The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Dominic Sansoni’s photographic practice moves between what curator Okwui Enwezor has described as resonant ‘acts of remembering and regeneration’. In Enwezor’s moving accounts of the archive as both a form and a medium in contemporary art, he suggests artists — in particular those working with film and photographic archives — have an ability to transform archival legacies into aesthetic principles: . . . the artist serves as the historic agent of memory, while the archive emerges as a place in which concerns with the past are touched by the astringent vapours of death, destruction and degeneration. Yet against the tendency of contemporary forms of amnesia whereby the archive becomes a site of lost origins and memory is dispossessed, it is also within the archive that acts of remembering and regeneration occur, where a suture between the past and present is performed, in the indeterminate zone between event and image, document and monument. 1 For more than 20 years, Sansoni has served as an agent of cultural memory, developing a major photographic archive relating to contemporary life in Sri Lanka. 2 Sansoni’s archive is shadowed by the country’s violent modern history, including the conflict which began in 1983, when divisions between the Tamil and the Sinhalese triggered civil war, and the devastating 2004 tsunami which resulted in significant damage and innumerable casualties. While these events provide an important context for the reception of Sansoni’s photographs, his work is in marked contrast to the images of violence and desecration amassed by media outlets. Sansoni instead offers firsthand accounts of the intimacies of daily life, formal studies of local architecture and the country’s extraordinary landscapes, and a record of important secular and religious festivities. For APT7, Sansoni is represented by a series of photographs from his vast collection of images documenting sacred sites throughout Sri Lanka, including roadside shrines and ephemeral religious structures. From a shrine at the Dambatenne tea estate celebrating the divine Hindu object vel (spear) to a coconut pandal archway commemorating the Catholic feast of Saint Anthony in Colombo, Sansoni’s photographs focus on the deities and images of Hinduism and Catholicism constructed for public veneration. The emphasis on these two minority religions in Sri Lanka, and indeed the omission of any iconography relating to the country’s dominant religion, Theravada Buddhism, gives the series a powerful subtext. The Shaivism branch of Hinduism is particularly prevalent in the country’s north and eastern provinces, the heartland of the Sri Lankan Tamils and the militant separatist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who fought to liberate themselves from the Sinhalese state during the country’s civil war. There is a strange and unsettling sense of absence about the photographs. Devoid of people, and beyond the remnants of flower offerings that point to a prior presence, the sites appear silent and abandoned to the elements. In one of the most arresting images from 2011, a Catholic altar in a home on Kayts Island, on the Jaffna Peninsula, is framed by a dilapidated wall, hinting at the trauma experienced by people living in the area during the civil war — in particular the 2006 Allaipiddy massacre — as well as in the current period of transition. The lives of ordinary civilians were affected irrevocably when government forces closed in on the northern provinces; during the course of fighting Tamil militants groups, significant numbers of fatalities were recorded and many remain displaced to this day. 3 At a time when Sri Lankans are engaged in a process of rebuilding and reconciliation, it seems appropriate that images exploring spiritual practice can connect a population with the possibilities of renewal following their experience of the war and disaster. It is not without significance that the Hindu deity of Ganesha appears in a number of photographs, manifested both as a stone sculpture and a temporary carving. Revered as the ‘remover of obstacles’, the figure of Ganesha can be read as a symbol of hope. For Dominic Sansoni, his archive recalls the past in the present and importantly creates opportunities to reflect, renew and rebuild an image of Sri Lanka outside the all-too-familiar discourse of war. It is a process that examines the question — how do artists make work after war has ended? For many years, the Sri Lankan civil war remained a spectre and subject for the country’s artists, filmmakers and authors; the challenge Sansoni and his contemporaries take up now is the search for a new language to explore Sri Lanka’s complex history and culture to ensure the conversation moves forward. José Da Silva 1 Okwui Enwezor, ‘Archive fever: Photography between history and the monument,’ in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art , International Centre of Photography, New York; Steidl Publishers, New York, 2008, pp.46–7. 2 In 2006, Sansoni co-founded TheeBlindMen Photography, an online archive of stock photography, with Rukshan Jayewardene and Sebastian Posingis. See <http://threeblindmen.photoshelter.com> , viewed 10 September 2012. 3 A United Nations report on the final phases of the Sri Lankan civil war, released in March 2011, stated that while there was no authoritative figure for civilian causalities, an estimated 7721 people had been killed and 18 479 people injured between August 2008 and 13 May 2009. See Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka , p.39. A US Department of State report suggested that the actual toll may never be known, as many deaths were unreported and large numbers of people remain unaccounted for. See Report to Congress on Incidents During the Recent Conflict in Sri Lanka , p.3. In February 2012, the Sri Lankan government’s Department of Census and Statistics released its official report on civilian casualties, suggesting some 7400 people died of undefined or ‘other’ causes. See Enumeration of Vital Events 2011: Northern Province Sri Lanka , pp.19–20. It is generally understood that as many as 300 000 people were displaced during the last stages of the conflict, with many still interned in government army camps. DOMINIC SANSONI Acts of remembering and regeneration 193