Third Text

19 May 2023

Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, Drawers of War Transactions, 2019, mixed media on paper, eight wooden chest of drawers, dimensions variable, commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation for Sharjah Biennale 14: ‘Leaving the Echo Chamber’, image courtesy of the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation

A cluster of uniform, wooden chests of drawers triangulate a circuitous pathway of a gallery space. The structure of each chest is simple. At about five feet tall, each contains nine drawers neatly labelled with a placard, inviting gallery visitors to open them and peruse their contents. There are seventy-two drawers in total, and each holds no more than two items: an archival document and a single sheet of paper that catalogues the document by index number, name, details and additional remarks.

The archival documents survey forms and processes that governed life under decades of war between the Sri Lankan Army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) from 1978–2009. ^[1]  Their corresponding catalogue pages provide details about how the documents functioned as well as testimonies from those who used them. In one drawer, the visitor finds three laminated cards issued by the Sri Lankan Navy granting fishing access in coastal areas. Another drawer contains a Detention Attestation form, a document issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to former or suspected militants prior to their release from rehabilitation. In another drawer, the catalogue file details the function of a ‘Porali card’, a document issued by the LTTE that granted the families of cadres priority for social welfare programs. Such documents shed light on the numerous and competing powers that oversaw everyday transactions of life in a war zone. They include local entities such as the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, as well as foreign entities such as the ICRC, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the World Food Organization and the Government of India.

Jaffna-based artist Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan exhibited this installation, titled Drawers of War Transactions, at Sharjah Biennale 14 (7 March – 10 June 2019). It mimics an archival structure, but not straightforwardly, as each drawer also includes a drawing by Shanaathanan that responds to the historical document or testimony in question. In the drawer labelled ‘Certified photograph’, for example, the catalogue file tells the story of Arun, a university student living in an LTTE-controlled region who did not have a government-issued National Identity Card. During the war, he tried to use a certified photograph in its place to prove his identity so that he could travel safely beyond the LTTE domain. In place of the actual photograph from Arun’s story, Shanaathanan inserts a drawing of a passport photograph, sealed with a hand-drawn government stamp, signature, and date.

Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, Drawers of War Transactions (detail), 2019, mixed media on paper, eight wooden chest of drawers, dimensions variable, commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation for Sharjah Biennale 14: ‘Leaving the Echo Chamber’, image courtesy of the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation

On first impression, the insertion of the drawing seems to point to something missing from the archive drawer, namely the photograph detailed in the catalogue file. Given the devastation that swept Sri Lanka’s war-torn regions over decades of struggle – in the form of ‘bullets, bombs, barbed wire, economic embargoes, mass displacements, violence, riots, air raids and murder’ – it should be no surprise that this archive is radically incomplete. ^[2]  Scholars of archives have cautioned that the very idea of a ‘complete’ archive is fraught in any case. An archive is not an all-encompassing repository of memory from which history can be neatly organised, sorted and extracted, but, as Stuart Hall writes, it is an ‘on-going, never-completed project’. ^[3]  Although archives largely concern themselves with history or ‘the past’, they are read, expanded on and interpreted in the present. By this definition, something will always be ‘missing’ from the archive. For Hall, it is this inability of an archive to reach completion or totality that makes an archive ‘live’. Rather than focus on the archival loss that characterises Drawers of War Transactions, Hall’s concept of the ‘living archive’ encourages us to read deeper into the processes that fragmented the archive in the first place.

In its impersonation of a traditional archival structure, Drawers of War Transactions plays with the widespread assumptions and conventions that see archives as fixed containers of history. Each object corresponds to an index number and title; the drawers display the documents in a neat, sparse layout, absent of any distracting clutter, and the wooden structure is finished and finely crafted as if to assure visitors of the calibre of the archive’s curation. Even the invitation for visitors to pull open each drawer is calculated, as the interaction allows any passing visitor to touch the installation, thus further diminishing the boundary that separates this archive from an art object. Visitors must move with delicate care and caution, viewing each object one-by-one, exploring the collection more extensively according to their interest. The central role afforded to the viewer’s curiosity in structuring the interaction with the installation also invokes the colonial cabinets of curiosity; the archival apparatus welcomes the casual perusal of its contents and sanitises the collection from the histories of violence attached to them.

The drawing of Arun’s passport photograph interrupts the artifice of a purely authentic archive by reminding visitors of the installation’s function as an aesthetic object. More than identifying supposed gaps in the archive, the drawing traces the artist’s hand in building this assemblage of objects and events and their recall through the imagination. The installation’s dual role as both archive and art object reinforces Stuart Hall’s notion of the ‘living’ archive in that it animates the contingent interactions, encounters and processes that ‘read’ the past, such as Shanaathanan’s collection and curation of objects and testimonies, the production of drawings, and the conceptualisation of the archive as an art installation.

But just as the drawings chip away at the anonymity of the archive, they also supplement the archive’s seemingly objective presentation of history with subjective interpretation. Consider, for example, the drawing included in the drawer labelled ‘Temporary ID card’. The drawer contains a blank identification card issued by the Sri Lanka police, which the accompanying catalogue file explains was issued to internally displaced people following the last phase of the war in 2009. A drawing of a face in profile appears in the ‘Remarks’ section of the catalogue file. The head is bare, and hollows form where eyes should be. Apart from a shadow of stubble and checkered pocks of skin, the figure bears few identifying features and is empty of any expression, movement or energy. In contrast to his lethargic state, a spiky caterpillar sits atop his head. It lifts its body and inches forward. Dark dustings of charcoal enhance the furry texture of its form and sharpen each spine that pricks the hairless skin beneath it.

Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, Drawers of War Transactions (detail), 2019, mixed media on paper, eight wooden chest of drawers, dimensions variable, commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation for Sharjah Biennale 14: ‘Leaving the Echo Chamber’, image courtesy of the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation

Unlike the drawing of Arun’s passport photograph, this drawing does not replicate the archived document. Instead, it pairs the blank identification card with a spectral caricature of the displaced subject, stripped of any identifying features except for a stubborn remnant of the earth attached to his body. The pairing of insect and figure inverts the physical logic of displacement in that it is the land that moves forward through space, while the displaced figure remains grounded in stillness beneath its touch. This inversion of place confuses the linear flow of time intrinsic to archival processes in which temporality is a mere chronological form – there is a before and an after, a time spent here and a time spent there. In the drawing, the ghost-like demeanour that haunts the figure’s face locates his consciousness in a time past, while also prolonging the event of displacement into our present confrontation with it. The dislocated larval form of the caterpillar signals to a place it left behind, while also indexing a future yet to come, a time and being yet transformed. The coexistence of multiple asynchronous temporalities sit unevenly with the objective and detached language of the archive index, which reduces the event of displacement to a bureaucratic document. ^[4]  The language also erases the scale of the displacement the drawer references from the ‘last phase of war’, when an estimated 330,000 civilians from the island’s minority Tamil community were targeted by a ruthless state military campaign, and an estimated 40,000 civilians (although likely many more) were killed. ^[5]  The disparity between the sparse contents of the drawer and the enormity of the event attached to it acutely registers the limitations of archive structures to contain and represent the histories they index.

Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, from Check Point, 2009, mixed media on paper, 56 x 75 cm, Sharjah Biennale 14: ‘Leaving the Echo Chamber’, image courtesy of the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation

Shanaathanan further undermines the objectivity of the archive structure in the nine paintings that lined the gallery walls, titled Check Point. Each painting in the series shows a human body at a checkpoint, a reference to the numerous military and militant checkpoints that governed access to the North and East regions throughout the war. In one painting, a naked multi-armed figure juxtaposed against an aerial landscape pries open his abdomen. Several hands flip open folds of flesh, stretch intestinal cords to the far corner of the frame, grip, squeeze and fumble the organs spilling from his body. The frenzied movement of the man’s arms is at odds with his trance-like expression. His lips part slightly and nostrils flare as if frozen mid-breath, while miniature militiamen traverse the surface of the body and landscape like toy soldiers. The flattened one-dimensional perspective of the body heightens the tactility of the substances that protrude from the surface of the canvas. This perspective is simultaneously frontal and aerial, and melds with the drone-like view of the landscape. There is little distinction between the two as objects of surveillance.

Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, from Check Point, 2009, mixed media on paper, 75 x 56 cm, Sharjah Biennale 14: ‘Leaving the Echo Chamber’, image courtesy of the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation

In another painting from the series, a multi-armed figure peels open the skin of a wound slashed across his torso. Nearby in a pair of portraits, a figure pulls his tongue forward for inspection, stretching it to a farcical length, while his adjacent figure unfurls his tongue in a scream. The latter portrait grips at the collar of his shirt to reveal a neck stripped of its outer flesh so that the inner anatomy of his distress is on full display. Across the series, the repeated attention to violence and mutilation enacted on the body overwhelms the indifference of the archive structure. Each gesture that reveals or rummages through layers of flesh and muscle parallels the gestures that search, sift and sort through the archive drawers. The juxtaposition elicits an uncomfortable relation between those mining the drawers for historical testimony and those who violently pry open their bodies and wounds for inspection.

Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, from Check Point, 2009, mixed media on paper, 75 x 56 cm each, Sharjah Biennale 14: ‘Leaving the Echo Chamber’, image courtesy of the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation

The Check Point series evinces the central role of the body as mediator of the archive collection. As Shanaathanan writes in the exhibition text, ‘the body is used as a document, a transaction of power and control’. ^[6]  But just as the body is a mediating site of power and control, it also houses its own expanding archive unaccounted for by institutional structures and archive catalogues. Each transaction of war that the archive references corresponds to imprints within the body itself that cannot be contained by archive drawers or represented by collections. Similarly, the sensorial imprints placed on bodies that interact with Drawers of War Transactions, whether in the form of discomfort or a tangential association to the history the collection addresses, are further expansions of the archive. These are all rogue imprints that constitute the archive, yet have no material place within it.

Drawers of War Transactions thus grapples with Hall’s central question of what makes an archive live. For Hall, the construction of a ‘living archive’ requires both the act of constituting an archive – through processes of collection, curation and dissemination – as well as the discursive processes that read it, such as interpretation, criticism and debate. The concept intrinsically trusts archival processes to transform ‘a relatively random collection of works’ into ‘an object of reflection and debate’. ^[7]  While Hall’s ‘living archive’ grants due authority to the role of interpretation in archives and pushes against the positivist or disciplining logic of the archive, it nevertheless remains invested in what the archive might yield, or histories that might be recovered. Anjali Arondekar cautions against this teleological impulse, which ‘both fuels and empties reading practices’. ^[8]  She encourages scepticism towards frameworks that purport to solve the issue of archival absence by transforming ordinary objects, anecdotes and testimonies into exemplars of a particular historical event, subject or identity.

To counter this impulse, it is useful to pair Hall’s living archive with Achille Mbembe’s argument on the archive’s constitutive relationship with death. Mbembe likens the architecture of the archive to a sepulchre, a place where the debris of ‘“dead time” (the past)’ is laid to rest. ^[9]  The archivist’s role is thus one of a medium, someone who resuscitates the dead while maintaining control over its narrative. This ‘trade with death’ captures an important point of analysis for Drawers of War Transactions: the relation between the archive and the state. ‘The power of the state’, Mbembe argues, ‘rests in its ability to consume time’ and thus relieve itself of any outstanding debt. ^[10]  While the passage of time is not equivalent to its death, it is important to recognise the state’s reliance on this linear understanding of temporality in which the past is continuously supplanted by the present. Drawers of War Transactions is, after all, an archive of various state actors and those enmeshed in its machinery. It collects the promises made and debts owed to those who invested their faith in whatever state entity available to them for protection, whether it be the government, the LTTE or the international community. The traces of Shanaathanan’s hand in constructing this archive resuscitate those debts. Thus, what makes this archive live, according to Hall, is also part of the trade with death that constitutes the archive in the first place. The dialectical relationship between livingness and death is useful as it directs our attention to the stakes of the archive, rather than its absences.

In the exhibition text, Shanaathanan notes how civilians took precious care of their documents during the displacement and devastation of the war’s conclusion ‘believing they would provide safety, security and a better future’. ^[11]  But for those who survived the war’s conclusion, the futility of such documents in the wake of genocide, and in the face of expanding militarisation and the consolidation of power, soon crystallised. This is most clear in the struggle of the families of the disappeared in the North and East provinces of Sri Lanka, who have been continuously protesting since 2017 and demanding answers on the whereabouts of loved ones who were forcibly disappeared. Witnesses attest to entire families, including children as young as two years old, surrendering to the Sri Lankan army during the final phase of the war, yet none were seen again. ^[12]  The government has offered death certificates, missing person certificates and renumeration to the next of kin, all gestures that would, on paper, relegate their demands to the past record. That several mothers and fathers have passed before receiving answers acutely registers the limitations of archival recovery, and the power of the archive to erase more than it records. Undermining the authority of the archive as a vehicle for preserving and interpreting the past is crucial, as it helps draw attention to the traces of the archive that live outside its index, such as those who continue to collect on its debts.
 

^[1]   The time frame of the war cited here (1978–2009) matches the time frame noted in the exhibition text for Drawers of War Transactions. Although many attribute the war’s beginning to the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983 (known as ‘Black July’), there were multiple upheavals of anti-Tamil violence prior to 1983 that are part of the war’s narrative. Tamil militant groups began to form as early as 1969, and calls for a separate state gained increasing momentum with the passing of the constitutions of 1972 and 1978, which further codified Sinhala Buddhist supremacy. See Kate Cronin-Furman and Mario Arulthas, ‘How the Tigers got Their Stripes: A Case Study of the LTTE’s Rise to Power,’ Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 2021, p 5

^[2]  Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, ‘T Shanaathanan’, in Zoe Butt, ed, Journey Beyond the Arrow–Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber, Sharjah Art Foundation and Prestel, Munich, 2019, p 230

^[3]   Stuart Hall, ‘Constituting an Archive,’ Third Text, vol 15, no 54, Spring 2001, pp 89–92, p 89

^[4]   My attention to temporality draws inspiration from Bliss Cua Lim’s method of temporal critique in Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2009; Lim looks to examples of the confrontation between asynchronous temporalities in cinema to critique colonial ideologies underpinning empty, homogenous time

^[5]   The UN estimates that 40,000 civilians died in the final phase of the war, whereas local population reports show that an estimated 140,000 civilians who were living in the warzone remain missing; see ‘Sri Lanka’s Dead and Missing: The Need for an Accounting’, The International Crisis Group, 27 February 2012

^[6]   Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, ‘T Shanaathanan’, op cit, p 233

^[7]   Stuart Hall, ‘Constituting an Archive’, op cit, p 89

^[8]   Anjali R Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2009, p 16

^[9]   Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, in Refiguring the Archive, Carolyn Hamilton et al, eds, Springer, Dordrecht and Cape Town, 2002, p 21

^[10]   Ibid, p 23

^[11]   Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, ‘T Shanaathanan’, op cit, p 230

^[12]   See International Truth and Justice Project, ‘Press Release: New ITJP website lists 280 names of enforced disappearance in Sri Lanka all on one day’, 15 May 2018

Kaitlin Emmanuel is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University