Janananda Laksiri

A man steps out onto a mesh of electric wires strung in the air, arms held wide, feeling for the next foothold, and the camera keeps him there for three and a half minutes while he works to stay upright over wires that read as live in every sense. Janananda Laksiri made this recording, titled Tight Rope Walk, in 2012, and set it against André Malraux’s 1933 novel of revolution and its costs, La Condition Humaine; the balancing act is the whole of the piece, and it is also, he suggests, the condition of a citizen under political power, kept forever between the step taken and the fall.

Janananda works as a full-time professional artist in Sri Lanka, across painting, sculpture, installation, object art, video and digital photography, and the thread running through all of it is the insidiousness of power: how it settles into a body, a street, a posture, until living beneath it starts to feel like ordinary weather. The Red Dot Gallery in Colombo held his solo exhibition Screaming Elegy in 2010.

That show gave the spine its clearest form. Janananda took his own photographed face and worked it digitally until the features locked into a scream, a self-portrait held at the pitch of a cry and denied any release. The scream is silent, frozen, repeatable; the elegy is for a country counting its dead in the aftermath of a long civil war. Rather than picture the violence directly, he pictured what it does to the person who has to keep standing in it, the face that has learned to hold a scream and go on.

The wider record carries the same argument outward. His work travelled to New York in 2017 for Portraits of Intervention: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka, the Aicon Gallery survey curated by Bansie Vasvani, where his digital photographs were read for the way bodies and shapes dangle to hint at the reach of political power; his video and installation pieces have anchored the Colombo Art Biennale, the tightrope walker returning to a public wall. Across galleries the vocabulary stays consistent: the human figure put under load, made to perform a stability it does not feel.

Return to the wire. The man on it is the artist himself, and the refusal to cut away is the point, because the work is less about whether he falls than about what it takes to keep from falling, minute after minute, in full view. Janananda has built a body of work out of that single suspended second, the one in which a person under power is still upright and already off balance, and he has kept his own face, and his own weight, on the line.