Prageeth Ratnayake
Cultural life, cultural man, I understand as our biological body, that is, the main animal that needs to be maintained. If a cultural animal is not behind us then we are actually biologically dead. If we do not have this cultural status, it is useless for us to dress and eat biologically. Our cynicism does not begin with race, but with the loss of the cultural organism within us. The one closest to us misses cultural life for whatever reason. This is what capitalism is doing at the moment. Although it has been interpreted globally, our culture has somehow shrunk under the state machinery under political conditions, and now we have come to Independence Square, the free space for this discussion, to see if we have lost the freedom we see.
Market
The market comes and snatches away our cultural life and gives us another fun and avoids our nearest, so if we don’t face it consciously we have a cultural life anyway and here this biological body ends. So nothing when it’s over. That is, all our other bodies have leaked into our biological body. It has to be healthy to endure it. Now we feel a big emptiness, society is creating it, so culturally the person in front of me does not apply to me once we are empty. I’m still looking for an existing body, I’m lost a mind, there’s a big tragedy inside the loss of a cultural organism.
Love
The subject of love and sex is one of the two great tools that organize within human emotions, so what we are talking about is the restriction of freedom, the cultural coercion or the overthrow of capitalism, and a lot of things like this challenge what we have maintained within the essence of a particular belief system. So within that we have to define what love is. This is hard to define contemporaneously, so we try to match what it has in the 70s and 80s. But it is not practical because there is a big gap between the two. That is, it is difficult for us to adapt these things from the nostalgic point of view. But that’s enough to read at the moment. Because there are different meanings within those two situations. Love is beautiful but it does not fit this time. The language of love is lost at this moment. Do not understand the language of love. That is, the warmth of love has missed the body language of someone or someone. We are not so disciplined, in love to endure the other. Even within friendships we are now unable to tolerate the other, that is, we are being anesthetized to a point where the other does not feel or understand. Sacrifice of love, of allowing the other, is slipping away from us in this moment. Our language has failed to say what love is properly. It is affected by the social structure as well as the economic structure, without which it does not happen automatically.
politics
Everyone in this process of micro politics and big politics is pointing fingers at big politics. It is also said that we get liberation but in reality there is no liberation for the common man or artist. It is a formulated mechanism, within that mechanism there are shifts, people change, color changes but society does not change. In fact, politics is about changing society, so the world of personal thinking is very important in the matter of changing society. In that world of thinking, we cannot change a society without a guerrilla attack. We cannot just leave it to this party as individuals and as artists. The artist is just one set of society. Artists should be mindful there. And the artist is a group of people with imagination who deal in a slightly different way than the average person. But those who direct their attitudes the way anyone wants do not become artists. Accordingly, if the government wants to maintain the artisans, then a king really has to be accountable to the people. I don’t think the whole society needs to do something in terms of the government, it needs to be categorized as an artist. Accordingly, I do not think that the government should stand for personal matters without looking at the whole society in the social sense.
I am
I believe that as an artist and a human being I breathe in this society at the same time. So that breathing is a conscious process. It does not mean that the mind breathes. That is, I am not innocent of any of these other events. Because in that sense I can neither draw innocently nor think innocently. Because when people are framed within a cynical society or mechanism, I think we are in great danger as free human beings. I believe in understanding this moment in relation to this land, cynically, in a very scary way, we have a picture in front of us. And it has a lot of tools in our territory. So when we synthesize these, we are shaken inside by human thought. Or shocking, we have to walk with a little weight on the ground to feel it. That’s when it gets caught, and within that catch my belief system builds up that I can’t get out of this. So something has been encountered within that line of thinking. That can sometimes be implied. Maybe not. So at the moment I’m thinking about it, my visual images are shaping up relative to the social moment I’m realizing. Then I think it’s political. In that breath and being political I enter the language of painting with a political acumen, which is how I manipulate my art, where my art is a political workplace, but it does not mean that I make art that can disturb society on a large scale, but that understanding is for me have.