Anurendra Jegadeva’s latest for Wei Ling Gallery, in Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur, is a collection of works created under lockdown. It’s a vast collection that considers global themes ranging from migration, empire, democracy, capitalism, to, of course, the ongoing pandemic. Much like the rest of his body of work, Anurendra’s acute reflections on history and politics continue in Scream Inside Your Heart.
Still, what strikes me most about this exhibition is not so much its vastness, but its consideration of the small and personal in contrast to the grand currents of history. There is no unexamined life for Anurendra. The self-interrogation and tender personal observations of family, as the artist attempts to make sense of the global turmoil and failed leadership exposed and exacerbated by COVID-19, is what makes this exhibition so memorable.
One of the pieces that kicks off the exhibition is Same Old Story. It’s a triptych with a portrait of the artist’s daughter (a frequent subject in the exhibition) sandwiched in between portraits of policemen from the American Black Lives Matter protests and the Hong Kong security laws protests. This is one of the biggest themes of Scream, as well as one of the struggles much of us experienced during lockdown: being sandwiched inside a world going through violence, extremes, and passionate struggles for democracy – while still, life goes on.
The exhibition’s title was inspired by a Japanese video of two businessmen who remain completely still through a rollercoaster ride. At the end of the ride, they turn to the camera and whisper, “scream inside your heart.” This is the spirit of the exhibition: the sense of being on an unstoppable rollercoaster, immobilised as the world around us changes rapidly.
An awareness of living inside the tides of history comes across again in Love’s Requiem, a portrait of Anurendra’s daughter’s boyfriend at his father’s funeral. The young man is painted in front of an archival photograph of a Tamil lady in Sri Lanka circa 1860, while three generations of the artist’s ancestors look at – and judge – this white man. Yet again, Anurendra’s obsession with history can’t be denied, the painting asking questions about race, whiteness, trust, and generational trauma. Nothing – especially love – exists without a historical context. Anurendra captures history as a vibrant and living thing that connects us all. It’s history as an unstoppable force we participate in, negotiate with, and struggle against in a desire for change. And in this painting, some things can indeed change rapidly in three generations.
What I enjoy, too, about Anurendra’s work, is his self-interrogation: of class, of coping-mechanisms, of political optimism. On the upper floor of the exhibition are a series of pre-coronavirus paintings. Critiquing middle-class activism, Saturday Afternoon Activist, is “a self-portrait of my class…who, once a month, every month, on a lazy Saturday afternoon champions the worthy cause of that moment, talks about it over dinner with friends in a nice restaurant and afterwards, sleeps like a baby.” With his particular blend of satire, Anurendra highlights the delusional grandeur of the middle class, whose activism can be indulgent, performative, and less noble that we might assume. “We were 'activists', part of online tribes that knew for sure that we were part of the solution and not the problem.... never, the problem,” Anurendra writes in his exhibition essay.
The views expressed in the article are strictly the writer’s own.
Photos courtesy of Lily Jamaludin
