Programme
T. Sanathanan
Graduate Student
School of Arts and Aesthetics
Jawaharlal Nehru University
E/ tshanaathanan@yahoo.co.in
A Stranger and a Suspect/Being Sri Lankan Tamil: Narratives of Personhood in Visual Art
Based on the visual narratives of works produced by the Sri Lankan Tamil artists, this paper tries to foreground the complexities of 'being' and 'becoming' in the locations of forced migrations, exile, displacements and the institutionalization of torture. The paper also attempts to reveal how the co-existence of the self in commensurable geographical, historical, psychological and cultural locations alters the ways in which persons experience their own being. Lastly, the paper questions notions of the self as rooted in the categories of nation, state, history and memory. My paper argues that the making of the Sri Lankan Tamil person hood is primarily grounded in the feeling of being a stranger and a suspect in every day life; a grounding that draws and redraws the ‘difference’ between being a Tamil and being a Sri Lankan.
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Mr. Sanathanan is one of the leading young artists from Sri Lanka. His work is
rooted in the experiences of the devastation caused by over two decades of civil
war in his native Jaffna, Sri Lanka. His work has been exhibited in several
countries including the United Kingdom, France and India. His major publications
include "Making the Impermanent Permanent: The Configurations of Mugamandhapa
Architecture of Jaffna Temple" in Cintanai 15:1 (2005); "Painting the
Artist’s Self: Location, Relocation and the Metamorphosis" at Tamil
Nationalism – Trans/Formation (2004); "Interaction Between Visual Art and
Tamil Literature in 20th Century" in Tamilini (2000), and "Contemporary
Temple Painting of Jaffna" in Cintanai 12:2 (2000). In 2004, he curated
one the most momentous art exhibitions in modern Sri Lanka, Aham Puram,
a work that brought together Sinhala and Tamil artists and it served as both
memorial and interrogator of political and social memory be being located in the
renovated public library of Jaffna whose destruction in 1981 had marked the
movement towards war through the assault on cultural and literary memory.