Point of Entry

All artists come from a foreign country, in some sense.
Where “originality” is essential, each artist becomes a world in him- or
herself, with zealously guarded borders. But what’s it like to be an artist who
makes a home in a distant land? The answers to this and a thousand other
questions are different for each of the artists interviewed below. It turns out
that “émigré artist” is not a category, only a door into a very large world.

Manjunan Gnanaratnam

Sri Lanka’s civil war drove Manjunan from home at
twenty-one, in 1983. He arrived in New York to study music, saw Merce
Cunningham perform, and found his calling as a composer for dance. His current
projects include plans for a 2008 performance that includes dance projected on
the walls at the Weisman Art Museum; he’s also recreating composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen’s work Ceylon.

Manjunan never spoke publicly about leaving Sri Lanka until
recently: “I couldn’t talk about the effects of war until war came here—you
can see wounded young people in the airports now. I can speak now about the
innocence that was lost and people will understand.” He feared that if people
knew of his exile, it would overshadow his work—which is not about exile
or nationality, but the relation of human bodies and sound.

“In some ways,”
remarked Manjunan, “I’m more at home musically here than in Sri Lanka; the
avant-garde music community here understands what I do. I have a home inside my
music, inside my relationship to dance, to the optimal performance environment
… that is, in some ways, my true home.”

However, on returning to his home country after twenty
years, he realized he had missed “the vibrations of the society that produced
me. Sri Lanka has five hundred years of colonization, by India, England,
Holland. The music contains all these traditions, church music, Hindu music,
Buddhist, rock ’n’ roll—and so in some sense everything’s allowed. My
physical home is in Minnesota, but my emotional home will always be Sri Lanka.”

“My work as a composer for modern and postmodern dance and
performance art is easily accepted in the East and West coasts and
internationally,” he noted; “however, I would say Minnesota lags on this.”

So when asked what he feels he brings to the mix of the arts
in Minnesota, Manjunan responded with a smile and another question:
“Adventure?”

Gladys Beltran

A painter who arrived here in 1993 from Colombia, Beltran
has a BFA from the University of Antioquia in Medellín, and won a McKnight
Fellowship in 2006. It took her several years to learn English and feel at
home, but now, she says, “the process of growing old and the hope of growing in
the spirit through my work is taking place here.” But she misses her sisters,
her parents—their faces, how they change over time, their jokes and
laughter. “The absence of our loved ones is a temporal death. It is horrible
when you can’t hug them.”

But there is freedom even in this sorrow. “As a painter it
is liberating not to be with some members of my family who love me, I know, but
who cannot understand why I have to paint. Being away, I do not have to explain
over and over why: I have to paint if I want to breathe in peace. I have to
paint because I do love to exist.” She says it’s too soon to know people’s
reactions to her work: “My work is like a baby, and people always like babies.
I haven’t done 1/30th of my project.”

Artists, she believes, are similar everywhere. “I brought my
hungry soul. I can say it is more what I took from you than what I brought,
because I am taking your cities to paint them, I am taking your spaces to
navigate in them with my paintbrushes over the canvas. In other words I will be
taking over your country to paint it, to love it.”