Bandu Manamperi

A man bound in bandages moves through a crowd, carrying his own body as though it were a load to be delivered, and the people around him cannot decide whether they are an audience or accomplices. The man is Bandu Manamperi, and the body is the work: bound, wrapped, washed in public, offered up as the very substance the piece is made from. To understand why a trained sculptor should turn his own flesh into his medium, you have to begin with the sculptor’s habit of mind, and with a country that in the 1990s had almost no shared language for performance at all.

He was born in 1972 in Bandaragama, a town inland from the coast south of Colombo, and he came to art first through carving and modelling. He took a BFA in sculpture in 2000 from the University of Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo, then studied archaeology at the University of Kelaniya, completing a postgraduate diploma and a master’s degree. The sculptor’s eye stayed with him. When the medium became his own flesh, he treated the body as a form to be shaped, wrapped and set in space, the way a sculptor handles clay or wood, so the discipline of the object stayed inside the live act.

The body, put under that pressure, was made to speak about the society around it. His sculptures and installations take up the commodification of cultural symbols, the way sacred and national images are turned into things to be bought and sold; his performances return repeatedly to war and its effects on ordinary life, staged as acts of binding, cleaning and endurance held in real time. In ‘Iron Man’, shown at the India Art Fair in New Delhi in 2016, and in the ‘Washing Man’ performances given in Colombo and Goa the same year, the discomfort is the argument, and the artist absorbs it in front of the audience rather than pointing at it from a distance.

He also helped build the rooms in which such work could be shown. In 2000 he was a founding member of the Theertha International Artists’ Collective, the Colombo body that grew out of the ’90s Trend generation, and he has served as its Vice Chairman; his practice has run through the Colombo Art Biennale alongside the artists of his generation. Abroad it has carried under named shows, ‘Don’t Measure Me’ at the Historisk Museum in Oslo and ‘Portraits of Intervention’ at Aicon Contemporary in New York, exhibitions that placed the ’90s Trend artists before international audiences, while residencies took him to Goa and to Yogyakarta in Indonesia and a long collaboration ran between Sri Lanka and India through the ‘Tale of Two Cities’ project.

He still lives and works in Bandaragama, the town that gave one profile of him its title, the rebel from Bandaragama. The bandaged man in the crowd is the whole of his method laid bare: the body he keeps putting to work is his own, and the questions he asks with it, about what a society reveres and what it does to its people, are asked with no safe distance left between the artist and the art.