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Organs without Bodies : A traumatic experience 2019


"Organs without Bodies" is a piece of art that I created in 2019 which is one of the series of works that I have been producing for years, yet have not been on view within the public. The audience may have thought that it is not the work by Dumith Kulasekara as it is not showing (according to the audience) the features of my works which the public has been familiar with for a certain period of time. One reason for this could be a gap (this is a very critical concept in the critical theory of art) between the works seen by the public before the “Organs without Bodies”. So, now there is (the ) thing confronted to the audience that is beyond the dimension of thinking which encounters the subject with a shock that can create a psychic trauma (Kulasekara 2015, 4) 
At this point, I am not going to clear that idea here. Rather I will leave it for the time and the audience. But I prefer to put it in a provocative way or in Lacanian way “Large hole and opening”. There is a large hole and opening between me and the audience of visual arts in Sri Lanka. That hole or the opening is getting bigger and bigger from all the sides for which I am very much conscious.
Writing and working on the theme of trauma for many years, I came to know that every human being could have encountered a traumatic experience in their lives. The effect of traumas tends to be post-presence in different forms. The most critical part of traumas is the psychic traumas which have been my key theme for nearly 15 years. What I have investigated in my studio practice is that thinking as a sculptor who deals with the whole range of views that 360 degrees, I wanted to emphasize the sense of form rather than the sense of character. My consciousness of this is that there is a character in my mind that affects me in the process of working on this language.

The two forms depicted on two different surfaces (separately made) have been juxtaposed. They are recognizable as objects rather than forms that create a contrast between each other. One object makes another object “(the) other” and vise-versa. It is a very psychical moment of life. Looking back to my own history as an artist, this work does not possess the somatic representation of life. In Contrast, it is absent as it is one of the features of trauma (Polock 2013, 2). What is still predominant in this work is the force that the work generates of encountering two phalluses: one could be a male phallus and the other could be a female phallus (imaginary). The work is in the state of polymorphous on which concept I have been working for many years.

References

Kulasekara, Dumith. 2015. "Representation of Trauma in Contemporary Arts." ATINER's Conference Paper Series ART 2015-1907 4.
Polock, Griselda. 2013. After Affect - After Image: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual museum. New York: Manchester University
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