PARIS.- “All the images will disappear”
The opening lines of Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux's novel, Les Années [The Years], appear like an acknowledgement but act like a warning. It reminds us that nothing is ensured, that images disintegrate, that memories become hazy and places undergo changes. What remains is not faithful to the past, it cannot be for the passage of time has made it cease to exist and transformed it into memory. The past is the persistence of an unstable matter that escapes our hold and which, however, we constantly try to take hold of.
It is from that primordial instability that Nina Jayasuriya built her exhibition “L’Odyssée de Yaka Villa”: an exploration of what happens when images are removed, of what is forgotten or remains, disappears or is transmitted. Yaka Villa existed once: it was the first name of the hotel set up in Sri Lanka by the artist’s father in the family home at the beginning of the 2000s. Its name, which means in Sinhalese the “villa of demons”, was quickly changed because of the pressure of superstitions that made people fear ill fate. However, it’s that name which reappears here, but stripped of its initial function, reinvested as the starting point of a fiction. It becomes a mental space, an oneiric territory that is a bridge between the mark of the past and the transmission of memory, a breach of resistance in a suspended present. Here the hotel is not reconstructed, it is shattered in pieces and disseminated in the works displayed in the rooms of the gallery transformed into a stage. Its original name becomes a tool to probe the faults in the personal and collective mythologies of which the works form a living, moving and sensitive archive. Rather than illustrating a family history that unfolds between France, Spain and Sri Lanka, Nina Jayasuriya imagined a journey in time and space where the objects, narratives and temporalities contaminate one another to create a liminal and ambivalent landscape. Everything seems in place but in reality cracks, breaks up and falls apart. The spectator moves in the perimeter of a catastrophe that took place and which, however, still seems on the verge of taking place. We discover what is destroyed by humidity in Sri Lanka: the materials that subside and the walls that sweat. The water leak becomes a central motif. What leaks is not only water, it is stories, memories, care, values. It is the beliefs, the superstitions, the illusions and the doubts. And with them, all forms of certainties.
In that scenario, Nina Jayasuriya’s approach rests on a simple premise: not to consider anything as minor or inconsequential. Switches, buckets, banknotes, fabrics, statuettes, photographs and medicine become matter to reflect upon and to tell fragments of a narrative, that of a past that doesn’t pass.
On the wall, switches made in ceramics proliferate like a discreet infestation. They don’t work and don’t make any fluid circulate but bring about a familiar chaos. They only signal and through that signal, nothing is ever activated. While evoking electricity, they speak of the invisible, faith, waves and circulation. They give shape to invisible fluxes of energy that traverse our existences and connect us to one another. All in all, they reposition, in the exhibition space, the most hidden intimacy, that which is difficult to access, even for us. The whiteness of the porcelain is at times stained with deliberate accidents caused by the inclusion of unusual materials during the firing, an emblematic process of her experimental approach to ceramics, her chosen medium.
Close by, paintings in various formats reproduce photographs of the hotel and its surroundings: empty rooms, bits of architecture, landscapes of beaches and mountains covered by postcards, images and other documents as anecdotic as they are trivial. Those paintings resemble photo albums of memory full of holes, in which the recollection is fixed but distorted. We see time superimposed in a disturbing and meticulously precarious manner.
Further on, banknotes painted in oxide on stoneware, whose image is at times erased, are reminiscent of the countries her father crossed in order to reach France from Sri Lanka, evocation of an epoch when commercial and human exchanges were not digitalised yet.
Here and there, columns in ceramics reproducing the shape of piled buckets contain chlorine water in which objects float, with coins at the bottom. Those silent fountains evoke the overflow and rituals, pools and temples as much as the gesture of washing hands and that of throwing in a coin to ward off ill fortune.
In that decor are placed votive statuettes, divinities in black ceramics surrounded with necklaces made of pills dipped in Mercurochrome, a liquid used to treat wounds, deemed toxic today. As for the fallen angel with an amputated wing, he seems halted in his momentum, purposeless now. He evokes exile and fall. His presence signals, in the manner of birds flying in an eerie way to announce catastrophes, the malediction that will inevitably befall even though the name of the hotel has been changed.
In the background, like bedsheets drying or the shrouds of a world falling apart, fabrics in batik, a traditional Sri Lankan technique, are hanging.
In this exhibition, Nina Jayasuriya doesn’t set nostalgia in opposition to disaster. She works at the very place where things come undone by starting with the images, reassuring tangible relics. There she searches still for transmission, a form of belief and healing, a realisation if not a re-enchantment. Even if the images disappear, the gestures that hold the memory of their contours still exist.
— L.D
