This presentation considers visual art produced during and after the Sri Lankan civil war that makes places for history and memory and opposes official narratives and injunctions to forget the past. Focusing on projects by T. Shanaathanan (b. 1969), who lives and works in Jaffna, it shows how artists respond to an emergent ‘postwar’ landscape of nationalist monuments and memorials with an aesthetics of absence, ephemerality, fragmentation, and incompletion. These projects also critically engage institutions of the state and civil society, including the public library, national archive, art gallery, and history museum, and present alternative forms of memorialization and preservation.

Sonal Khullar is the W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity and Modernism in India, 1930-1990 (University of California Press, 2015) and editor of Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia (University of Washington Press, 2023). She is completing a book manuscript, The Art of Dislocation: Conflict and Collaboration in Contemporary Art from South Asia, under advance contract with the University of California Press.