite present and vocal within and without the ‘Aragalaya,’ and has proved to be quite resilient since.

For all that, it was most certainly a remarkable outpouring of youthfulness, courage and innovation, most evident in the cultural vibrancy of the artists; the ‘Aragalaya’ was in both frill and substance laden with music, painting and theatre. The ‘Aragalaya’ was dispersed or dissolved itself, but that vibrancy continued to flourish in relevant cultural enclaves.  

It can be argued that ‘art’ would have flourished anyway of course, but the word and its meaning have lent themselves to various forms of appropriation. It has acquired brand value and this has been recognised by those embedded in the protests as well as those who neither identified with the sentiments nor made up the numbers, as leaders or followers.

‘Aragalaya’ in this sense is akin to ‘revolution’ and even ‘Che,’ but that’s not the fault of the revolutionaries, the ‘aragalists’ or Che of course. And yet, the idea of objecting to perceived wrong or injustice can spill out of the contours of trope and travel along interesting roads or blaze new pathways as the case may be.

The ‘Aragalaya,’ it seems, has traveled to the United Kingdom or was taken there or else the ‘Aragalaya’ met another version of it in that country. That’s what struck me first when I perused the work of Sisil Fernando. He has been described as a ‘Veedi sarana siththara’ or a painter who walks the streets. ‘Street,’ is also a metaphor and to the extent that it alludes to things on the ground, grassroots, ordinary, agitation and everyday, Sisil is a walking political project or is geared to be so.

This is evident in the subjects that capture his imagination and which inspire his work. If street is all of the above and perhaps more, then it is where drudgery, hope, resistance and disappointment co-exist in uneasy configuration. It is in flux and is volatile; it is an unease that challenges attempts at capture. The street, like the ‘Aragalaya’ is made of constituent parts but these are not static. They move.

On the other hand, Sisil, even as he immerses himself in ‘urban sketching,’ which has become quite popular of late, also focuses on the political ‘immediate.’ In this instance, he had been commissioned, apparently, to address ‘Sri Lanka’s struggles over nature conservation.’ The painting does conform to the brief, but Sisil’s wider range of intellectual and political concerns enables him to problematise conservation and its challenges in a larger political sense.

The elephant is also the symbol of a political party that has dominated Sri Lanka for decades, a party whose leader, ironically, was seen as being part of systemic problems but nevertheless was the most evident beneficiary of the ‘Aragalaya.’ Did corruption, then, enable an elephant crossing in the political sense?

There are two other paintings in the ‘crow’ series, one with a crow perched on a stop sign and the other with a crow atop a sign indicating that school children cross the road ahead. The symbolism is plain but offers multiple extrapolations, just as in the one with the elephant crossing sign. He has used ink and watercolour for these paintings and has used a dip pen to draw. These choices, complemented by handmade instruments and of course a certain irreverence of style that is at seemingly flippant and yet carries the signature of meticulous craftsmanship, makes up his artistic signature. They seem ideal for paper sketches, which seems to be his preferred canvas as of now.

Sisil’s other interest is what he calls ‘the power of life,’ the vital energy that links humans and animals. These paintings, acrylic on canvas, do show shared energy that speak of both gentleness and strength.

Urban landscapes seem to have fascinated him of late. Capturing elements of the Sri Lankan ‘urban’ may have honed a more critical gaze on space in general, both architecture and the social life that makes and moves through buildings, for example. To him, cities are living entities shaped by human presence, emotion and memory.

‘They are like evidence left for the future about the present world,’ he has observed in an interview given to www.newswave.lk. He is not, however, a historian per se. Nevertheless, he does point us to the disjunctures in social life by ‘shaking up’ the urban landscape, as is evident in the series in his work in the UK.

The UK Collection, if I may, contains the iconic such as the Big Ben and a double-decker bus, and the relatively nondescript (for example, sketches of Cardiff and Newport. Not ‘picture postcard pretty’ but as or more alive thanks to choice in rendition.

The ‘people’ aren’t in your face; society is written into or recognised as being part of architecture. The politics of space is not outlined and perhaps that is something that the agitator in him could explore in future, after all he began his experiments with line and space as a political cartoonist. In fact he was adjudged the Cartoonist of the Year in 2019. 

The potential along such lines is apparent in the sketch titled ‘Bahirawakanda Kandy 2020,’ again mixed media on paper. The gigantic Buddha statue on top of the hill by that name looks down on the historic capital of the Central Province, Kandy. In his depiction, Sisil places several Buddhist monks before the Buddha, not in the orderly and serene manner that adherents of the doctrine would listen to the Enlightened One, but in various postures, almost discourteous and oblivious but certainly agitated.  

That’s all interpretation of course, but one struggles to find the ‘Aragalaya’ and the ‘aragalist’ in his ‘people and places’ work. Put another way, he hasn’t seen any ‘crows’ in the London, Cardiff and Newport he visited. Not that such things are musts of course. For now, he has the instruments, the insights and has honed his craft to a point that indicates that mind, eye and fingers are agile, agitated and yet controlled. What’s holding him back and what’s he holding back are the questions that pop out of his work.

There are crows, metaphorically speaking, everywhere. There are corruption-crows and crows that exploit, plunder, murder and silence. Such creatures inhabit buildings. Their signatures must be on the walls. Cities are political and ideological, just like people. A veedi sarana siththara like Sisil would do himself a great disservice if he gives such things a pass, unless his journey takes him to landscapes of the philosophical, which is possible and legitimate. Whether Sisil Fernando’s ‘everyday street’ takes him to such nodes that cry out for artistic comment remains to be seen.