.jpg)
At the start of this year, between 1 and 7 January, KUNST Gallery in Mattancherry, Kerala, held a lively exhibition titled "The Eelam Dialogues: Voices of Resistance" as part of the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The exhibition was a week-long programme of discussions, performances, speeches showcasing Tamil visual arts, poets, novelists, political commentators and musicians.
This exhibition interrogates the Eelam Tamil experience and invites its audience to question what it means to be Tamil, how resistance manifests itself through art, and how Tamil identity can be passed on- not as trauma alone, but as resistance and identity.
During the session, "Drumbeats of Rebellion", Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan, a co-curator of the exhibition alongside Meena Kandasamy, gave an introductory lecture entitled "Sensory Reclamation: On Being Eelam Tamil".
Excerpts of her speech are detailed below:
"It isn’t easy to rebuild after a genocide. It requires the kind of imagination that is tethered, heavy, weighted in history, yet light, to innovate, expansive to beckon new recruits.
And sometimes you need proof that the imagined can become real. Eelam was there. I saw it, I felt it".
[...]
"To preventatively create against what Meena cautions – “the death of collective imagination that precedes the death of collective action.”
To sketch new geometries of liberation: the parai drum circle as subversion against predatory formations – round-ups of every kind".
[...]
At this particular political moment, I offer a plea: to stay in ambiguity a little while. Every step into what we are offered – impoverished language of rights and governance -- what once felt concrete, solid, becomes a new carceral casing.
This is not to exist in a void – quite the opposite -- as part of this endeavor to foreground art is to say the undefined may be the only safe space we have.
[...]
On Maaveerar naal just before 6pm a father lights a flame against the wind that threatens to extinguish, again.
His hands, her hands, all naturally cup around the flicker, in the lotus gesture we once learned in dance class.
Close enough to feel the fire, hands close in as if affectionally molded against a child’s cheek. The way my father did mine. The way I do my son’s.
[...]
Palestinians call the hunger strike the “battle of the empty intestine.”
The women Thileepan Anna’s hunger strike for Tamil liberation would, first, claim the moment to be indescribable.
Immediately after a declaration of indescribability, as if recognizing the fleeting possibility for light to escape a black hole, they rapidly locate linguistic scraps to reconstruct, resurrect.
“In Tamil we would say watching Thileepan was ‘நரக வேதனை (naraga vedanai),’ a torture like hell.”
“His fast was so powerful that the word ‘powerful’ itself feels too small.”
“It was history, emotion, pain and determination embodied, in one.”
[...]
When the doctor knelt at the side of Thileepan Anna’s dead body, a collective wail erupted. It reverberated at the same decibel across resistance struggles, piercing through to the next generation.
There are sounds that stay with you".
Full videos of each event are to be published online.
Read more about the exhibition here: 'Eelam Dialogues' - Sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale
Read Nimmi Gowrinathan's interview with the Tamil Guardian: TG Exclusive Interview with Nimmi Gowrinathan