| Mieke Kooistra: Why did you call this show Trauma? What does the title mean? Dumith Kulasekara: “Trauma” is a Greek word for “wound.” It is a physical injury or an extreme emotional shock that may lead to traumatic neurosis. This exhibition is called Trauma because I want to confront the spectator through my work with the anguish humanity is facing, but that we are all trying very hard to ignore. My work describes the anxiety caused by losing the value of culture, of human relationships, friendship, brotherhoods, and spirituality. The many limp penises in my paintings symbolize the death of the masculinity and of its creativity. |
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Dumith Kulasekara’s work was on view this past September at Harold Pieris Gallery, Sri Lanka.
Dumith Kulasekara, The wo-man in Infancy, 2008. Oil on canvas, 79 x 65.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.Mieke Kooistra: Why did you call this show Trauma? What does the title mean?
Dumith Kulasekara: “Trauma” is a Greek word for “wound.” It is a physical injury or an extreme emotional shock that may lead to traumatic neurosis. This exhibition is called Trauma because I want to confront the spectator through my work with the anguish humanity is facing, but that we are all trying very hard to ignore. My work describes the anxiety caused by losing the value of culture, of human relationships, friendship, brotherhoods, and spirituality. The many limp penises in my paintings symbolize the death of the masculinity and of its creativity.
MK: What do you mean by the “death of masculinity?”
DK: I feel today everyone is trying to construct an identity by looking at himself or herself—much like Narcissus did. What I call a “father figure” in my life is absent. My father died and I started looking for a role model, an ideal person to identify with, but all I see around me is Narcissus, people in love with their own image. This is significant in all my works. I am not saying that men should be playing a dominant role in society at the expense of women. What I am trying to say is that we have lost the cultural meaning in our life. Despite the importance of human relations we seem to prefer constructing virtual relationships. Most of us are not conscious of the crisis we are in right now. The contemporary reality is that we build our identity, we represent ourselves, through the goods we consume and how we look, rather than through what and who we are or believe in.
MK: Why do you use yourself (or your wife) as your main protagonist?
DK: I am constantly looking at what is happening in my own life and the world around me. My aim is to reveal the inside of everything, to hold up a mirror to look at our real inner selves. You can stand in front of the mirror and ask, “Who are you?” Having a penis does not make you a man, just as not having a penis does not make you a woman. Having a child does not make you a father. Having a womb does not make you a mother. Unless we are willing to arrive at some real conclusions of what it is that makes us human, we will stay traumatized and in crisis.
MK: How long have you been painting?
DK: I started painting at a young age. My father was my art teacher, but he was also a huge part of my life, and much of my work deals with childhood memories. The year I entered university was also the year my father died, and I became more aware of my environment, my family, the social atmosphere. His death created a wound in my psyche, and I tried to build a bridge between my personal and social life. I started asking myself what was there. Six years at the art faculty gave me the capacity to reveal my inside and discover new techniques to translate this into visual form.
MK: Do you believe art is political?
DK: I get my ideas from what I observe in society and from what happens to me personally, and I feel that the crisis I observe cannot end until a real political movement changes it. I can only address this crisis through my work. I also do not believe that artists should just copy or repeat the same existing artistic practices or trends. The most significant role for every artist is his or her intervention in the social and political sphere. Ideally, these interventions should be consistent with the artist’s personal life. The paintings in this exhibition did not appear suddenly; they are the result of a four-year journey. The largest work in the exhibition I started in 2006 and grew with me as I questioned the subjectivity of contemporary human life.
