Two murals by renowned Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport (CJIA) Timehri were covered in order to accommodate a new roof which is designed to prevent water from leaking into the immigration department, according to management and technical experts.
There are five murals at the CJIA. The two which have been largely obscured face the runway, two more are on the western side close to the immigration department, and one is in the departure area.
The covering of the two works of art is currently being investigated by Elfrieda Bissember, Curator of the National Art Gallery, Castellani House, and officials of the National Trust. They are trying to find out how it is that murals commissioned to improve the aesthetics of the airport could have been obscured by architectural adjustments, and when it is they will be restored to public view.
The murals, done on what were previously the VIP open-air verandah walls, greeted visitors and returning Guyanese on disembarkation.
Chief Executive Officer of the CJIA Ramesh Ghir told Stabroek News during a visit last week, that at the time renovation was being undertaken to the arrival terminals by Kishan Bacchus Construction and supervising contractor Vikab Engineering, it was found that there was a leak in the area outside the VIP viewing gallery and the water was running into the immigration area. The $231 million contract for the arrivals area was funded by the Government of Guyana and the Inter-American Development Bank (GOG/IDB) and was signed in June 2004.
Various strategies were employed to try and stop the leak, none of which worked. Because the roof was close to the runway, vibrations from the airplanes had cracked it. Help was enlisted from Trinidad’s Specialist Chemical to assist in sealing the fracture, but the Trinidadian firm warned that the seal it had applied would only last for a short period.
A technical expert confirmed the account from the CJIA CEO, noting that there were two options for remedying the leak problem. The first was to break down the existing leaking structure and rebuild it, and the second was to construct a roof over the structure. The second option, it was decided, offered a less expensive and more time-saving solution.
The roof which is now considered structurally sound has a number of beams, nuts and bolts, etc. In order to achieve an ambient atmosphere it was decided to cover these with a ceiling, since the area served as the VIP lounge.
Minister of Public Works Robeson Benn said, “I am convinced that if it ever becomes a necessity the murals can be fully recovered.” Ghir agreed, but added that removing the structure would be costly and that the roof was serving a purpose. He said further efforts had been made to preserve the murals during other phases of the renovation by covering them with protective plastic.
Bissember told Stabroek News recently that the murals were not destroyed but were hidden by the renovation work. She said she could not see how design principles would allow for such an occurrence when the construction should have been executed with some amount of logic. The murals, she said, had been covered by gypsum board placed to hide structural beams supporting an extension to the roof of the viewing gallery.
The National Gallery of Art had been contacted initially in 2004 when the airport project was about to start. She said contact had been made with the then Chairman of the CJIA Board Manniram Prashad. However, Castellani House was not approached the following year before the additional structural work was embarked on, namely, extending the roof to stop the rain coming in. “We should have been contacted,” Bissember said.
She pointed out that as a result the two murals at the western end of the airport had also been affected by a column that runs through one of them. Since the side roofing only extends marginally over the building the curator queried the level of design planning that went into the construction of the roof.
