By Jasmine Nilani Joseph
-Pranav Kadambi
In this session of SEA CITY, Jasmine uses drawing as a medium to narrate and investigate the concepts of barriers, shelters and home in war affected landscapes as it becomes an archive of the past & present.
Jasmine Nilani Joseph is a visual artist from Jaffna, whose work focuses on the experiences of displacement, militarization, and the lived histories of Northern Sri Lanka which experienced 30 years of armed conflict in recent history. She studied in the University of Jaffna, graduating with a bachelor's degree in fine arts in 2015. She has presented her work in multiple events across the world, and her work comes from her stories of displacement while growing up in the midst of the Civil war.
Born in Jaffna, her family moved to refugee camps in Vavuniya- as her village and the lands around were declared high-security zones. Being only an infant when her family was displaced, Jasmine was able to recreate the ideas of her family’s old home only through the memories of her parents- which is a central part in some of her works. She explains stories of expectation and grief through her work which profoundly speaks about the feelings of uncertainty, questions of the space she was living in during the times of displacement, and her works are drawn out with objects of memory encountered in the everyday of her childhood. Constantly moving with her family due to violence, some of her core aspects in her work are the idea of home, shared and collective memory. ideas of movement and involuntary displacement, changing lifestyle and the everyday. She mentions she creates her own memory through the memory of others.
In her presentation, she mentions how the presence of fences shaped the landscape, and the barriers it created. ‘Fences’, a work which she presented in the Dhaka art summit of 2017 explains about her perspective of how she looked at the changing landscape, the overlap of the fence and the local buildings such as the church which fall in the high security zone. She explains the narrow gap between the fences was where conversations and gossip among village-folk and housewives would take place. Fences act as an omnipresent element in her memories of landscape, in which she questions the idea of barriers and its physicality.
Jasmine is a passionate storyteller, she delves into some of the smallest details of her memories growing up, and has drawn them out as such- memories of the wilderness, snakes in the fields around, objects in her house and the cycles she would rent as a child. She describes her artwork as an archive of her memories, and the house; mentioning that, even if her house gets destroyed, it will continue to survive in her artwork. In 2017, Jasmine was able to finally visit her old house after it was no longer deemed a high-security zone. She mentions how her house was the one with bougainvilleas around, and now, 27 years later, the bougainvilleas had completely grown around her house. Jasmine refrains from directly depicting violence in any of her artworks but depicts the objects, landscapes and changes in lifestyle as result of violence.
Another powerful artwork of Jasmine titled ‘family trip to 188/4’ depicts all the memories and instances from when they resettled, to her moving back to her hometown of jaffna. Jasmine has given the title ‘family trip to 188/4’ as an irony being that a trip is something voluntary and by choice- whereas here it is forced upon. 188/4 here refers to the address of her family’s refugee camp, and gives a sense that her family never saw their new address as a place of permanence, but something temporary, despite it lasting over 30 years.
Address of Residence
Conversations between Apurva Talpade and Jasmine post presentation, gave us insight into her various mediums of drawings out, experimentations with material and form. Jasmine brought out her ideas of archiving through multi-disciplined ways of listening, talking and finally bringing out stories through multiple processes of drawing. In all, the conversation with Jasmine provided depth and insight on how memory and displacement finds itself in multiple forms through various elements. The works presented brought out the depth and forms of passage of time which a sense of loss and memory brings.
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