Art Today, T. Shanaathanan

T. Shanaathanan graduated from the College of Art, University of Delhi, India with a BFA degree in 1997 and got his MFA in painting in 2000. He has had number of solo and group exhibitions in France, India and Sri Lanka. In 2003, his work was included in the Sri Lankan Art exhibition at the October Gallery, UK. At present, Shanaanathanan practices his art in Jaffna, and teaches at the Department of Fine Arts, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka.

“Experiences are defined in the polar concepts as real and ideal, good and bad, god and evil, justice and injustice, victory and loss, peace and war, self and world, tradition and modern, masculine and feminine…

Social and political unrest in this land and the expense, which we paid for survival made me realize the validity and the limitations of these opposites. My art is an attempt to translate the silence behind the opposites into a visually articulated form.

So in the process of listening to the sound of silence, the place where one places his own self becomes important. For me, self is a consciousness mapped by the physical and psychological location of experience and the body becomes the referring point of this location of experience and its expression” – T. Shanaathanan