PETALING JAYA, Nov 28 — Powerful reconstructions explore lost memories in award-winning photographer Liz Fernando’s major exhibition Trincomalee — My father’s stories and the lost photographs.
It is only recently, in the digital present, that hard lines separating photography from painting, sculpture and performance have become irrelevant.
Trincomalee makes full use of the walls and white space of the gallery, yet each image is a self-contained moment.
Fernando’s concept, involving extensive academic research, explores the boundaries of her medium.
Individually each photograph appears carefully constructed and handmade, the way sculpture can.
Viewed together, alongside embossed prints featuring single lines of meditative text, the structure of this exhibition becomes a subtle performance, leading the viewer through a journey first undertaken by the artist.
Liz Fernando’s black and white images are more than moments captured, they are multi-layered reconstructions of vague and fragile memories.
For Trincomalee, Fernando reimagines lost photographs inspired by stories of her Sinhalese father’s early life before Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, was devastated by war.
Partly shot in the original settings of her father’s memories, the images present the fiction of a narrative as if captured from actual memory.
Fernando does not directly engage with politics, more effective is her choice to focus on conversations between a Tamil girl and Sinhalese boy, revealing a childhood lived in innocence and free from social restrictions.
Throughout her work, Fernando uses photography as a tool to explore issues of cultural difference, cultural inheritance, and questions around identity, which she describes as “the root for all of us”.
She is fascinated by the roles that identity, history and memory have on non-Western cultures, especially South Asian ones.
Fernando’s photography is a personal reflection on her discourse with identity, yet Trincomalee avoids introspection by leaving space for the viewers’ own reflection.
Fernando beautifully captures a sense of loss and longing, with an emphasis on the emotion of cultural difference.
She poses the question: Who are you today, and how is this formed by your histories?
Liz Fernando was born in Berlin and studied in Zurich, Geneva and London.
In 2011, she graduated from the prestigious LCC BA Photography programme at the University of Arts, London.
In May 2012, she was selected as winner of the World Bank South Asian Art Contest and several of her photographs were acquired by the World Bank in Washington DC for its permanent collection.
She currently lives and works in Hanover, Berlin and Colombo.
Fernando’s work has been previously displayed in major exhibitions such as After we arrive, before we leave (2011) held at the Tate Modern, London and Imagining our future together (2013) held at the World Bank HQ, Washington DC.
More recently, she exhibited solo shows titled Shadow Scenes (2015) and Portraits of Resistance (2017) at Colomboscope, Colombo and the Aicon Gallery, New York respectively.
* Trincomalee will be shown at Shalini Ganendra Advisory @Gallery Residence in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, open now until January 15, 2019. For more information visit here. Admission is free.
