National Trust lecture: Heritage without Borders
View(s):‘Heritage without Borders: Re-defining temple murals of South-Western Sri Lanka’ a lecture by Dr. B.D. Nandadeva will be next in the lecture series presented by the National Trust – Sri Lanka. It will be on September 24 at 6.30 p.m. at the HNB Auditorium, 22nd Floor, HNB Towers, 479 T.B. Jayah Mawatha, Colombo 10.
Wall paintings and some of the relief-sculptural decorations in Buddhist temples in the South-western maritime regions of Sri Lanka have been looked down upon by certain art historians for their non-traditional or anti-traditional character; propensity to use motifs, imageries or pictorial techniques of European and Christian art; and the use of paints imported from Europe instead of home-made and hand-made traditional paints commonly used by traditional painters of the Kandyan Kingdom.
This characteristic of the southern temple art has been over simplified by those art historians as a manifestation of ‘Western influence’ over Sri Lanka’s Buddhist temple wall painting tradition, which expresses a unique aesthetic idiom in religious art of the South Asian region.
This school of thinking recognises South-western temple paintings as non-representative of the national cultural identity of Sri Lanka, and hence a poor representation of the country’s cultural heritage.
Based on recent studies on the social, political, and historical contexts of the South-western temple art, this lecture questions the suitability of the familiar expression of the so-called ‘Western influence’ to describe the presence of non-Sinhalese and non-Buddhist attributes of the art.
It further questions why the phenomenon is not considered as a result of ‘inspiration’ the local artists received from the so-called ‘West’.
The lecture proposes to see the appropriateness of considering the art as having added to the diversity and variability of traditional art, and thereby representing a shared cultural heritage of a multi-faceted cultural identity.
Dr. Nandadeva Ph.D., is attached to the Department of Fine Arts, University of Kelaniya and has a multidisciplinary background combining art history, cultural heritage management, and conservation science.
Further information can be obtained from the Trust Office, Tel 2682730 at the Post Graduate Institute of Archaeology, 407, Bauddhaloka Mawatha, Colombo 7.