Exhibition Dates: 29th April to 27th May 2017
Time: 10:30 am to 6:30 pm (Monday – Saturday; Sunday with appointment)
Address: Exhibit 320, F-320, Lado Sarai, New Delhi – 110030
Gallery Exhibit 320 in collaboration with Blueprint.12 presents a solo show by Sri Lanka’s contemporary artist Pala Pothupitiye at Exhibit 320 in Delhi. Through his work, Pala Pothupitiye confronts issues such as colonialism, nationalism, religious extremism and militarism, and extends his inquiry to questions of caste, the distinction between art and craft, tradition and modernity, as well as generating a critique of Euro-centrism.
For the exhibition ‘Until This Moment’, Pala has created new cartographies that talk about memory and its erasure, identities and their discomfiture, the 30-year long Sri Lankan war and postwar complexities. He has worked on a series of government maps and old colonial maps, merging them to create the said cartographies. Pala treats maps as two-dimensional surfaces, which he uses to draw attention to lived experiences of these inscribed spaces.
His art project with maps is a way by which he is engaged in re-crafting the ‘social’ version of maps with the idea of focusing on the underlying geo-politics that have shifted or is undergoing constant change along with its historical evolution. While the maps have remained as documents of cartography to locate places or to give a geographic sense to the world, seemingly placid; when considering the shifting of borders and renaming processes of places, they have sometimes been highly controversial and a bloody source of conflict and violence. Therefore, Pala arrives at a conclusion that Maps are not so innocent documents after all.
About Pala Pothupitiye
Pala Pothupitiye, born in 1972, obtained his degree in Fine Arts at the Visual and Performance Art University in Colombo. Raised in a village of traditional southern Sri Lankan craft-artists and ritualists, his work incorporates and reinterprets the material and philosophical content of traditional art.
In 2005, he was selected to participate in the third Fukuoka Triennial at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, and in 2010 he won the jury award of the Sovereign Art Asian Prize, Hong Kong. Recently Pala has been part of the Singapore Biennale 2016. Pala is also associated with the Teertha Collective.
At present, Pothupitiye is living and working at the Mullegama Art Center near Colombo where he runs his workshop and an art school, supporting younger artists and schoolchildren.