Taprobane Collection

Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan (1969)

“…this is, without doubt, a record of the hardship…and suffering of war, it is superseded by its being a record of resilience and adaptability. It’s a resistance to passive victimhood, if you like.” – Mark Rappolt

 

Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan or T. Shanaathanan was born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and despite having a passion for art since childhood, he decided to study Science for his Advanced Level examination. Later, still feeling an unfulfilled creativity within him, he entered the University of Delhi in India where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Painting. Shanaathanan went on to study further, earning a PhD from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. He is now one of the prominent academics about art in the contemporary art scene of Sri Lanka, having created as well as researched pieces that unearth histories of Sri Lankan Identity. Shanaathanan has had several solo exhibitions, and has exhibited widely across the globe in countries such as Canada, India, Austria, Australia and the UK. In 2014, he co-founded the Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design (SLAAD), which is a unique archive that has resources of books and other printed matter theorizing Sri Lankan contemporary art, architecture and design. He is also a member of the State Arts and Sculpture Advisory Board associated with the Arts Council of Sri Lanka. Shanaathanan is currently based in Jaffna as a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Fine Arts, and works alongside students of the Jaffna University, providing them with opportunities to present their creative work to audiences locally and internationally. 

Shanaathanan, as an artist as well as an educator is known to draw upon the personal; his experiences as a young man growing up in the north during the thirty-year civil war, directly and indirectly affected by the growing discriminatory attitudes in society towards Tamils. He recalls the difficulties he had to undergo to enter university in an interview with Sharmini Pereira: “When I was about to move to India for my higher studies the political situation in Jaffna and in the region was worsening. Jaffna came under the control of the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government imposed an economic embargo on the north and its military actions involved constant air raids. So there was a shortage for medicines, fuel, food items and no electricity. There was no direct land route to Colombo.” His work is inspired by such personal struggles forced upon him during the conflict-ridden era. For example, his works after the Jaffna Exodus in 1995 are extremely personal in nature, dealing with loss, longing and existential thought as he had no information about the whereabouts of his family. The painting “Missing” (1994) captures a dog, wailing, next to a pair of rubber slippers, with an overwhelming aura of anguish and despair. A deep commentary on the routine disappearances of citizens in 1987, “Missing” is emblematic of another aspect of Shanaathanan’s early work where he masters the mood of a painting through objects other than human figures. 

He also worked on recreating and archiving the histories of Tamils as citizens damaged by the war, and his project A History of Histories (2009) was the culmination of one such attempt where he displayed the stories of 500 families with an installation including an object from each family that captured their stories and memories. Referring to this project, he said, “in ‘History of Histories’ the act of collage or random association of an object was an attempt to take the individual loss or pain onto the level of a collective. On the other hand it also represents the co-existence of difference and simultaneity of mismatching realities.” The installation was therefore a “collage” or a collated group of objects that contained distinct memories of the Tamil community, but with certain resemblances, a shared existence of being discriminated against by the state. Even after the end of the civil war Shanaathanan continued to explore the politics of historicising and remembering, working with the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Vancouver, Canada. The realities of the two communities appeared to be similar, despite their physical grounding being in different circumstances. The outcome of such intellectual engagement with the lives of Sri Lankan Tamils was the project The Incomplete Thombu (2011) – a book that incorporates conceptualizations of architecture, art, memory and remembering, developed through the collection of and critical engagement with rough sketches of the ground plan of people’s houses. For the Kochi-Muziris Biennale held in 2016 Shanaathanan went a step further with his experimentation with installation art in terms of representing a history of the Tamil community. He created an old-fashioned piece of furniture that had a card index divided into 30 drawers. Each drawer consisted of cards containing details about the manner in which the Tamil community adapted to the circumstances of difference during the thirty-year ethnic conflict. Each experience recorded being limited to the space of the drawers symbolized the suppression of the Tamil community, but the simple fact of the details being present delineated a sort of resistance to the passive victimhood imposed on them. 

His solo exhibition Mismatches held at the Saskia Fernando Gallery in 2011 displayed nine pieces with an inquiry into the phenomenon of dislocation. He began using the jigsaw as his signature piece, with the shape defining the shape of his canvas. The thought of how easily the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle could be dispersed, embodying a sense of incompleteness is fascinating to Shanaathanan, and it reflects the manner in which dislocated and resettled communities of the war feel incomplete without an affinity to their roots. The nine separate pieces displayed in Mismatches encapsulated distinct memories, experiences and encounters brought together as “navagragam” (nine planets).

The solo exhibition Dis/placement (2015-16) is another commentary on “the experience of place in the post-armed conflict context by investigating the relationship of physical space, memory and history”, with compositions of jigsaw pieces capturing the disturbances associated with space. While each jigsaw piece has its own identifiable memorable fragment with its vibrant colours, they are arranged as disconnected pieces in disarray. Referring to the pieces Shanaathanan said, “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.” Contributing to a larger narrative or experience of the civil war and its aftermath using such fragments of memories is not what he attempts with the motif of the jigsaw, but rather a focus on the intricate details that make developing an all-encompassing history difficult and a tense reality.

As of the late 2010s, Shanaathanan’s interests have mainly been in educating young artists. He has been involved in the curation of a series of exhibitions dedicated to displaying the works of emerging artists with potential. The series began with Seven Conversations co-curated with Sharmini Pereira and was followed by Self-Portraits in 2017. In 2018, he curated the exhibition Being and Becoming held at Saskia Fernando Gallery, which exhibited works by recent graduates in art from University of Jaffna. 

Name of ExhibitionYearPlace
Kochi-Muziris Biennale2016Kochi, Kerala, India
Serendipity Arts Festival Goa2016Goa, India
Dis/Placement2014Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Mismatches2011Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Non-Aligned2011Barefoot Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Border Zones: New Art Across Culture2010Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, Canada
The One Year Drawing Project Show2010APT, Queensland Art Gallery, Australia
The One Year Drawing Project Exhibition2009SAVAC, Toronto, Canada
The One Year Drawing Project Exhibition2009Devi Art Foundation New Delhi, India
Artful Resistance: Crisis and Creativity in Sri Lanka2008-2009Museum of Ethnology, Vienna, Austria
Locating the Self2006Paradise Road Galleries, Colombo, Sri Lanka
An Exhibition of Painting by 13 Artists from Jaffna2004Alliance Francaise, Jaffna, Sri Lanka
Aham Puram: An Exhibition of Visual Art2004Public Library, Jaffna, Sri Lanka
New Sri Lankan Art2004Usher Gallery, UK
New Sri Lankan Art2003October Gallery, UK
Kannukkul Velli2000Madras, India
Exposition 97: Exhibition of Paintings1997Rabindra Bawan, New Delhi, India
France / Sri Lanka Friendship Exhibition1994Embassy of Sri Lanka in France – Paris, France

Ref :SAN 1

Title :Mismatches VII

Signed :Lower Left

Year :2011

Measurements in Cms :55.9 x 47.5

Material Used :Mixed Media on Paper

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Ref :SAN 2

Title :Mismatches II

Signed :-

Year :2011

Measurements in Cms :55.9 x 47.5

Material Used :Mixed Media on Paper

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Ref :SAN 3

Title :Mismatches V

Signed :-

Year :2011

Measurements in Cms :55.9 x 47.5

Material Used :Mixed Media on Paper

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Ref :SAN 4

Title :Migration

Signed :-

Year :2005

Measurements in Cms :56 x 60

Material Used :Mixed Media on Paper

Dimensions in Cms. :56 x 60

Ref :SAN 5

Title :Place III

Signed :-

Year :2014

Measurements in Cms :42.5 x 62.5

Material Used :Mixed Media on Paper

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Ref :SAN 6

Title :Place IV

Signed :-

Year :2014

Measurements in Cms :42.5 x 62.5

Material Used :Mixed Media on Paper

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Ref :SAN 7

Title :Place XVII

Signed :-

Year :2014

Measurements in Cms :42.5 x 62.5

Material Used :Mixed Media on Paper

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Ref :SAN 8

Title :Place V

Signed :-

Year :2014

Measurements in Cms :42.5 x 62.5

Material Used :Mixed Media on Paper

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Ref :SAN 9

Title :Mismatches VII

Signed :Upper Right

Year :2001

Measurements in Cms :58 x 66

Material Used :Mixed Media on Paper

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Ref :SAN 10

Title :Mismatches VII

Signed :Lower Left

Year :2011

Measurements in Cms :58 x 66.25

Material Used :Mixed Media on Paper

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Ref :SAN 12

Title :Landscape IV

Signed :Lower Left

Year :2011

Measurements in Cms :98 x 187

Material Used :Mixed Media on Paper

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Ref :SAN 13

Title :Landscape VII

Signed :Lower Right

Year :2021

Measurements in Cms :57 x120 cm

Material Used :Mixed Media on Handmade Paper

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Ref :SAN 11

Title :Mismatches V

Signed :Upper Right

Year :2011

Measurements in Cms :58 x 66

Material Used :Mixed Media on Paper

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YearInstituteQualification
2011PhDJawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, IndiaPhD
2000University of Delhi, New Delhi, IndiaMFA in Painting
1997University of Delhi, New Delhi, IndiaBFA in Painting
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