Malaka Dewapriya

Malaka Dewapriya engages in visual art. He has involved in the Theater field since 1991 and wants to become a composite artiste committed to exploring issues that demand attention. He perceives the world through a critical lens, and wants to intervene in what happens around us through an exploration of Socio-psychological milieu. He has been engaged in a variety of fields in the arts, ranging from film, photography, theater, and radio plays has tried to blend a variety of styles in his creative production. His works were represented and won awards from Israel, Japan, Netherlands, USA, Germany, India, Pakistan, Italy and Austria international film festivals and exhibitions . Graduated University of Colombo Sri Lanka 2005, He won a scholarship for Film video and new media to Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany 2007 .After He was a Asia pacific fellow holder at National Goyang art Studio , Under National museum of Contemporary art Seoul 2009.

Statement

He has used his visual art creations to look into the behavior of human being, its mind and the society in general, deeply touching the unenlightened corners of human mind and the undisclosed spheres of the human society in which the human being is perpetually engaged in a struggle for freedom from shackles of political, economic and cultural ties. Sometimes, he throw a psychological perception on the tensions and emotions of the human mind. Mostly, he uses my medium to bring out and display the conflict between the individual and the archaic social structures, for instance patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation or feudal social status and capitalist values of marriage and love.
He entered the field of video creation in 1998 in Sri Lanka. And during the period of my German scholarship, He has created several contemporary video works. In some of them, I used one major character and created the script based on it. Sometimes, the script has led me to a documentary work. Also, he has created artistic works without using character appearances. I have tried to blend a variety of styles in my creative productions. Most of his works perceive the world from a critical lens and intervene in what happens around us through an exploration of the socio-psychological milieu.
Aanxiety (1998) is based on the life of a writer who had the desire of wining an award. Today (2008) captures a issue faced by an individual, which has bearings upon the environment of technology. In this story one man who performs with a mobile phone depicts a stranger in a high-tech material world. He lives like other human beings with an imaginative relationship to his alarmed clock, mock up of the mobile phone.
Life Circle, which he did in 2002 captures a woman’s life fettered to a sawing machine. While the machine provided her with hope, it was also an ominous presence. My Rythem, Painting and He 2008 explores a painter’s daily schedule in an orderly manner among other attributes of an artist’s role, namely patience, creativity and attention. He tried to examine some predestined conflict in a man and woman’s life In Sri Lanka from my film Transference 2006. It is story that provokes the effort to understand the gulf between the man and the woman, instinctive primarily out of different interpretations of reality based on their social and instinctual roles. It deals with conventional notion of feelings from one person to another. In 2001, He created Penetrate where He also tried to capture another part of this situation with a university couple. It is based on a relationship of individuals and their aspirations. My End Loop (2008) is about couple who make an ‘encounter’ with each other while traveling on a train. The movie brought up a story about crisis in identity and culture. An encounter of two world views, one which upholds individualism, human rights and sexual liberty and the other which aspires for such a world view but has no material base to create it. In this story I wanted to show, through the metaphor of the train, that whole human race is sharing the same world like the same train, but travels in different compartments (different ideologies, political economies and cultural conflicts) and they all are not aware of their final destination. Finally, the film makes its denouement showing that yearnings of the alienated human being for the recognition and for the love of humanity, that in spite of all the artificial boundaries imposed by the tyrannically regimes, society and the greediness of the exploitative mechanism prevails upon over all the divisions.
Exchange (2003) comparatively analyses the pre- and post-colonial situations in Sri Lanka. It is about two people repairing shoes, shoe symbolically representing the political structure. The realization of the film would be that the same oppressive structures have prevailed in the post-colonial states even after they regained their independence, for the indigenous rulers imitated the colonial masters in many ways. Shifts (2008), set in the context of contemporary Sri Lanka is about the impact of the market advertising on people’s lives who are persuaded to by things despite the irrelevance of such objects to their existing conditions of life. In Earth(2009), a video art work, I tried to argue that comprehension of the nature of the Earth is not as easy as it is shown to us and I comparatively visualize this incomprehensible nature of the Earth with that of the human life. None has been able to fully recognize its nature. At times the earth becomes still like water; it could also be desolated like the sky; if not it could be as soft as air. Like fire it could be hot as well. Our life is like this earth which cannot be predicted of its nature. In Ornament(2009) He attempt to visualize rhythm, movement, images, light and darkness which constitute poetry of nature. The dazzling earring worn by the artist who plays the