Towards a bright future

For many of us, history represents a search for meaning in life attempting to make sense of one’s life by treating the past as the key determinant of our contemporary experience. In many situations we present conflict of trauma which we undergo as a result of past suffering. Increasingly, personal meanings can be achieved by each individual through engaging with the rights and wrongs of the past. And in the process, history becomes customized as an instrument of individual therapy. As individuals, we wish we could attempt to cleanse what we tend to identify as dreadful memoirs of our personal, social, political and cultural history.

Symbolically using a commode, toilet paper rolls, air freshener, a mop – I depict how as an individual we treat the past and how we use the above items, to relieve ourselves from our contemporary issues.

We consciously or unconsciously in a fatalistic fashion are increasingly comfortable to interpret all of our current problems as the inevitable outcomes of past events, presenting ourselves as traumatized victims who wait to revitalize from unpleasant past.

Along with the display of the digital art work, fusing sounds of a flushing commode, a voice of meditation instruction as a background sound, thus creating an awareness to the audience leading them to come into terms with past, that can be experienced as a healing process, a meditation. At this process making history can be identify as a therapy.

Colombo Art Biennale 2014 

Interactive sound Art Work

 By Poornima Jayasinghe