PEOPLE BEHIND THE EXHIBITS
Your trauma will never define you is an exhibition that brings together creativity and labour of a collective of individuals, working separately but also in tangent. Most of the artworks featured in this collection (unless otherwise specified) is a work of collective art attributed to a community of women, who remain anonymous in credits, though first to be acknowledged for their bravery and resilience.
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Working with them were a team of facilitators and officers from Centre for Equality and Justice.
KUSAL GUNASEKARA, VISUAL ARTIST
Kusal has been actively contributing to the art scene in Sri Lanka since 1998, when his first exhibition took place. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions. Since 2003, Kusal has been a lecturer at the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts (VAFA) and has immense experience in working with community groups on art projects. As a politically astute artist, he has tackled topics of justice, peace, memory and reconciliation repeatedly.
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With the support of Centre for Equality and Justice he conducted several workshops with women across the country, which in turn inspired Kusal to produce a new spate of artworks featured in this collection.
TEHANIÂ CHITTY
Tehani Chitty is a therapist who provides one-to-one and group counselling sessions for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties, adults with anxiety, those who have experienced trauma and at-risk children and youth. She has a MA in Drama and movement therapy from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (UK) and is a member of the British Association of Dramatherapists. From 2018 to 2019 Tehani ran self-compassion groups with women from conflict affected areas in Sri Lanka. She has worked with children in residential care for 3 years and has co-created the Good Enough Parent Course. Tehani is passionate about supporting people to move into a healthier relationship with themselves, others and the world around them. She uses play, storytelling and enactment, and movement as the medium through which to facilitate this journey.
VASUKI JEYASHANKAR
Kamala Vasuki (1966) is a feminist activist and artist from the East and North of Sri Lanka. As an artist she combines her steady interest and talent in creative arts with her passion and commitment to issues of gender, human rights and social justice. Other than her individual artistic expressions she works with the women affected by war and violence to express their voices through collective art forms.
Her first solo exhibition in 1989 was organised by Alliance Francaise de Jaffna. She prefers to exhibit her works in unconventional spaces that are closer to the communities. As a mobilizer, she founded various groups including an artist’s group called ‘Artists for Non-Violent Living.
She was a student of Vembadi Girls High School, Jaffna, graduated in Biological Sciences from the university of Jaffna and completed Masters degree in Human rights and Democratization at the University of Sydney.
RADHIKA HETTIARACHCHI
Radhika Hettiarachchi is a researcher, curator and peacebuilding practitioner, with over 16 years’ experience working in Sri Lanka. Designed by her and implemented together with Viluthu Centre for Human Resource Development (2012-2014), www.theherstoryarchive.org is a collection of oral histories of war-affected women from Sri Lanka, archived at the National Archives of Sri Lanka. She conceptualised, and together with Search for Common Ground implemented the Community Memorialisation Project (2015-2019) which not only archived people’s lived experiences of conflict, at www.memorymap.lk, but used the stories for intergenerational dialogue, through people-to-people exchanges. She curated one of Colombo’s leading arts festivals – ‘Colomboscope’: Tackling issues of history, representation and politics in ‘Making History’ in 2014 and in 2015, focusing on historical geographies of people, and Colombo’s urban development in ‘The City/Identity/Urbanity’. In 2019, she was the founding Curatorial Advisor for HistoricalDialogues.lk's travelling history museum 'It's About Time'. In 2021, she curated the 7-country exhibition -www.sharedjourneys.online - on challenging dominant narratives of power through marginalised histories. She read English and Communications Theory at York University, Canada, and holds a MSc in Development Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science, U.K.
HASINI A. HAPUTHANTHRI, CURATOR
Best known as a development professional and arts manager, Hasini collaborates with a global network of researchers and practitioners on peace-building, arts and heritage management. Her current focus is on reinventing museums as sites of representation, innovative pedagogy and civic engagement. Her publications include Archive of Memory: Reflections of 70 years of Independence (www.archiveofmemory.lk), Cultural Fluency: A Transformative Agenda for Caring Communities, and Museums, Memory and Identity Politics in Sri Lanka.
She has curated two online platforms related to memory and museums, namely, the World Art and Memory Museum (www.wam-emuseum.org) and Museum of Memory and Co-Existence (www.momac.lk)