In a three-week artist residency in Vancouver this past September 2009, Sri Lankan artist Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan worked collaboratively with the local Tamil diaspora, exploring the condition of collectivity rooted in a consciousness of homelessness, and the idea of homeland and host land as constantly changing entities. The result is a work he calls Imag(in)ing ‘Home’ (2009), for which he and a number of volunteers collected visual material from 300 community members representing individuals’ narratives and ideas of ‘home.’ Each item is displayed in its own container in rows on shelves, offering a kind of museumization and acknowedgement of expatriate experience.

When asked by the curator how he would describe Imag(in)ing Home in terms of a question it asks, Shanaathanan answered, “How do the emotional and material boundaries of a diasporic home exist? And how do they interact and transform each other?”

Currently completing his PhD in Art History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, T. Shanaathanan is an artist and University of Jaffna lecturer practicing in his home community of Jaffna, Sri Lanka—a city that has been ravaged by more than 20 years of conflict between the Sri Lankan government and Tamil Tiger rebels. In 2004 he facilitated an art exhibition there, A History of Histories, that brought together Sri Lankan artists from the north and south for the first time in 50 years, offering a kind of catharsis for community members trying to deal with the trauma of ongoing war.