MUVINDU BINOY | SURVIVAL OF THE FRAGILE

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    Fragile 06, 2022
    Giclée Print on Archival Photo Paper
    112 x 140 cm
    44 1/8 x 55 1/8 in
    Edition of 5
  • Fragile 05, 2022
    Giclée Print on Archival Photo Paper
    140 x 112 cm
    55 1/8 x 44 1/8 in
    Edition of 5

  • Fragile 02, 2022

    Giclée Print on Archival Photo Paper
    140 x 112 cm
    55 1/8 x 44 1/8 in
    Edition of 5

  • Fragile 04, 2022

    Giclée Print on Archival Photo Paper
    140 x 112 cm
    55 1/8 x 44 1/8 in
    Edition of 5
  • Fragile 01, 2022
    Giclée Print on Archival Photo Paper
    140 x 112 cm
    55 1/8 x 44 1/8 in
    Edition of 5

  • In Muvindu Binoy’s Survival of the Fragile, we encounter a language made of things. Muvindu enlists an object vocabulary lifted from roaming the streets and museums of Paris to poke holes in our false equation of fragility with weakness. He valorizes the fragment - the bits of stuff that show up in his work and glide through fields of colour: a white linen shirt, a wooden fence, a plinth on a tilted checkerboard floor. These things form the pictorial language Muvindu employs in his digital collage works. We might imagine them in a primary school reading primer - the word ‘sex’ in neat cursive denoting a marble couple locked in embrace, the word ‘violence’ to describe a bulletproof vest. In Muvindu’s work, the visual fragment - the splice of a traditional landscape painting, the carcass of an antique urn - has more to say than the whole. Each time we sit with these works, something new appears, conjured out of depths of colour. 

  • In the Survival series, Muvindu returns to his hyperactive style of digital collage, saluting the analogue roots of collage through deliberately unfinished edges and dicey, flat compositions. Muvindu encodes his own system of meaning within these works: anthuriums are elevated from their decorative function in dusty government offices to powerful visual embodiments of androgyny. A gargoyle, decapitated models from a SKIMS ad, a Transformers toy, and the toothy grin of a yakka mask form part of a slowly expanding cast of characters in Muvindu’s practice. He does not differentiate between the assigned value of the objects he incorporates, playing into the promiscuity of his sources: Pierre Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss receives the same attention as a pair of well-oiled Doc Martens. In Survival 03, a tactical vest is fitted uneasily onto a woman from a colonial photograph. She is armed with a NERF gun, her head replaced by a monk’s fan - a walking contradiction. Engulfing her in a shrine-like conclave are splices of the stickers defiling Parisian urban infrastructure - from telephone poles to seedy alleyways. Survival 01 and Survival 02 are bricolages of graffiti writing; Muvindu elevates vandalism to the status of Art with a capital A, resembling the newspaper cuttings in Cubist collages. Throughout these works, the circle appears - floating in the corner, nudging into a Persian carpet, infringing on a dreamy Renaissance sky. 

  •  In Survival 03, a tactical vest is fitted uneasily onto a woman from a colonial photograph. She is armed with a NERF gun, her head replaced by a monk’s fan - a walking contradiction. Engulfing her in a shrine-like conclave are splices of the stickers defiling Parisian urban infrastructure - from telephone poles to seedy alleyways.

  •  Survival 01 and Survival 02 featured below are bricolages of graffiti writing; Muvindu elevates vandalism to the status of Art with a capital A, resembling the newspaper cuttings in Cubist collages. Throughout these works, the circle appears - floating in the corner, nudging into a Persian carpet, infringing on a dreamy Renaissance sky

  •  In Survival 03, a tactical vest is fitted uneasily onto a woman from a colonial photograph. She is armed with a NERF gun, her head replaced by a monk’s fan - a walking contradiction. Engulfing her in a shrine-like conclave are splices of the stickers defiling Parisian urban infrastructure - from telephone poles to seedy alleyways. Survival 01 and Survival 02 are bricolages of graffiti writing; Muvindu elevates vandalism to the status of Art with a capital A, resembling the newspaper cuttings in Cubist collages. Throughout these works, the circle appears - floating in the corner, nudging into a Persian carpet, infringing on a dreamy Renaissance sky

  • The people persevere, whilst the hardline government falls to bits around us - unable to withstand the pressure, unable to bend and accommodate the needs of the people. Lawyers use their bodies as barriers to protect protestors whilst the police rely on man-made shields and barricades to cower away from peaceful demonstrators. It is the collapse of this regime of strongmen - the Rajapaksas and their lackeys - that Muvindu presages in Death of a Regime. Muvindu combines a candy-coloured bouncy castle, tubby cargo planes, and a wailing woman, setting them together in a curious dialogue. In the foreground, plasticky anthuriums spring profusely from the neck of a tactical vest. From a piece of armour that we associate with moments of death and destruction, life persists. 

  • Featured below couched in this rich set of ciphers is Muvindu’s activist edge. In the pair of They Knew! works, his monochrome dots reappear – this time, he contracts them into small, white, specks which block out the eyes of the police officers in the photographs from the 2019 Easter Attacks. The artist manipulates these photographs by using them to overlay classical biblical paintings depicting the murder of Christ. The ‘Scene of the Crime’ tape that winds around They Knew 01 refers to both the killing at Golgotha and the murders that occurred in churches and hotels across the country on the 21st of April 2019. Muvindu Binoy uses the dots to anonymise the authority figures in these works so as not to vilify them as individuals, and instead critique the government that they uphold - the government that knew. As protests continue at sites like GotaGoGama, it is this same government that the country begins to come together to question the crimes and legitimacy of. 

  • PROTEST IN COLOUR

  • In Protest in Colour V, Muvindu uses the image of Jehan Appuhami, the Sri Lankan actor who walked for three days from St. Sebastian’s Church, the site of one of the 2019 explosions, to the Galle Face Green. He covered a distance of forty kilometres – all while being barefoot and carrying a wooden cross on his back. Appuhami called for justice for the victims of the attacks, through these powerful works, Muvindu does the same. Social media is saturated with images from the protests: reposted on Instagram, shared on Facebook, forwarded on WhatsApp. This ties them to temporality, giving them an expiry date at which point they are interred in the internet’s vast cemetery. Refusing this consignment to oblivion, Muvindu immortalises these events and these new makers of history – those who are not afraid to be vulnerable, whose fragility becomes their strength. The small size of these works, framed in and set back, draws viewers into these congealed moments - frozen in amber and flushed in a dusty pink and purple haze. Muvindu Binoy gives them permanence.