Art has always had the ability to capture the time in which it’s created – and indeed, the further back in time we go, the more we look to art to paint us a (sometimes literal) picture of the experiences of those who came before us.
It is no secret that the last two and a half years have been some of the most interesting and tumultuous years of the recent past – the pandemic and our own national struggles have put Sri Lanka in a time of unprecedented change, and artists of all forms will, and are, playing a part in documenting that change and creating art that captures it or responds to it.
One such artist is Muvindu Binoy, a multidisciplinary artist whose work mainly takes shape in digital collage and film. As a digital artist, Muvindu observes his personal outlook, exploring themes of gender, agency, titles, and the expectation of traditional values contradicted by modern-emancipated standards of the digital age.
Muvindu’s first creative forays were in the world of music which then led to filmmaking (his first feature film ‘Kotta Baba’ (pillow talk) was released in 2019, and despite having made a name for himself as a digital collage artist over the last few years, he still sees himself primarily as a filmmaker. His journey as a still visual artist started in 2015 when he started making digital collage series with the Saskia Fernando Gallery.
On 16 June, Muvindu unveiled his newest artistic showcase – a groundbreaking exhibition in many respects, Muvindu presents two bodies of work. One showcase, Survival of the Fragile, is a visual exploration of fragility and vulnerability that Muvindu created while in residency with Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France in 2021. The other, PROTEST IN COLOUR is a series created by Muvindu at the protest site GotaGoGama in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 2022. It is a direct response to the political unrest in the country and is something Muvindu created with the support of AI.
Survival of the Fragile was informed by the pandemic and its emotional impact combined with how people responded to it, and PROTEST IN COLOUR is Muvindu’s way of documenting the ongoing protests and the social change it is driving in Sri Lanka. Brunch sat down with Muvindu for a chat about his newest showcases and how he sees artists playing a role in documenting social change.
Tell us about Survival of the Fragile – what is it about and what inspired it?
At the time of my residency in Paris at Cité Internationale des Arts in 2021, the main thing happening both locally and internationally was Covid. Whenever I spoke to friends and family, it became quite straightforward hearing about who had got Covid, who was still living, and who was dead.
I was away from all my comfort zones or what I thought my comfort zones were, and even in Paris, the situation was different. You still had to go through the experience that comes with Covid-19, and that was actually how the title Survival of the Fragile came about – it’s a play on the Darwinian theory ‘survival of the fittest’. I realised from chatting with my family and friends that the situation is very fragile, and in a sense, it’s actually not the fittest who survive, but the fragile, the ones who survive by being sympathetic towards each other. Physical and mental fitness didn’t matter to Covid-19, and even now, especially now, it makes so much sense that the people who are sympathetic towards each other, who are fragile, are surviving and carrying out history and civilisation in a kind and loving way.
My work is digital collage – when it comes to still images, I tend to approach digital collage as a practice because it is very fast and comfortable execution-wise. However, I don’t like to limit myself to an approach; it all depends on the idea. If the idea requires me to sit down in front of a canvas, I will do it, but if the idea says film, then I won’t go and paint simply because that’s what I do or don’t do. It’s about what medium that idea requires.
Alongside the still visual art, Survival of the Fragile also has a film element to it – as a visual poem that is still ongoing as I lurk and roam around Paris with my lo-fi video camera, peeping into the lives of France-born millenials of migrated Sri Lankan parents and also sparing moments with rebels and artists of the new youth. This is my video diary while I reside in Paris where fever dream-like visuals get entangled, blurring what is real and what is not. A contemporary visual contemplation of fragility and vulnerability as we experience death more closely than ever before.
What about PROTEST IN COLOUR – how did you go about capturing the protests? Does it link back to Survival of the Fragile?
The PROTEST IN COLOUR series uses base photographs I found online that capture the essence of GotaGoGama when it started. These photographs come from various sources – from photojournalists, from news sites, from people – and if you look at them you will notice you’ve seen them before. I wanted my collages to look like renaissance paintings. Aesthetically, renaissance paintings are larger than life and have so much colour.
I worked with an AI programme on PROTEST IN COLOUR. It was a programme where you give text prompts and images and I experimented with it in many ways (sometimes for one collage I would do 100 or 200 experiments) feeding prompts like renaissance painting titles to keep generating artwork until I achieved the look and result I wanted, and then manipulated that artwork. I didn’t want the last result to be just the machine’s choice, but to alter it and give it my essence.
Apart from the initial approach I took in terms of digital collage, it doesn’t link back to Survival of the Fragile because it is strictly about GotaGoGama and its rise and Survival of the Fragile was made while I was residing in Paris and before the Sri Lankan political landscape changed.
What was it like creating art with AI?
This wasn’t the first time I’ve worked with AI, but it is the first time I’m publishing such work, and though it shows alongside Survival of the Fragile, technically, in terms of aesthetics, it’s very far from how I thought I would end the Survival of the Fragile series.
Working with AI itself, some parts were actually really easy. Many of us who are familiar with the internet know how AI works – it’s quite straightforward to a point, but you also don’t get the result you desire, and after a point, you don’t always know what the outcome will be. That’s why I would experiment 100 or 200 times with the same picture. It’s me against the machine, and I found it really interesting but also frustrating because I don’t come from a tech background and am not familiar with coding. But it was simple enough for me to understand, and I enjoyed seeing the outcome very much. I do feel that if someone knows technical aspects like coding they can be more familiar with it, so it was a bit of a struggle for me, but I took an instinctive trial and error approach.
With documenting change, what role do you think artists have to play in the Sri Lankan context, especially now?
Personally, I think the main or biggest thing any artist can do is to archive more than document. Archive everything as a sort of reflection on the timeline, whether you’re a visual artist, a filmmaker, a designer. Whenever and wherever, it is important to archive the small things. They can be creatively presented or simply reflect as an obvious historical example. We know of the French Revolution by way of books and poetry, which was how things were documented back then.
At present, this has expanded greatly – there’s AI and social media, whether it is Instagram stories or Facebook posts. Even our Facebook timelines are archives, and more important than aesthetics, our archives will be how the next generation or generations after that will reflect on this time and extract knowledge about what happened.
Rather than doing exhibitions or filming documentaries for the sake of fact, I think these timelines are more precious than anything and are things we can look back on. In my head, these timelines will be similar to what it was to write epics or novels.
How do you hope people will respond to Survival of the Fragile and PROTEST IN COLOUR?
I really don’t want to place any sort of pressure on the viewers to take away something from the art, but given my aesthetic, I would hope that people who view it feel a fire. With PROTEST IN COLOUR, I hope they would feel that same fire that led to the initiation and the starting point of the Aragalaya. Personally, I never thought I’d see anything like this form of rising up, and regardless of the ending or how we face it, I see it as a celebration of absolute collective power.
Survival of the Fragile is much more indirect than PROTEST IN COLOUR because it holds no direct theme or political reasoning. Survival of the Fragile can be observed from everything, from simple mundane things like an egg being fragile to anyone’s vulnerability and how people see that vulnerability. Vulnerability is fragility, from political views to sexuality to gender and to anything else. I would hope that people see the work in a very personal way. There is no right or wrong way to feel about it.