Narrator: The Sri Lankan civil war was one of Asia's longest wars, almost 30 years, in which the Sinhalese majority attempted to eradicate the Tamil minority. And conversely, the Tamil minority tried to establish its own state within Northern Sri Lanka. The context for this work, The Incomplete Thombu, is the end of the war in 2009.
What you're seeing are a series of drawings and accompanying narratives by Tamil people who were forced to leave their homes during the war and placed into internal displacement camps and worse. And the artist here, who is Tamil starts to ask, “What is home for these people?” He asked them to draw what they remember of home. And then he overlays their drawings with his own architectural renderings, in some way making that which is ephemeral, a memory, a thought, an idea of home more permanent.