War and Peace: Visual Narratives from Contemporary Sri Lanka brings together paintings, sculptures, photographs, and installations produced during and after the thirty-year war in Sri Lanka. The exhibition invites viewers to pause and reflect on this traumatic period, on the verge of being forgotten in this age of reconciliation and rebuilding. With the lack of any national or private institutiona
l support to collect, exhibit, interpret, and preserve contemporary art in Sri Lanka, the varied responses of artists--both male and female, from different parts of the country--towards violence, pain, trauma, death, loss, and displacement are brought together in this exhibition in the form of a brief repository. War and Peace is organized thematically according to visual motifs that artists keep returning to over and over again: The Book, Maps and Roads, Everyday Landscapes, The Body, The Soldier, People, Objects of War, Everyday Objects, and Shrines and Memorials. Rather than breaking up the larger exhibition into two distinct temporal entities called "War" and "Peace," we use these recurrent visual tropes to indicate not only the arbitrary margins of such categories but also the concerns of artists and by extension the collective. War and Peace not only challenges viewers to remember and memorialize a tragic era, but also proposes a future in which such events must never occur again.
