Description
We co-organised the ‘Artful Struggles: Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka’ exhibition at Harrow Arts Centre (London) in July 2023, together with three Sri Lankan community organisations based in and around Harrow. In this paper, we will discuss the peacebuilding implication of the exhibition and its process. Through the exhibition, we explored how the visual arts helped promote – and now help sustain – a more hopeful, pluralistic, and just politics for the country. It did so by bringing together several Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim artists whose work tackles ongoing struggles for accountability, economic justice, religious understanding, and women’s rights. The process of organising the exhibition brought together Sinhalese and Tamil Sri Lankan diaspora arts groups (Agora and Vimbam) to work together for the first time, in-collaboration with the Movement for Peoples Struggle-Sri Lanka (UK) (a broad-based movement that had organized UK protests in solidarity with the 2022 protests in Sri Lanka).
