Burden of Identities: Art in 20th Century Tamil World (Inaugural Annual Tamil Studies Seminar Series)

Launching of the Annual Tamil Studies Seminar Series at University of Toronto in collaboration with the Centre for South Asian Studies, Asian Institute. This will be the inaugural lecture of the Annual Tamil Studies Seminar Series. 

 

 

South Asian art in the twentieth-century was preoccupied with the project of nation building. Visual arts were heavily invested in exhibiting newly emerging identities fueled by the conditions of modernity, both at the national and sub national/ regional levels. Further, spurred by the tensions and entanglements between the colonial and the national, a local modernism began to take shape in twentieth-century South Asia. This ‘new art’, though inspired by the French avant-garde movement, sought validation from local traditions which were themselves epistemologies and inventions created under the ordering and classifying gaze of European modernity. 

 

This talk tries to map the being and becoming, in and through visual representations, of an individual/ collective Tamil self in post-independence India and Sri Lanka. By way of thematic and stylistic analyses of public sculptures installed by the Tamil Nadu state government in Chennai, the modern Tamil capital, since the late 1960s, the works of the ‘Madras Movement ‘which came into existence in the 1970s and the art works influenced by the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict and the Dalit movement in Tamil Nadu after the 1980s, this talk tries to address the following queries: How did the Dravidian ideology and its imaginaries arising from ancient Tamil literature re/shape colonial and pre-colonial notions and functions of visual arts? How did interactions among expressive mediums such as literature, theater, cinema and visual arts contribute to the construction of a Tamil self? What were the sites and moments where the popular aesthetics of the Dravidian movement had to negotiate with the elite aesthetics of the Madras movement? How did the burning realities of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict and the Dalit movement in Tamil Nadu challenge the formalist approaches of the Madras movement and the image worship of the Dravidian movement? 

 

 

Dr. T. Sanathanan is a visual artist and a Professor of Art History, Department of Fine Arts, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka . His artworks explore the meaning of home in the context of displacement and migration. His works have been exhibited widely in Sri Lanka and at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, Vancouver; Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane; Museum of Ethnology, Vienna; Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi, Asian Art Archive, Hong Kong, Kochi Art Biennial, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lahore Biennial, Dhaka Art Summit, Sharjah Art Biennial among others. His artist book projects include 'The One Year Drawing Project', 'The Incomplete Thombu', and 'A-Z of conflict'. He is also the author of several articles and book chapters on Modern and contemporary visual art in Sri Lanka. He received his PhD in Art History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Sanathanan is one of the co-founders of Sri Lankan Archive for Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design in Jaffna and founder of Kolam craft initiative. 

 

Dr. Sidharthan Maunaguru (Chair) is an Associate Professor and the inaugural Chair of Tamil Studies at Department of Historical and Cultural Studies, UTSC. He has a graduate appointment with Department of Anthropology at the St. George Campus. His research focuses on anthropology of war, violence, migration, politics, religion, sovereignty, conscience, ethics and future/s.