Firi Rahman grew up with parrots so he is familiar with their looks and understands their habits. On a visit to Paris, it seemed as if the parrots from Colombo had followed him there – migrants to a foreign land, making unfamiliar sounds while racing across the landscape looking for another home. The Parisian parrots adapted to their new environment but as they multiplied, they are seen as invasive and a threat to local fauna. The parrots are much like people who have been forced to flee their loved but now hostile homes for safer places in which to have a better life.
In his latest exhibition at the Saskia Fernando Gallery, Swept Away Like Leaves, Firi portrays parrots drawn in shades of grey, deliberately devoid of colour; some are in cages while others fly free in one continuous arc. The birds are enclosed in wooden bars where some of them are missing while others are without wings or limbs.
Firi’s own home in Slave Island is under threat from gentrification and big business which is taking over homes and demolishing them to build corporate eyesores on the valuable land. In a bid to preserve and document the surroundings and the lives of the few remaining residents, Firi and a group of artists founded the We Are From Here project.
Taking its name from a verse in Agha Shahid Ali’s A Country Without A Post Office, a poem that echoes the sentiments of loss and longing for a place that exists only in memory, Swept Away Like Leaves explores ideas of being and belonging. It is a commentary on experiences of refugees and migrants who exist in an ambiguous and uprooted zone of belonging and non-belonging as they try to comprehend the meaning of home.
