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After attending a host of high powered biennales in Asia this year, I found the Colombo Biennale in Sri Lanka to be the least ostentatious. Featuring established and emerging artists from Europe and, mostly, South Asia, this low key exhibition, that was founded in 2009 by the British gallerist Annoushka Hempel, continued its mandate to bring local artists and regional concerns to an international platform.
In this fourth edition of the Colombo Art Biennale (CAB), Alnoor Mitha, the London based curator and Senior Research Fellow at the Manchester Metropolitan University, brought together a host of works that mined current and past historical events in his exhibition titled Conceiving Spaces. Although the calibre of the works in the show was not consistent, and the frustration of finding different venues was exacerbated by Colombo’s hot and humid environment, Conceiving Spaces should be applauded for the way in which works from Sri Lanka and the Pakistani diaspora excavated new ways and methodologies of presenting basic human concerns.
At the Prana Lounge, one of the quaint temporary spaces that are often used in South Asian Biennales, the works took on a more personal resonance through being outside the white cube setting. For instance, the Bahrain-born US-based artist Ghada Khunji’s photographic self portraits, The Dark Ages (2016), brought home the necessity of subverting preconceived notions of religion and identity. By presenting herself as the Virgin Mary, and as a female Christ-like figure stabbed with swords, Khunji drew attention to her own humanity as a Muslim woman feeling singled out and ostracised in today’s deeply contentious environment. In the adjacent room, UK-based Hardeep Pandhal used cartoons and prickly doodles in his Jojoboys series (2014)