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.