‘History of Histories’ is an installation done as part of the exhibition titled ‘Agam-Puram’, at the Jaffna public library, which was turned into ashes in the summer of 1981 and embodies memories of a ‘cultural genocide’. This large-scale installation was carried out by the people of Jaffna with the assistance Art History students S. Kannan, S. Kumutha, G. Tamilini, Vasanthini of the University of Jaffna and T.Shanaathanan.
For this endeavor, accompanied by friends, they visited 500 randomly chosen houses in different parts of the Jaffna Peninsula in order to ask the residents to give them any material object that memorializes the last 20 years of people’s own lives in this embattled land. This activity “collecting” is in a way similar to that of a local Hindu madi pichchaikaran who, with collected rice from various houses, makes a special offering to the public at the temple. Every single object in this collection was placed on a red velvet pedestal, in identical containers and displayed as in a conventional museum or a library. The collection included a wide range of ordinary, mundane objects such as a single shoe of a dead child, the broken head of a temple icon, various kinds of identity cards, passports, death certificates, reports of disappearances, letters of missing relatives, keys of the houses that were demolished for the expansion of the “high security zones”, police residential permits, photographs of loved ones lost in the war, the ashes of a burned house, particles of trodden buildings, shell-pieces, bullets, broken dolls, pieces of dance and costume jewellery, barbed wires, water, sand and so on .
The particular installation excavated the layers of conflicted, contested and mismatched memories, histories and emotions that generated in a single unified geographical territory in the “no war” period (during the time of the Norwegian peace initiative between the time of 2002 and 2006). The objects provided viewers recurring possibilities to participate in making, unmaking and remaking histories and in so doing opened up many opportunities for positioning oneself. Here, the act of collage is not only the principal way of making meaning but is also the metaphorical and metonymic representation of the character of this society. These observations directly pose a question in relation to the kind of self and its process of emergence in dislocated locations. The following testimonies may help the reader to grasp the nature of the problem I am trying to address here.

History of Histories
An Installation by. T. Shanaathanan, S. Kannan, K. Tamilini, K.S. Kumutha, R. Vasanthini collaborated with people of Jaffna.
Concept of artwork:In one of the Buddhist jathaka stories, one mother requested the Buddha to give life to her son, who had died by snakebite. The Buddha told her that if she was able to get a handful of rice from a house where no death has occurred, he could then be able to give life to her son. Then, this mother went to each and every house in the village to get the rice, and found that there was no house where death had not occurred. This story brings us to the contemporary reality of northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka, which are the battlefields of conflicting histories, which had also seen war over the last twenty years. Loss, destruction, despair, disappearance, suffering, death, exodus and nostalgia became part of mundane and ordinary experience. There is no house or street or village or town without the touch of war. They are affected physically or psychologically. Even though the people restarted removing the physical destructions of war and engaged in reconstruction, they still live with their inner wounds in the ‘no war’ time.
This artwork, ‘History of Histories’ was specially done for the Jaffna Public Library, which was burned, and itself became a memorial for the civil war. Like a local Hindu madipichchaikaran who goes from door-to-door and collect rice in order to organize an offering at the temple as part of his vow, we collected materials from 500 houses (randomly chosen within the Jaffna peninsula). These materials represent the owners’ history and memories of last 20 years of their lives in this land. In the process of collecting these materials, they shared their experience and memories in relation to these objects. We have arranged these materials in the form of a museum where we have tried to amalgamate these small parts and the ordinary things into a factual history of this society. Like the way madipichchaikaran shares his food, in the end we too share our experience with others. The viewers of these memories may construct numerous histories through the process of viewing this work.