Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

racism withi n me? It challenged and shattered everyth ing that I bel ieved to be true of myself. It questioned my integrity as a human being. Most of my a rt during the period, from 1 983 to 1 994 was a imed at capturing and chronicling this anxiety within me. By about 1 994, the main 'subject' of my works moved towards understanding the social and cultural aspects that sustain organised crime in Sri Lanka. I made a decision to get involved in constructing and suggesting avenues out of this crisis. During the same time I became heavily pro-active with programs that promoted the proposed constitutional changes, which if they were approved in the parl iament and in a referendum would bring pol itical autonomy in the form of a federal government to the largely Tam il population in the north and east of Sri Lanka. One of the important works along these lines was an installation named Shrine that I showed in Colombo in 1 994 in 'New Approaches in Contemporary Sri Lanka Art', an exh ibition curated by independent curator Sharmini Pereira. This work was later shown in Fukuoka and currently it is being made into a full scale memorial with the title Shrine ofthe Innocents for the victims of political violence in Sri Lanka . It is funded by the President's Fund as a result of a Presidential Comm ission by Mrs. Chandrika Bandaranayake Kumaranatunge. My next important work in this category is the installation , 'Yantra-Gala ' and the round pilgrimage currently on show at APT3 . This work was first shown in Colombo 1 997. In this work I have tried to make several comments on the Sri Lankan crisis. Here I am trying to bring into focus the inability of religious institutions to relieve us from violence and the fact that these institutions in fact camouflage and j ustify violence. I have also tried to argue here that the now corrupted feudal and peasant attitudes and the ind ividuals and the institutions that have come to the surface of history by way of the capitalist-democratic system, continue to feed on the corrupted attitudes as the root cause that sustains and justifies violence in Sri Lanka. 1 66