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Patterns of Distortions

IMG_5210 Coca collective of contemporary
b9 Coca collective of contemporary artis
b1 Coca collective of contemporary artis

The work of art is created by using a stationary bicycle, a kaleidoscope which will operate with the peddling and use of the bicycle allowing the audience to interact with the art work.

 

As an avid cyclist Artist, Chinthaka Thenuwara sees a lot of changes going around his daily cycling routes. Most of the time he sees structures created to destroy and destroyed to create. Historical monuments, buildings, landscape and roads are changing its original form, identity, functionality or completely disappear due to time, social, political and cultural changes. His memory line is constrained and confined by these landmarks. These momentous sights are refreshed, reinterpreted and re-narrated throughout the history. This construction and reconstruction possibilities make history and keep changing and re shaping his memories. Symbolically using the important landmarks in his cycling route, and the ongoing construction process, on moving screen with video/ photographs, he shares his experience with the audience. He experiences these changes as an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of past history. Either in visualized or abstracted form, one of the largest complications of memorializing our past is the inevitable fact that it is absent. Every memory we try to reproduce becomes – as Terdiman states – a 'present past'. It is this impractical desire for recalling what is gone forever that brings to surface a feeling of nostalgia, noticeable in many aspects of daily life I experience when cycling. For me these changes that occur at the process of making history are like looking through a kaleidoscope. You look at a set of elements, the same ones everyone else sees, but then reassemble those floating bits and pieces into an enticing new fantasy. Every instant a change takes place, new harmonies, new contrasts and new combinations of every sort appear. The most familiar people stand each moment in some new relation to each other, to their work, to surrounding objects. He shares his experience with the audience fitting the kaleidoscope to his cycle. Audience needs to get on to the cycle, sit and peddle for the Kaleidoscope to function. In this nature he shares with the audience the experience he gather of “Making history” while cycling.

 Art work by Chinthaka Thenuwara , Colombo Art Biennale 

Medium: 3D Interactive Sculpture (Metal, Rubber and Plastic)

Size: L60”x W26”x H6

Year of execution: 2014

Kaleidoscope Photo Coca collective of co
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