This exhibition, created by six Sri Lankan artists, explores themes of memory, home and loss and their personal insights into the impact of war, displacement and dispossession on the people and landscapes of the Jaffna peninsula of Sri Lanka. The exhibition forms part of an international partnership between researchers at the University of Exeter (HaSS Cornwall), University of Leicester, Museum of London Archaeology and the Arts Faculty at the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, who together have been collaborating on a project entitled Identity, place and community: archaeologies of the recent past in post-war Jaffna, Sri Lanka.

Home/Land

Home, homeland and nation are seen as interrelated affective domains that construct identities linked with territory or place.

The Sri Lankan Tamil community has been fighting with both non-violent methods and violent insurgency against the Sinhala Buddhist Sri Lankan state since Sri Lanka’s (Ceylon) independence from British colonial rule. The goal in both instances has been to win its aspirations: the right of self-determination, the rights to a traditional homeland and the recognition of Tamils as a distinct nationality. The armed conflict was brought to an end in 2009 by the government’s cruel military initiative that killed thousands of people and resulted in the displacement of five hundred thousand others. Meanwhile, the causes of the separatist war remain unacknowledged and unresolved.

It is an irony that the Tamil community’s struggle for a separate homeland ended by making the majority of the Tamil speaking community home/less; through displacement, dispossession and human loss. Further, a war-like situation continues into these post-war years. Manifestations of this situation include the acquisition of land for high security zones, Buddhist archaeology, the creation of new Buddhist sites and the alienation of land under the guise of protecting forests and wildlife.

Tamil literature from the Sangam period (200 BCE) categorizes the poetics of human experience into five different thinai, or landscapes: Kurunchi (Mountains), Mullai (forest), Marutham (agricultural land), Paalai (desert) and Neythal (sea and coastal land). Cheran (2007) powerfully extends the category of thinai to the experiential realities of the displaced and diaspora, drawing our attention to a broader understanding of the poetics/politics of home. He argues that in thinai, landscapes are not merely treated as physical entities, but rather are infused with imagination, located in time, and associated with specific patterns of behaviour. In other words, landscapes are complex lived realities, simultaneously animated with motives, materiality and metaphors. Therefore, Cheran calls for a new landscape or thinai specific to the diasporic and the exiled. This thinai could be profitably employed to chart new contours of displacement, change, exile, transformation, hybridity, and fusion of genres.

Cheran’s attempt to foreground belonging in the context of the displaced, where those forcibly displaced struggle to find an equilibrium between memory and reality, also raises questions regarding how such experiences of the in-between-ness and the interlocking of landscapes can be visually represented. Under the conditions of the civil war, forced displacements led to the erasure of home. Memory, and the nostalgia of a lost home, became a productive anxiety for many artists who were direct victims of the war.

This exhibition explores individual and collective memories of home embedded in the experience of loss of a land and the longing for home in the aftermath of the war in Sri Lanka.

T. Shanaathanan, 2023

Jasmine Nilani Joseph

Fence-VI

Jasmine Nilani Joseph
2018
Ink on paper

Debris interacts with the land of my ancestors in Jaffna, which civil war compelled them to leave in 1990. My work raises questions about the fences of high-security zones that stand as barriers and in seeking answers my gaze is taken to the extent and entirety of the fences. In 1995, my family were displaced from Jaffna to Vavuniya, where I was surrounded by several kinds of fences. Everyday I was kept waiting for many hours with my family in front of a police station fence for the renewal of our temporary residential pass to live in Vavuniya. After a few years of life in a refugee camp, we settled in a government sponsored housing scheme, where we ourselves made new fences.

Fences commonly create conflict among neighbours, and my experiences of living within different fences in welfare camps, resettlement areas and police stations expanded my view of boundaries. Boundaries are symbolized by the construction of fences. Although the fences can present an aesethic and beautiful view to the external eye, the creation of fences provokes in me an involuntary response of separation and violence. We can see that one basic reason for ethnic conflicts, violence among communities, battles, separatism among families, struggles, and problems in our country are provoked by making borders and fences. As a little girl, in primary school my dad helped me to build a miniature house for the lesson of craft making and named the house ‘Nila Illam’ which means the house of Nila. I still search, where is that? Where is my home?

Address of Residence-IV

Jasmine Nilani Joseph
2018
Ink on paper

Address of Residence-I

Jasmine Nilani Joseph
2018
Ink on paper

Address of Residence-III

Jasmine Nilani Joseph
2018
Ink on paper

Mano Prashath

Untitled

Mano Prashath
2021
Collage pen and ink drawing on art board

Façades of buildings are not made out of concrete and stone, but the maker's aspirations, imaginations, fantasies and position. Therefore they are registers of time, space, culture, memory and history. They reflect social change, exhibit the power of the owner and carry the scars of war. Their styles represent time: colonial, pre-colonial, post-colonial, and national and post war. Buildings are also testimonies of war, riots, violence and other natural and human-made destructions.

Façades or entrance-ways signify an in-between-ness: a space between inner (agam) and outer (puram), us and them, sacred and profane, social and psychological. My works are the juxtaposition of multiple facades belonging to different periods and places. I tried to explore the meaning of in-between ness through these juxtapositions.

Distressed wall-II

Mano Prashath
2020 Collage and drawing on paper

Distressed wall

Mano Prashath
2020 Collage and drawing on paper

Distressed wall

Mano Prashath
2022 Mixed media

Suntharam Anojan

Layer Upon Layer

Suntharam Anojan
2023
Acrylic on paper

My art journey has been topographical. The armed conflict in Sri Lanka came to an abrupt end in 2009 but it still manifests itself in many forms, even today. My career falls into two parts; one before the war and the other after the war. I am trying to express through art the memories and experiences of the violence and atrocities inflicted on innocent people. Although the war escalated throughout the whole country, it affected the North most, particularly in the manner it aimed to destroy culture, religious practices, social structure and the lifestyle of the people. The actors of this war were powerful groups whose objective was to gain control of the land and rule the people. I am from the Vanni, the vast tract of land in the north that separates Jaffna from the south of the island. It is mainly jungle but has paddy fields, tanks (reservoirs), rivers, settlements and temples. The beauty of the land, known for its diversity, was scorched by the cruel war that reduced it to a wasteland. The experiences of displacemant are unforgettable but much more horrendous were the scenes of war I witnessed: torn flesh, strewn limbs, disemboweled corpses, injured and bleeding men, women and children writhing in pain. Scenes of stray dogs and crows fighting to feed on human flesh were nauseating. Amidst the piled corpses were vehicles; two-wheelers, three-wheelers, trucks, tractors and lorries that made movement of refugees impossible. Civilians hiding in the jungle and in bunkers or in abandoned huts were most vulnerable. They were destitute, without medical care. Landscape consists of layers in which lie buried the remnants of our culture, a forgotten civilization that I am trying to give expression to through art, using canvas, paper and acrylic. After experiencing oppression and violence firsthand, my soul yearns for freedom and peace.

Layer Upon Layer

Suntharam Anojan
2023
Acrylic on paper

Layer Upon Layer

Suntharan Anojan
2021
Acrylic on paper

Layer Upon Layer

Suntharam Anojan
2021 Acrylic on paper

T. Krishnapriya

T. Shanaathanan

My works titled Dis/Placement explore the experience of place in the post-armed conflict context by investigating the relationship of physical space, memory and history.

I am drawn to the fragment because of the free association it gives me to play with ideas of space, time and memories. By creating compositions using jigsaw pieces these works attempt to capture the ruptures associated with place. Each puzzle shaped form represents an identifiable or memorable fragment that is part of a larger vision or experience.

The random association produced by the arrangement of mismatching forms, shapes, images and symbols create their own logic or truth. At the same time the apparent connections between the parts produces ambiguity and disconnection.

For me these works talk about the impossibility of linear histories and the impossibility of knowing when memories are displaced, lost, abandoned, or buried. Knowing only seems possible through fragments.

It is the details that I am interested in not the large scale narrative of events. Borders are not important here but the parts. These works represent the tension of stitching together or matching together incommensurable locations, stories, memories, histories, data and all else.

Vijitharan Maryathevathas

Life in burning forest

Vijitharan Maryathevathas
2023
Mixed media on paper

My art practice is formed by my own experiences of the civil war in Sri Lanka and accounts of those who were similarly affected in my community. They deal with the complex and fragmented identity of Sri Lankan Tamils who were forced to migrate from the country as a result of the scarcity of resources and on-going violence.

Basis for migration

Vijitharan Maryathevathas
2022
Mixed medium

Struggle coexistence

Vijitharan Maryathevathas
2022
Mixed medium

Identity of diaspora

Vijitharan Maryathevathas
2022
Mixed medium

References:

Cheran, R, (2007). "The Politics of Identity; Bakhtin’s Chronotope and the Tamil Concept of Thinai", in R. Cheran, Darshan Ambalavanar and Chelva Kanaganayagam,(eds.), New Demarcations; Essays in Tamil Studies. Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press Inc.