Vivid, spiritual encounter with nature
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The French Spring Festival, normally held in June and July and organised jointly by the French Embassy and the Alliance Française, is an annual celebration of French art and culture that is eagerly anticipated in Colombo every year. This year, despite suffering considerable delays due to the country’s financial and political upheavals, festival events continued and a stunning photographic exhibition entitled “Badjines, The Spirits of Nature” by French photographer, Nicolas Henry drew many to the new gallery space at Barefoot.Here Tanya Warnakulasuriya shares some impressions of the exhibition that concluded on September 27
As I climbed the stairs to Barefoot Gallery’s new viewing space, I felt as though I was ascending into a dream world. Nicolas Henry’s otherworldly scenes had a ‘floaty’ feel about them. The photographs had been mounted on textile canvases for ease of transport during Sri Lanka’s difficult times which had sadly prevented Henry himself attending the exhibition.
As the gallery fans caused the light-flex canvases to move and billow, they brought to life the ponderous beating wings of a giant bird being ridden by an African woman and the rippling waters in which an Indian Ophelia-like girl floated, festooned with flowers.
The creator of these fantastical scenes is photographer and director Nicolas Henry who graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris and specialises mainly in portraiture and community-based installations. His multi-genre works of writings, photographs and film have travelled extensively and he has received global recognition, not just for his aesthetics but also for his artistic approach, from well-known institutions such as COP21, and the Museum of African American History.
Henry created the ‘Badjines’ works whilst on a residency in the Casamance region of Senegal, working with a team to create compositions that blended natural resources of seeds, shells, leaves and driftwood with the stories and beliefs of the local area. When asking his local team from the Senegalese Diola community how they would describe the photographs created, he was struck by their responses. For them, the images evoked references to the elemental spirits of nature – spirits of the earth, sky and the seas.
Where Nicolas Henry, with his realistic European perspective, saw his creations as a metaphor for climate change, and humanity’s aspirations to live in balance with our natural world, his African team saw the images as human communions with the Nature gods and spirits that are so endemic to old world civilisations. It is these almost spiritual celebrations of Nature created in Africa and India, that formed the body of the exhibition.
What was particularly interesting was how Henry played with dimensions in his pieces. He presented, for example, a two-dimensional composition of two female soldiers guarding an ornate entrance created from rocks. Yet around the periphery of the picture, we saw an aerial view of horses – their backs and maned-necks looking into the picture of the guarded building. So, you the viewer were looking down on horses who are looking down on the façade of a building created on the ground with the two guards laid down on either side of the entrance. The image magically revealed a third viewing level to you.
This playing with levels and dimensions runs throughout the exhibition. A descending spiral of cotton grass through which the model seems to be falling, reminded me of Alice in Wonderland and the idea that nothing is what it seems. The red-shawled Indian woman proudly sitting at the pinnacle of a fan of books and photographs of her ancestry (pictured above) tells us that our existence spans a timeline that is far from linear.
The other thing that I particularly appreciated with this exhibition was choice of models. Multi-national and multi-aged. Normally these illusory phantasm-style pictures tend to prefer sylphlike ingénues in diaphanous white gowns. But in Bajines, Nicolas Henry’s models come from a multitude of ethnicities which makes his images very relatable. As a woman on the wrong side of 50 myself, I was heartened to see older models telling interesting stories rather than the stereotypical ‘age and decay’ narrative that they often depict. The elderly African lady astride a huge flying bird fashioned from deadwood and leaves, smiles joyfully and evokes a sense of wise abandon, as though to say there are forces of nature that we humans have yet to understand and should not even bother to question – just enjoy!
The composition of colour also steers away from the washed-through combinations that are often used to create the dreamy ‘not quite there’ quality. Whilst Henry mutes the overall subject matter of the image, his models are brightly illumined in strong very ‘Eastern’ and African colours that are so synonymous with our Earth. They unapologetically embrace the natural colour of our flora and fauna and show what a master of the colour-palate Nature really is.
It is a shame that I couldn’t meet the artist himself. His work conjured up so many questions for me. I wish the exhibition could have remained for longer – I would have certainly revisited it. Sadly, the political and economic turmoil that threw Sri Lanka into disarray for most of this year, prevented Nicolas Henry from coming here and working with our own local talent to create similar Sri Lankan pieces for the festival.
French Ambassador, Eric Lavertu agreed that the works of Nicolas Henry were certainly interesting, and it was a shame that the artist could not be here himself to create new pieces specific to Sri Lanka.
I wonder what our Sri Lankan Nature spirits would have shown us.
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