Ties That Bind from Activist Artist Vetri Jathiskumar
Last weekend in Batticaloa I had the good fortune to meet Vetri Jathiskumar, an exciting young artist from Ampara district preparing for his first solo exhibition this coming weekend. Walking into his house with the artworks lined up against every available wall space both inside and on the front porch, you can see the amount of work that has gone into preparing for this first solo show. This is eight year’s worth of work he tells me, managed while holding down a full time job as a Development Officer assigned to work as a school teacher and being the father of a young son. So why hold it in Navithanveli, a small village in a rural part of Ampara district?
This is very much in keeping with the philosophy that Jathis holds dear – a philosophy he shares with the rest of the Artists for Non-Violent Living collective of which he has been a part for several years. For these artists their work is both a form of activism and community service. They resist the pressures of an economic system that treats art as a commodity to be savoured and consumed by elites and a politics that frequently treats rural communities as “uncivilised” populations to be “developed”/ “educated”/“saved”. Rather they use their art as a way of engaging the communities within which they live to at times celebrate, honour and remember, at others to grieve, protest, provoke and challenge.
It is with this in mind that Jathis has chosen to host his show in his village’s local cultural hall.
Having spent so much time trying to capture and document the experiences of women in his community, he says it feels only right that they should be the first to see the work. At the same time he also sees his art as a novel medium of expression for conveying the perspectives and lives of those around him. He hopes they will see their struggles reflected in his work.
Rope is a strong feature of many of the works so I ask what it symbolises. It is reflective of Jathis’s early work in the collective during which he was particularly concerned by the terrible stories he was hearing about the indebtedness and exploitation so many women were facing as a result of predatory microfinance schemes. Sadly there are far too many stories of women in various rural parts of Sri Lanka who have been tricked into taking loans at exorbitant interest rates and on disadvantageous terms. Often they are not fully aware of the terms of the agreement and many do not even receive a contract in writing or regular statements about how much they still owe.
As he tried to understand the root of the problem, Jathis came to realise that women in his community were often provided very limited knowledge on income generation and financial management. This made them vulnerable to ruthless microfinance companies preying on their desperate financial situations and limited options. Unable to invest the money, too many women used it to simply meet basic needs, leading to a debt spiral out of which they struggled to emerge. They ended up borrowing more and at the same time were subjected to harassment and exploitation by unscrupulous agents.
The insidious ways in which women become entrapped, the constricting ways in which debt takes over their lives and the desperate spiral they find themselves in is well captured in the sinewy rope fibres that weave their way around Jathis’s canvases. The viewer feels a sense of claustrophobia. The rope appears snake-like, malevolent, slowly suffocating all other life. One can imagine the feeling of being caught and unable to escape. Having also heard tragic stories of women driven to suicide, I couldn’t help but be haunted by the idea that for some the rope may appear the only way out.
Jathis’ more recent work, by contrast, is more hopeful although texture remains a prominent mode of expression. Here, however, it is the texture of local reed varieties woven and plaited in the traditional style common to baskets, mats and decorations in the East. Through these Jathis invokes a more positive form of “tied-ness”, namely the connection to the natural environment and local cultural practices that provide important sources of belonging. He says this is to also pay tribute to the resourcefulness and knowledge that many women in his community hold: something all too often overlooked and undervalued.
A graduate of the Swami Vipulananda Institute for Aesthetic Studies (SVIAS), Jathis’ artistic talent is only matched by his firm commitment to community and social justice. When I ask why he has chosen visual art as the medium for his activism he comments that it is something new for a community that is more used to expression through performance and song. Introducing a new medium thus provides a novel and innovative intervention. His first solo show may be for those close to him but I have no doubt that others will also find his work exciting and inspiring. The exhibition at the Navithanveli Central Cultural Hall, Ampara runs from September 19 to 21.
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