Art as a Place – Of disappearing pasts
From the family collection of Menika van der Poorten: Ranmenika and her daughter-in-law Nellie, Menika’s grandmother
It is just after the 1983 riots in Sri Lanka. In a windswept bungalow in the Urugala tea plantations, near Kandy, a motley cast of unlikely, madcap characters assemble. Three Eurasian grandmothers, two Tamil sisters and an unhinged drunk uncle with a shotgun, play out dramatic encounters fuelled by the urgent political situation. Into this mis-en-scene enters a young girl, of Belgian and Sri Lankan descent, with her Trotskyist father, with whom she has been living in England. As if this wasn’t enough, her grandmother decides at this moment that she may, in fact, be dying. So she hands the girl an extensive photo-album, and tells her about her mosaic ancestral history for the very first time.
Artist, photographer and curator Menika van der Poorten is never short of a good story. Often filled with darkness, humour and eccentricity, her narratives tend to point toward wider social histories. Starting with her name – where Menika is a modern version of her Sinhalese great-grandmother’s traditional name Ranmenika, and van der Poorten comes from her Belgian great-grandfather Antoine Joseph van der Poorten who came to Sri Lanka in the mid-19th century – a sense of fantastical and forgotten chronicles is evoked. She describes this particular moment in Urugala as pivotal, not only for deepening her interest in the personal and political, but as the impetus of her artistic journey altogether.
But before any of this came to pass, it is important to remember that van der Poorten had been immersed in several ideologies and life experiences that had shaped her worldview. For example, her fascination and engagement with mapping social stories was originally triggered by the complex and committed work she undertook as a South London probation officer in the 1980s. Soon after this, influenced by her father’s own left-wing leanings, she discovered the world of Labour Party politics and women’s movements. It wasn’t until she met influential Black and Asian feminists, such as Audre Lorde and Angela Davis, however, that she found herself truly identifying with those around her.
The 1980s Britain of societal racism, and subsequent unrest, gave way to one of supposed multiculturalism in the 1990s, and it was during this decade that van der Poorten worked on several formative projects – with Sheba Feminist Press, Format photography agency and Lambeth Council art department. She had also begun developing an independent artistic practice, stimulated by studying photography at Westminster College and London Metropolitan University. Her close exchange with British-Asian artists and writers, exploring areas such as post-colonialism and identity politics, led her to Punjab, where she spent six weeks in a village, learning the language and fostering relationships.
One of her earliest series, “Punjab,” (1991) – which has still not been exhibited to date – gives us an insight into her distinct sensitivity and inter-subjective approach toward portraiture. Spending time within this relatively remote community, capturing their rural and ritual-filled lives, she recalls how she began to feel a part of them. She remembers how there was a pervasive sense of grief amongst the post-Partition generation, as many of them had left behind homes on the other side of the border, while others had family who had left and migrated abroad. “Punjab” connotes this deep evocation of homeland, belonging and loss, felt by an increasingly dispersed and diaspora-based community.
Menika van der Poorten: Connecting with her roots
In 1999 van der Poorten returned to Sri Lanka. Now the mother of two sons, she wanted to put down roots. Having largely grown up away from her extended family and their remaining connections to a bygone, colonial era (her strongly socialist father had wanted to get as far away as possible from notions of privilege and property) she realized that she craved it all the more. This longing to finally understand her own history and identity was further intensified by the fact that the Eurasian community in Sri Lanka – many of whom migrated to Australia and England after the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 induced a sense of alienation – was rapidly disappearing without apparent awareness or archival record.
It is remarkable then, that though the resultant series, “Where do you come from?” (2010) stems from this place of anxiety and urgency, it contrastingly evokes a sense of slowness and duration. Each image in the series is depicted as a poetic three-part tableau and is accompanied by an audio-narrative, which seeks to establish the multiple viewpoints and voices at play. In one triptych, we see a middle-aged woman in a pink tracksuit bearing a listless expression, next to a green plantation bungalow and a black-and-white image of two girls in Victorian dresses, overlaid with a handwritten letter. The tracing of these fragmented lineages is left open and unburdened by overt explanation or representation.
One of the reasons that van der Poorten’s images lean toward a non-didactic reading, is because the more she sought out her ancestral heritage, the more she found many versions of the same account – and no ‘correct’ or ‘complete’ truth. Compared with her mother’s family from Ratnapura, who were “part of a clan” or “rooted to the land,” as she describes it, her father’s side was full of outrageous stories; of AJ van der Poorten as the wealthiest landowner in Sri Lanka in the 1940s, of uncles named Benito, Adolf and Othello, of cousins marrying each other and of wild parties at planters clubs. “They were completely mad, buccaneering settler-types, with no traditions to anchor them.”
Lamenting the lack of a definitive legacy of this eccentric and gregarious community – which she says were often considered “neither fish nor fowl” with their hybrid ethnicities – the artist continued to gather certificates, letters, photographs and documents on them. Some of these came from her uncle Tony, who was also an avid photographer, and others from her grandmother (who eventually passed away ten years after the Urugala incident). It was only after her own father’s death, however, that she decided to use the material to compose the work “Real and Imagined” (2016); a family photo-album containing vivid snapshots into four different social, historical and cultural moments of Sri Lanka.
Sub-texts, tangents and undercurrents abound as you go through correspondence between A J van der Poorten and his wife, certificates of his appointment to the ‘Belgian Congo,’ intimate glances between close friends and planters pictured against ‘their’ landscape. Part anthropological, part psychoanalytical the work serves to rephrase histories, as well as amplify new and non-linear resonances. Over the years, the artist’s quest for mapping forgotten or disappearing spaces has taken her to remote parts of Belfast, Scotland and Jaffna. “My ‘Eurasian’ work is also about contested spaces,” she explains “about being a cultural mix and constantly pulled in different directions. It’s all slightly schizophrenic.” Ultimately it is this sensitivity towards duality, along with her encyclopedic approach and emotional investment, which gives van der Poorten’s practice a poignant edge.
* Art as a Place derives its name from the Sarai Reader 09 exhibition (2013) in New Delhi, curated by Raqs Media Collective.