A man lies on a bed, seemingly asleep, turned onto side, facing the viewer. He lies on a simple bed, still in his shirt and trousers. A bedside table is at the head of the bed and in the background against a sea of blue we see a woman in a pink sari with her back to us, looking back over her shoulder. Above her, but in a different scale are seven pigeons in a row, and then further to the right, one in flight. That latter one hangs in the sky above a tractor. It seems to be driving towards a small table that has a decorative object on it, a vase perhaps, in the shape of a comic frog.
The individual elements of Varshga Premarasa’s painting ‘The Lion’s Memories’ do not seem to quite add up, but somehow make sense in the way that different elements of a dream or a hallucination might. There is something ominous about the row of birds, even about the tractor heading towards the central characters but it is not clear where the threat comes from. Of course, this conjunction of disparate but somehow connected motifs is part of a modernist artistic tradition, that of surrealism, but here it seems that there is something else going on that is linked to the artist’s cultural heritage and her other paintings.
Premarasa was born in London and has a Tamil Sri Lankan cultural background. It is difficult to read her works without reference to that country and in particular the Sri Lankan civil war which regularly flared between 1983 to 2009. The complexities of that conflict are largely unknown outside Sri Lanka and its diasporic communities although the last phase of it from 2009 finally reached international attention. That phase was particularly brutal; UN documents and other sources estimate that up to 70,000 Tamil civilians were indiscriminately killed as the Government launched a massive military offensive aimed at wiping out the separatist organisation, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) seemingly regardless of civilian casualties.
There are journalistic accounts of this period, for example Callum Macrae’s Channel 4 documentary ‘No Fire Zone: In the Killing Fields of Sri Lanka’ and Frances Harrison’s book ‘Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lankan’s Civil War’. Both of these were done by western journalists in the aftermath of the conflict. Premarasa is making work from a different position – that of a diasporic British Tamil born here and who was a child when the conflict ended. Premarasa’s is accessing a past – that of the country her family come from, the structures that quietly form a very specific diasporic experience. Like many in the diaspora the main way to do this is through listening to stories, from family and their friends and filtering those narratives through her own form of story-telling.
Yet there’s an issue inherent in this method. Those family members who remained in Sri Lanka and their relatives and friends in diaspora don’t talk about everything. In fact it might be possible to go further; there is a tendency to avoid talking about the conflict. The memory of war, torture and the decades-long internecinal killing between two groups who were once neighbours are glossed over, or elided to in indirect fashion. This is reinforced by the post-conflict stance of successive governments in Sri Lanka to not recognise the full extent of the last years of the war, consistently denying or downplaying international accusations of war crimes and civilian massacres. Instead the administration of 2005 to 2015 claimed the military had carried out a ‘humanitarian operation’ with zero civilian casualties and the administration of 2019 to 2022 took a similar stance. Elision then, can also still also operation as a form protection, against officialdom but also against members of a mixed post-conflict community or neighbourhood.
Premarasa’s works then are paintings that speak of the role of mediated memories that have come through both stories and silences; what is retold but also what is not talked about. One might read those silences in the backgrounds of saturated colour that Premarasa’s motifs are set against – filled with light but deliberately empty, rich with vivid colour but strangely threatening. The history of trauma and its ghostly presence in the present disrupts normal storytelling, and so reconstructing that from the diaspora necessitates an imaginary act, that might counter a narrative of a united nation where war is a distant memory and now is a welcoming haven for western tourists. And that position from the diaspora is key to Premarasa’s work. In some of the paintings we see the incongruous figure of an anthropomorphised frog and it is possible to read this presence as a way of Premarasa signalling her own position – an outside and insider at the same time, a subjectivity approaching this closed narrative from a necessarily different angle. Homi Bhabha’s reworking of Frantz Fanon’s idea of belatedness is relevant here; there is a time-lag to the diasporic position, a dislocated temporal relationship to trauma; but it is from within that time-lag that we can start to allow a space for the stories from those who experience them, to re-emerge.