A series that deals with remembrance and recollection

Pro.ject has conceptualized an exhibition by one of young and established Asian artists in collaboration with the Shrine Empire Gallery. Titled ‘Memory Keeper’, Anoli Perera’s solo unveils on 19th January 2013 at the New Delhi-based Shrine Empire gallery.

The artist mentions in her accompanying concept note, “I am the ‘memory keeper.' I have become a memory keeper because I was born wedged between the sun set of one era and the dawn of another.” Anoli Perera, a renowned contemporary artist from Sri Lanka, is currently based in the capital city of India. Her series deals with remembrance, recollection and the danger of erasure. In terms of its conceptualization, in this exhibition the artist will relate a story she has seen unfolding.

For her and many others of her generation, “existing between eras is to live in a  liminal space where people forget to keep records because they are eager to forget the past and move on to the future.” She observes, “the last vestiges of the previous era and the transition itself, become insignificant moments and footnotes of history, not worth remembering in the larger contexts of events.”

The exhibition takes viewers to and beyond private and public memory mediated by the passage of time  as well as war, and traverses through a number of other discourses that includes  migration, globalization and advent of homogenous cultural forms and the expelling of the local.

However, in all cases, the artist’s point of departure and obsessive focus is what is remembered and what would lapse from memory.  As she observes, “what we lost was our innocence and our common sense… we, for sure lost the trust. Then it stopped …Soon the pain and what was lost might well be forgotten too…amnesia sets in…. People want to move on. I keep memories for posterity ...”