T. Shanaathanan

In a room in the north of Sri Lanka, people who have been driven from their homes are drawing, from memory, the houses they can no longer return to, and T. Shanaathanan is gathering the results. He sets those remembered floor plans beside an architect’s renderings and his own drawings, and calls the whole ‘The Incomplete Thombu’. A thombu was the land register the Dutch once kept of who owned what; his version, made in 2011, turns that colonial instrument of ownership into a record of dispossession, and it has since entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The loss the piece holds open, the loss of home in a Tamil north shaped by war, is the wound his whole practice circles.

He was born in 1969 in Jaffna, and Jaffna has stayed both his home and his subject. He took a BFA and then an MFA in painting at the University of Delhi, in 1997 and 2000, and completed a PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2011; he has taught for two decades in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Jaffna, where he now holds a professorship. The scholar and the artist pull in the same direction: his research into the modern and colonial art of Sri Lanka feeds a practice built around memory, and around the particular memory of a Tamil north shaped by nearly three decades of civil war.

The work is made mostly in drawing, painting, installation and the artist’s book, and it returns again and again to displacement and to the fragments left when a place is broken apart. ‘The One Year Drawing Project’, carried out between May 2005 and October 2007, sent drawings back and forth by post between his studio in Jaffna and those of three artists in and around Colombo, Muhanned Cader, Chandraguptha Thenuwara and Jagath Weerasinghe, until each had made and received fifty-two; the exchange itself, running the length of a divided country, was part of what the work was about.

That the world beyond Sri Lanka took notice can be read in a run of named exhibitions. His work was shown in ‘Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2016, at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale the same year, at the Lahore Biennale in 2017, and at Sharjah Biennial 14 in 2019, where his ‘Drawers of War Transactions’ examined the part documents play in binding people to place. In 2017 ArtReview named him among its Future Greats, and at home he received the Kalasuri award from the Government of Sri Lanka in 2005 and the Bhunka award in 2014.

What holds the work together is a refusal to let loss become abstract. A floor plan drawn by someone who can no longer go home, a drawing carried the length of the island by post, a chest of drawers standing in for a file of transactions: Shanaathanan keeps giving memory a physical shape a viewer can hold, so that a history usually told in numbers is returned to the people who lived it.