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Welcome to the South Asian Studies seminar, and I would like to introduce Dr India Pidio, who is going to be speaker for today.

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Vidya is an anthropologist and actor who works at the intersection of conflict and visual culture,

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and her current research looks at war photography and civilian resistance in northern Sri Lanka and

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considers the local and global aftermath of civil conflict through the making and moving of images.

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India is an associate lecturer in Social Anthropology at St Andrews, the University of St Andrews,

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and she's also a founding member of the first of its kind virtual museum in Sri Lanka,

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titled Museum of Religious Freedom, which is a space for archiving,

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learning and critically reflecting on the complex histories and contemporary concerns relating to the freedom of belief or religion in Sri Lanka.

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So today of India, we'll be talking about how the final years of the Sri Lankan Civil War were transformed

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by a significant development in the techniques of photography and how digital

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cameras and mobile phones in the hands of a public led to a surplus of digital

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images documenting the horrors of Sri Lanka's no fly zone in the post-war period.

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These photographs and footage can persist in active, online and offline circulations,

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and this underpins competing political claims and demands for justice and accountability.

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So centred on this, the public commemoration of the 2009 massacre the talk of India will give will examine

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the unruly afterlives of atrocities photographs within the context of Tamil civilians,

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resistance and remembrance in northern Sri Lanka. So before I hand over the night to world, so to speak of India,

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just some housekeeping rules of India will talk for 40 to 45 minutes and then we will open for questions which Typekit directly into the chat.

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India took over to you, India.

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Thank you so much, Stephanie, for that introduction, including the surprise mention of the virtual museum, a religious freedom.

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Anyway, I'm going to start talking and I do have some slides.

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I'm not showing any graphic images, but I just want everyone to be aware that this is a discussion of atrocities,

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so it might not exactly be pleasant descriptions of violence, et cetera.

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So please consider yourself cautioned. I'm just going to start sharing my screen if that's OK.

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OK, can you see that OK? Yes. Perfect.

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Thank you. So I have this scripted out in order to keep two times, I'm going to be reading hopefully will be engaging,

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but there are some pictures where we want to look at so atrocity nation state amnesia

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the photographic debris of the Sri Lankan Civil War On the 18th of May 2018,

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the road from Jaffna to Maldives was punctuated by small towns in mourning.

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It was the ninth anniversary of the last day of war between the Sri Lankan state forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or the LTTE.

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The intensification of hostilities between 2006 and 2008 fatally impacted the Rumney Tamil community,

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who were caught between the military's indiscriminate offensives and the Tigers frantic last stand by January 2009.

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Over 300000 displaced civilians were forced into government,

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declared no fire zones and trapped between the advancing army and the retreating combatants.

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Many thousands succumb to relentless state directed artillery shelling and aerial bombardment.

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Essential humanitarian aid, including food and medical supplies, were curtailed, deepening the crisis.

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Not even hospitals and medical facilities were saved from the armed forces systematic attacks.

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Neither warring parties showed regard for international humanitarian law or civilian life.

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As the rebels command structure collapsed. The able-bodied were draughted in desperation to fight for an independent Tamil homeland that day,

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like many thousands before them, did not survive to see. The final days of the three decade long insurgency led by the Tamil militancy unfolded

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in will back where it was brutally extinguished between September 2008 and May 2009.

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An estimated 40 to seventy thousand civilians were killed in the money.

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Government statistics maintained that the number was no greater than 9000.

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Credible allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity have been levelled against both the Sri Lankan state forces and the LTTE.

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A newlywed couple Remembrance Day upon which this papers focussed walruses were reanimated in makeshift monuments that mobilised photography,

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little roadside shrines were centred around assemblages of photographs, small candles showing the carnage of the final months of the war.

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Others house portraits of the known dead and missing, garlanded with peach, hibiscus, white pinwheels,

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flowers and red Zora unscented commonplace funeral blooms for lives lost Cleo and lamps of mourning were shuttered.

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Shops draped with black flags announced a region wide half of the town's marked with the protest.

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A day of turmoil. Grief in the predominantly Sinhalese south remembering the end of the war took on an entirely different tone,

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indicative of the lack of consensus about the nature of this atrocity.

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Preparation to the annual commemoration of Victory Day, as it's called on the 19th of May well underway.

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The photographic debris of war making of the transient memorials in the North challenge the proclamation of this hard-won peace.

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The government's projection of reconciliation took on the form of new highways,

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ports and stadiums in southern Sri Lanka and grand monuments in the north as a tribute to the bravery of the armed forces.

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For those gathered at Mouly by such concrete,

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accolades amounted to insulting the perpetrators who were responsible for the deaths and disappearances of their family and friends until 2015.

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Public gatherings to remember the time awarded were prohibited, taking place in secrecy or hidden away in homes.

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Commemoration of the war that remains contested as a surveillance,

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intimidation and harassment of those meeting and to mourn in public by state intelligence continues where

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the visual material remains of the Tamil militancy and its efforts at state building have been raised.

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Tamil imaginaries of the nation and the imperatives of the Sri Lankan state persisted at troubled odds.

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In these divergences, the causes and consequences of the war and the contours and histories of nation and state were quietly but resolutely opposed.

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This paper delves into the visual debris of war in the form of atrocity photographs

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and the unruly afterlives within the context of remembrance and resistance.

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Karen Straw's uses a metaphor of refraction to examine how popular photography mediates between widely

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shared representational forms and the visual logics and more intimate concerns as they change context.

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Photographs accrue new social meanings and functions.

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Sri Lanka's territorial boundary also served as a threshold between political suppression and possibility.

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Defining the refractions of the images discussed here. Photographs and gendered silence or risk on the island, conversely,

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allowed for vocalisations of pursuit for truth and accountability, or demands for nationalist liberation outside its borders.

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While acknowledging the extensive visibility and impact of wartime images outside of Sri Lanka,

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I focus on the uses of photography in the not in northern Sri Lanka, where freedoms were limited and the risks remain constant.

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By sending the space of remembrance and movie Michael as a point of departure,

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I explore the political work of photography in the shadow of the nationalist conflict.

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Photography offers us a window onto contested questions of war, nation state and citizenship.

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Everyday photography and the endless contextualisation and we materialisation of photographic images presented a compelling

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means to illuminate the effects of war and the lingering political frictions and grievances of the post-war following.

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I realised the provocation. This forms an attempt to watch the types of photographs that made up the post-war image world of my interlocutors.

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My analysis extends beyond what is shown in the image to reconstruct the photographic event and its subsequent circulations,

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and we framings to account for the inscriptions of time, an increasingly borderless movement as enabled by the digital and the virtual.

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In another life, the senator near the ocean, Admiral Levi Cosmi,

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had played host to a game of cricket and football, but it remained irrevocably steeped in the detritus of war.

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The soil at Mouly Biche was still tangled and scattered with remnants and the no fire zone children's shoes, women's saris,

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the plastic shells of battery-powered radios, men's rubber slippers, woven mats and blue tarpaulin all served as indexes of atrocity.

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Hundreds of mourners had gathered before a crowd with metal rods that would be repurposed as torches.

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Here, they took off their shoes towards digging into soil,

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consecrated darkly by the relics of nation and violence, as if to form an elemental tether to all that was lost.

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Examining the everyday materiality of violence in Sierra Leone, Marion Fermé considers how local histories are bound up in matter,

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whereby through objects, language and social relations, violent historical memories, sentimental and critically appropriated.

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The visible world, Vermeij argues, is activated by forces concealed beneath the surface of discourse, objects and social relations in Malawi.

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Back what was buried, though only barely concealed, served as a material reliquary of nation upon which political continuities and claims are built.

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Photographs of the soil tangled up with wartime residue were posted on mediums such as Instagram,

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which captions demanding recognition for the atrocities against the community and justice demanding justice for victims.

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Where ragged shirts, broken suitcases and small school school bags are half buried in the dirt.

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Mourners assembled makeshift memorials for the departed loved ones.

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Amongst these were those whose family members had disappeared in the hundreds following the surrender to the state at the end of the war.

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Flowers and incense circle and circle photographs, elegant studio portraits and occasional families that stared headshots still laminated

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into identity cards were placed on mounds of soil resembling little graves.

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Many were elderly women, often alone, weeping with visceral grief that hung heavy in them.

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A stone's throw away on the strip of beach were the final days of the war.

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It unfolded scraps of sun and salt bleached family albums carried by victims had

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survived for a number of years before they slowly deteriorated and washed away.

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Flags banners printed with brightly tinted atrocities was strung on tree branches and tents that offered sweet cordial to the participants.

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Despite a buzzing media draw, an upset a few elderly mothers reminding them of the harm of falling shells.

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Local photographers, media workers, citizen journalists and activists congregated around grieving families looking

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for the most arresting of potential photographic evacuations that would.

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In the days that followed, the event circulated around the local and media.

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Local media scape little children cried over parents they had only known for a few months of their short lives.

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Grandmothers wept over their dead sons and daughters, who had not survived the teenage years or had disappeared upon surrender to the state.

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A father boy in his arm, a large picture frame and causing multiple grave, says a family tree of death.

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A mother mourned a Photoshop memorial portrait of her son. Two images flanking a text that spoke to his memory.

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As the movie commemoration preceded a sharp cry cut through the hum of morning in the morning local time on May.

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The truth is in the soil, a mother is about anxiety and both lament and curse.

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She despairingly grabbed at the Earth with her hands. Photographers bunched around her.

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Two women held up a post-war seta clutched clutching at the soil desperately as of the Earth, might open up and offer her answers.

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Photography was central to the nation state and citizen making practises of Sri Lanka's competing state actors,

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the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE.

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The media was mobilised within personal and collective political spheres to mediate both individual and shared political futures,

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which sustained conflict and resulted in mass displacement and international migration.

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These imaginings would become icons, become transnational and aspiration and character escaping into a space of global circulation.

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These days, this served as an unlikely expansion of Azaylia's proposition of photography's capacity to be territorial lies in wartime and post-war.

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In Sri Lanka, citizenship as a practical pursuit to remedy inequalities of political stackers was made possible by everyday photography.

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Personal and political improvisations facilitated by photography played a crucial role in helping transcend the limits of the sovereign.

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These enables, in turn, greater amplification of allocated claim for a time illusion state and homeland by way of a nation.

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The territorial lies to transnational dispersal in northern Sri Lanka.

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Popular photographic practises have been defined by war in terms of what was photographed,

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why they were photographed and how these photographs were displayed, shared, concealed and destroyed.

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Conflict continues to determine the afterlives of these images, emphasising how war affected communities are actively engaged in the production,

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reproduction, embellishment and circulation of photographic images that pertain and respond to of their civic and political status.

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Where conflict photography has been typically theorised through the lens of documentary images is compelling and necessary,

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an important shift to understanding of what frontline photography can constitute and demonstrates the

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medium's perceived power to confront common evasion and help materialise political aspirations and features.

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This paper speaks principally to the diversity and vibrancy of those photographers and their interminable conjugations within a landscape of loss,

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displacement, war, death and terror. The boundaries between the public and the intimate were blurred, and the social became inherently political.

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Conflict necessitated the generation of new social,

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political and institutionalised image making practises and their splendid transnational circulations.

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As thousands of Tamils fled the island as the war escalated,

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the internationalised social and political arcs and permutations of these images would become increasingly unruly.

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Following the 2009 military victory by the state, the oppression of the Tamils under the guise of national security continues.

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The diverse photography's of the post-war era began to reinforce new and competing post-war political claims and demands,

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transitional justice grievances and individual aspirations.

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But parity of citizenship photographer's capacity for contingency, as theorised by Walter Benjamin,

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is vital to its political possibilities in the context of post-war Sri Lanka events of war, and the troops were numerous and disputed.

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There exists also a powerful paradox the scarcity of personal photographs compounded by loss, displacement status,

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access to cameras and the cost of studio services co-existed with an excess of images documenting wartime suffering.

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The final phase of the Sri Lankan Civil War was marked by a significant transition in the techniques of photography.

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In the mid 2000s, analogue practise became rapidly supplanted by compact digital cameras and mobile phone cameras.

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Unrestrained by the finite exposures and temperamental qualities of film cameras.

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Hundreds of images could be immediately generated, viewed, modified and transmitted.

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A surplus of digital images recording the horrors and atrocities of the war zone captured by both victims and

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perpetrators were a direct result of the shift where these events were framed and atomised by multiple perspectives,

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lenses devises and image regimes.

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Contingency understood as a future uncertainty demanding both personal and political intervention lends itself to grapple with photography,

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social and political reflections. Within the social conditions and transformations of the Sri Lankan food,

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sure new and responsive photography's were continually generated in both intimate and official spheres.

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A large number waited tender to manage personal and political contingencies.

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A surfeit of photographic debris, as if to visually enumerate the pervasive terrors of the state,

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reinforce the collective imagining of Tamil nation state and its political necessity, as well as possibility.

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Following Christopher Binny, the medium's capacity to disturb and trouble was enabled by both volume and ubiquity,

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magnified by the digital reproduction, enhancement and circulation of photographs, rather than a singular.

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The most spark of chance associated with the sort of iconic images produced by photojournalists, for example, that we associate with war photography.

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Accent spaces of Tamil civilian resistance, as well as those declaring renewed claims of nation,

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became saturated with images showing the devastation of war.

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Such photographs drew attention to the countless injuries inflicted on Tamil bodies on the Tamil landscape.

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These amounted to a visual inventory illustrating claims of genocide,

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boldly paper on the contested homeland of digitally or through user generated maps on social media platforms.

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It served as a communal act of evidencing where community histories and landscapes intertwined

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with the chronology of state violence against Tamil citizens were continually expunged.

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The assembly of photographs formed. In that meeting, mobilisations a defiant act of making visible in numbers the resilience of the nation.

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Secondly, even within more intimate realms,

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seemingly mundane portraits such as national identity photographs or the contents of wedding albums performed

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an important function in aiding individual mobility that was ultimately bound to citizenship aspirations.

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This image, for example, shows the use of a national identity card to commemorate were lost, and maybe I'll talk about it more in the Q&A.

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So the small dirt road to the gardens of By was brimming with hundreds of grabbers.

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The path was marked by flamboyant paper and vinyl pandas printed with photographs, maimed children, injured elderly,

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the dismembered dead, hundreds fleeing for their lives with their worldly belongings borne on their backs and bicycles.

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Others wounded and imitated, queuing for kanji courage.

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Photographers, both civilian and militant trapped in, will turn their cameras on for their own suffering.

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In Sri Lanka, the makers of these images, public images remain mostly anonymous.

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Photographers in exile occasionally step forward to claim ownership as they began to relive their lives and asylum elsewhere.

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Thousands of images circulated online as part of displays build for commemoration events,

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such as the one that we see here in Sri Lanka, echoing a civic demand for recognition for the violence that took place in 2009.

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These congregations of images often suggested that the Tamil community's impaired civic status to follow Abiola.

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As always, racing can only be remedied by national self-determination.

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The photographs displayed in Mouly by in and around the north and east during the time of the commemoration,

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with those captured by both victims and perpetrators.

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Celebratory records of annihilation were snapped on cell phones and digital cameras by their executioners in early years.

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A portable digital image making Sri Lankan state soldiers exultant pauses, for example,

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affirmed the heroism in what the Sri Lankan government described as an effort at eradicating terrorism.

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These men documented their own experiences and making a war on the front lines.

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Compatriots killed by their adversaries because of brutalised Tamil bodies to strip them desecrated enemy subjects of deliberate injury.

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The callous executions of prisoners and army men posing triumphantly over piles of corpses recovered and recovered weapons holes.

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Such photographs, especially those of dead tiger cadres,

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bolstered the state's account of liberation and its assertion of a benevolent humanitarian rescue operation,

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which is the sort of government tagline in this business.

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Embedded media personnel staged scenes of combat and rescue with cinematic web Tamils are simultaneously

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framed as both victims in need of saving and culprits requiring requiring total extermination.

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The line between civilian and combatant had been blown by many decades of state violence, coupled with voluntary enlistment and forced recruitment.

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As a result of the state's rhetoric of undoing and antagonism, the distinction was one that many in the south of Sri Lanka were willing to overlook.

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Yet what was made apparent in the images produced during the final months of war was

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the perpetrator state's wilful and catastrophic failure to protect its Tamil citizens.

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This continued to permeate the post war, where Tamil lists and the expression of interlinked political grievances were

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regularly condemned and recommended as efforts to resuscitate the Tamil militancy.

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State violence against those who accost a suspect cast as suspects persisted.

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Tamil photographer is trapped in the war zone, collectively drew attention to the plight of civilians in the fire zones,

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while the Sri Lankans dead when the Tamil victims invisible through claims of zero civilian casualties, thus denying the vast losses that took place.

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Soldiers photographed the brutalities that were deemed necessary to win the war.

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The Tamil militants, in turn, enhanced civilian visibility through photography to protect its own interests.

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Pictured captured by emergency aid workers, meanwhile, verified the government's bombings of hospitals and designated humanitarian centres.

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Journalists and photographers working for the Tigers document the carnage with transmission to the outside world by waves of Tamil news via web sites.

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These photographs, showing the catastrophe of the war zone supplemented the LTTE,

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is repeated requests for a permanent ceasefire confronted by what was described

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as an unprecedented humanitarian crisis weeks before the war finally ended.

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I just want to flag that this remains contested, but is something to take note of the witness of the Tamil.

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But what's important here is that the witness and testimony of Tamil survivors of the Bicol have also

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often been silenced and denied or rejected on account of the city and perceived allegiance to the LTTE.

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In the post war, these images and footage made with diverse intentions endured in online and offline circulations.

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Such images simultaneously motivated contrasting readings and mobilisations.

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Sinhalese nationalist celebrations. Tamil nationalist demands for separate dead evidence of war crimes.

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And international calls for accountability, thus emphasising the unruliness and possibility implicit in Benjamin's suggestion.

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A photographic contingency following the end of the war,

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the visual material markers of the aspiring Tamil state were aggressively demolished on occasion,

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such as movies such as Movie Remembrance Day,

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atrocity photographs and momentarily stitched into the landscape and acts of commemoration and resistance.

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The recasting of the northern landscape under the direction of the military heritage

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development apparatus was described as a process of signalisation such violence.

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Such violations are documented on the hashtags on photography centred social media platforms such as Instagram,

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registering complaints against the state's colonial occupation.

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This is the essential context, again, which one must grasp the political power of claims upon this landscape, as articulated through photography in.

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Sorry. In a black banner displayed Jackman University in May 2018, four photographs showed the suffering of the final months of war.

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A mother tended to a bawling when the child was broken on but was in a sling.

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Strapped Tamil prisoners of war were rounded up near a sort of waterlogged mud bed.

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One appeared to be alive but collapsed into the water, holding his head. Few soldiers watched on while another led a naked men to the pit.

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The execution was imminent. Amongst them was also a young boy.

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It may be readily inferred that this was one of the many jokey photographs captured by army personnel.

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The third partial, the third, showed a pile of corpses half folded into the soil, perhaps prior to a hasty burial or cremation.

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The boat exposed a camp with injured camels sprawled on the ground, where the building of new roads also seated.

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Buddhist shrines and civilian lands remain occupied in an ever expanding military camp, housing the perpetrators of these violences.

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These images of atrocity directed attention away from the hegemonic script of a victorious peace,

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then said movie back necessitated then a different sort of remembrance imagery as a

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mnemonic of nation taking the form of those who were essentially martyred on its behalf.

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To borrow the language of my interlocutors in the midst of shelling gunfire and exalt time,

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a photographer from Jaffna who will keep anonymous in this instance photographed the destruction of his community.

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His family was amongst the thousands trapped in Mouly back in the brutal final months of war.

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Camera in hand He painstakingly snapped the devastation of war.

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He narrated his lost in a survivor with filmic vigour,

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repeatedly making clear that his photography was not intended to serve the parties and the politics of the conflict,

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but the evidential by the record the world needs to know about the suffering, he said simply.

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He hoped that their contents would serve as evidence of what was done to his people through his photographs,

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shot in colour and sometimes edited into black and white. The photographer sought to capture moments of stillness amidst chaos in a vivid Tamil image.

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While that draws on Hindu and Catholic iconography and the flamboyance of South Indian Tamil cinema.

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It was a contrasting solemnity of black and white, a colour typically associated with mourning that demanded the viewer's attention.

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In his photographs, now circulated and exhibited globally, the war was captured in intense detail.

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Huddles of young and old fled in chaotic processions, the belongings heaped onto the backs of bicycles and bullock carts.

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Black clouds of smoke billowed on the horizon,

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evidencing shelling that the Sri Lankan state denied a woman embracing a memorial portrait of a relative led a small convoy of exhausted escapees.

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Dogs and a message factor followed ready at their heels, ready old men and women, deep knee deep in salt water stacking,

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cooking pots, plastic chairs, tin kettles and old rice stacks full of uprooted possessions into small fishing.

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Boats on the lagoon were all pictured in his photography.

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Other photographs emphasise the seemingly endless tragedy of the one named SoundCloud.

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Old men dug graves to bury the dead laid out on stretchers fashioned out of brush mats and ritual branches.

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Families sheltered and slept under the abandoned husks of buses or queued for water dispensed from houses with plastic buckets.

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A woman carried over 10 mat in the crook of her arm and a tiny pet monkey in a makeshift chicken wire cage on her back.

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A stunned boy in a bright orange shirt sat on the back of a tractor, cradling a baby in his arms.

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Sleeping or dead? It was impossible to say. The dagger saw two men on a hero on the bike gasped in horror at an event unfolding beyond the frame.

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Sandwiched between them was the half concealed body of a girl in a blue teddy bear print dress.

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The jagged bones and jutted out made it difficult to gauge whether there was more to her than a pair of legs spilling out of the side.

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A woman carrying a boy in a Red Bunny cap looked on at the two and a half passengers in resignation amid this turmoil.

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There were also shy, smiling toddlers sitting on saris, wings draped in every bunch draped on TV bunches and tired grandmothers cradling happy babies.

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Life to person persevered.

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Amidst that, I wanted to capture the feelings of people through their faces, and so I photographed them directly looking at the camera.

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No words I required them, the photographer mused. Nearly a decade after the war had ended.

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I don't support any side, but I see this as my responsibility to make sure that the injustices,

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the crimes committed against the Tamil people are brought to light. I see these photographs as evidence of genocide.

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I do not know whether we will get justice, but it is my look and meaning purpose.

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These photographs must be seen and these injustices need to be enquired into internationally, but no one is speaking on behalf of US Tamils.

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This is socks. You are direct with us. This needs there needs to be justice.

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And no one can denied what happened. We must record this for history.

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The photographer's images were amongst thousands claimed an unclaimed, mobilised, concealed,

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appropriated exhibitor and disputed that persevered in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan armed conflict.

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Speaking to a history of loss that had been silenced in Sri Lanka as the material remains of war were covered up,

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the photographic debris continued to challenge the absence as contrived by the state.

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This photographer was not alone in his pursuit of photography as possible,

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a record the significance of the record was not merely in its sole in its role as a source of historical truth.

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In its photographic incarnation, it was also politically expedient to be read for its intentions, contingencies and disturbances.

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The photographic panorama was a repository of the past that not only pointed to the future in its present mobilisations,

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but demanded a future alternative that tethered to a political claim of nation in the money.

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A studio photographer who I will also keep anonymous, had occasionally moonlighted as a photographer for the militancy.

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He recalled the mass confiscation of cameras by the latter during the final months of war.

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Cornered, the tigers were using photographs from the war zone to document atrocities by the state and strengthen the

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expanding appeal for an internationally mediated ceasefire that they requested at the time as the war was ending.

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Photographs uploaded onto news websites spurred the dispersed global Tamil diaspora in Europe,

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North America and Australia to undertake global protest, drawing attention to the plight of civilians trapped in the fly zones.

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And indeed, we see these photographs continuing to be mobilised within these spaces of desperate protests,

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which are centred on demands for accountability and justice for the victims of the Sri Lankan war.

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So this studio photographer buried his camera in the silent movie by hoping that he might recover it one day.

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He had not returned to look for them, but was certain that he would not be able to look at it now,

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where people who went to Cullen came back to pondered, implying something of his resilience in the face of adversity as much as his communities.

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Photographs produced by victims or those living in.

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I use the term victim here in quotation marks or those living in sites of active conflict or crisis in the recent years,

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such as in Syria and Myanmar, are yet to be afforded significant attention within the ideological literature on photography and conflict.

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Those, like the first photographer will collide amid war saw themselves as exercising something like Oslo's called responsibility.

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This was also central ultimately to that and the political identity for the Tamil community.

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Confronted by the Sri Lankan state, the atrocity image demanded to be amplified as perhaps inadvertently implied by Kleinman and Kleinman.

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The local population is often tacitly categorised and homogenised as passive victimised subjects of such photographs.

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If we think back to claims by Susan Sontag, for example,

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they are seen as being seen and theorised as somehow separate from the global audience to which they do not appear to belong as produces audiences,

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consumers or intermediaries in their dissemination and circulation.

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Within this framing that also rendered apolitical and lacking in agency,

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often relegated within tropes of the suffering other as opposed to makers, movers and manipulators of images.

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This premise has rendered progressively unwarranted by the rapidly expanding access to image making devices their potentials in appropriations,

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but enhanced with internet based platforms available for the direct dissemination of images.

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It must be noted that within the context of the Sri Lankan conflict,

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atrocity images have had a very complex history of political use by the state as well as the LTTE.

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Visuals of war and violence were actively incorporated into the Tamil image world through photography,

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film and other forms of public art utilised as a tool for recruitment and the political socialisation of the Tamil community.

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The true tigers, or cadres trained in film and photography for the LTTE, is now endorsing a more reality television media unit,

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filmed its battles against the Sri Lankan armed forces on land and sea.

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Central to this distribution were images for Gandhi, the Sri Lankan state's atrocities against and victimisation of the Tamil community.

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That, in turn sort of strengthened their claim for a sovereign homeland.

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These were featured in exhibitions and pamphlets circulated online and broadcast

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on television to enlist popular support and encourage recruitment locally.

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These visuals were also circulated internationally to secure support and financial contributions from the Tamil community abroad.

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The footage was used by the group's military strategists to assess performance and as instructional material.

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Moreover, the Tigers. She's over the Sri Lankan forces in various battles were documented, often in the form of Kill's,

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showing the bodies of dead soldiers to rouse nationalist sentiment and public motivations of the Tamil political cause.

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The Sri Lankan state initially claimed to avoid using atrocity images in its official media campaigns.

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Now this is not to in with reference to its campaign against the JVP insurrection in the late 80s,

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and I can speak about this more later, but I'm not going to touch on it now.

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So, however,

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the intensification of the war between 2006 and 2009 saw its adoption of similar visual strategies similar to that utilised by that term emergency.

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This coincided with the switch from analogue to digital image making, as I mentioned before, as well as growing access to personal cameras.

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Consequently, the war effort was enthusiastically documented by Sri Lankan soldiers.

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The performative martial virtues of young troops is no for the Mount terms.

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It is forced into military service from the rural Sinhalese South by poverty and unemployment.

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Image animated the war for the screens of sceneries audiences.

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This imagery was regularly revived in election campaign visuals ranging from posters and billboards to music videos to

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remind voters of the Sri Lankan armed forces triumph over terrorism and the sort of agency of relevant political figures.

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In this respect. Images of violation and violence underpinned the nationalist political claims in which atrocities were not denounced,

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but demanded and celebrated photographs became generative of further future violence.

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Claims of nations served as a means of consolidating the martial imperatives and powers of the state,

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which also made visible the consequences to those who did not conform to a short lived,

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informal economy of authentic and counterfeit visuals from the final years of the war emerged to satiate the sort of morbid public curiosity,

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as well as political assertions both in Sri Lanka and overseas in the island's capital, Colombo.

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VIDEO CDs of bloodshed and conquest sold for a couple of hundred rupee, so about a pound.

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The content rejoiced in the grisly death of the Tiger leader and his acolytes at the Michael Sidis hawked in

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Colombo included news footage captured from broadcast and handout footage from the Military Ministry of Defence.

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Film and stills were captured on low grade phones and compact cameras,

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as well as professional equipment that were leaked for profit a few months after the end of the war.

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The Sri Lankan army also hosted a grand exhibition that sought to bring,

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and I'm quoting here bring the heroism witnessed in the to on the television screen to the capital in Colombo.

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The event was described as a beautiful live experience, and it drew thousands of citizens to experience the war.

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And again, I'm quoting here the marvellous triumph for themselves through a display of captured weapons,

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armoured fighting vehicles, soldiers demonstrating their combat skills and most significantly, photographs.

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The images on display showed the visceral bodily destruction of the Tamil militants by the line up of corpses of dead cadres,

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over which the triumphant military leadership stood internationally.

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Tamil victims and international aid workers. Images and testimony soldiers trophy footage and photographs became the subject of

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investigative documentary such as Sri Lanka's Killing Fields came out in 2011.

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Similarly, Tamil photographers images of suffering were transformed into the contents of international exhibitions and publications.

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While the films moved international audiences to outrage and advocacy in Sri Lanka,

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they became the focus of state sponsored protests against the international community.

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Widely publicised efforts were made by the government to discredit claims of

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authenticity through the production of its own documentaries and publications.

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These visuals remained coloured by the politicised tensions between ethnic groups.

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Wartime atrocities committed on the basis of ethnic difference and a fundamental rejection of the notion of a shared

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humanity and citizenship continue to be dismissed by the government and the majority of the island's population.

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The political work of these atrocity images of buried origin and intent far exceeded the island.

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Azoulay considers citizenship through the study of photographic practises,

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suggesting that the media move towards new means for the photograph, the photographer and the spectator,

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the untether themselves when the bonds of sovereign power or contracts of the nation state and economy,

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drawing on the context of Israel and Palestine, where the Israeli state governs both citizens and Palestinian non-citizens.

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As she phrases it together, even though they form a government differently as alien processes that the nation state retired realises citizenship.

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This provides, she says, a protective shield to those declared as citizens within a certain territory and discriminates between

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them and others non-citizens who are governed with them in the same territory by the same power.

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By contrast,

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Azoulay argues that photography the territory lies a citizenship reaching beyond its conventional boundaries and plotting or carving out a

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political space in which the plurality of speech and action is actualised permanently by the eventual participation all of those who are governed.

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This premise, Azoulay suggests, permits for civil skills that are not subject to nationality,

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but rather borderless citizenship that demands an ethical responsibility towards one another.

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These territorial circuits and proliferations of these images respond to asylees

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appeal for civic spectatorship images from the final days of the Sri Lankan war.

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Reinforced Witness Accounts Testimony,

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an international advocacy efforts that underscored state violations of international humanitarian law shared on Instagram and Facebook,

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compiled into YouTube clips or Flickr albums printed onto vinyl banners at commemoration events and protests.

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They persisted within political within political claims of the post-war Tamils, both located in and dispersed from the island,

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sought to imagine that their shared political future for a possible independent nation in these divergent,

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even contradictory post-war registers,

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wartime images accrued new political meanings and mediated new political potentials for different audiences for the Tamil community.

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00:41:13,780 --> 00:41:17,170
This signalled the hostility of the state both past and present.

391
00:41:17,170 --> 00:41:22,990
Underpinning the necessity for an alternative political future within global frameworks for human rights and

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world peace were Oslo's notion of solidarity and responsibility emboldens advocacy and accountability networks.

393
00:41:30,400 --> 00:41:37,900
These photographs supplemented demands by international governments, governance commitments and action.

394
00:41:37,900 --> 00:41:44,880
The inclusion of these visuals within quote unquote Western documentaries elicited outrage amongst.

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00:41:44,880 --> 00:41:50,310
Certain sections of Sri Lankan society where it was deemed as a sort of conspiracy

396
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bolstered by against the Sri Lankan state and to undermine its sovereignty.

397
00:41:56,010 --> 00:42:03,810
These visuals confirm the defeat of the quote unquote other that was a threat to the survival of the Sinhalese body and nation in this respect.

398
00:42:03,810 --> 00:42:08,220
Such photographs also served as a reminder that individual politicians and military commanders

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00:42:08,220 --> 00:42:14,370
roles in vanquishing this perceived enemy becoming integral to their electoral influence.

400
00:42:14,370 --> 00:42:21,990
Elsewhere, these mementos of atrocity were transformed into visual accompaniments to songs of patriotism and lamentations by Tamils,

401
00:42:21,990 --> 00:42:31,410
including the LTTE important legacy of political and cultural production centred on atrocity and violence of the Sri Lankan state.

402
00:42:31,410 --> 00:42:38,730
So these contending images regimes of war endured as Tamils sought to imagine their personal and political futures in the post-war,

403
00:42:38,730 --> 00:42:45,300
burdened by the grounds and effects of extraordinary violence that begot this quote unquote peace, where the Sri Lankan state,

404
00:42:45,300 --> 00:42:52,740
which stands as the perpetrator, the reorienting of its visual material mark of citizenship, as we saw in the example of the identity card,

405
00:42:52,740 --> 00:43:01,240
isn't in an explicitly Tamil space of memory and resistance announces a space of intense conversion through acts of state terror and violence.

406
00:43:01,240 --> 00:43:09,420
Lives and deaths of the Tamil community was subject to literally erasure, as evidenced by the materiality and visibility of Tamil culture.

407
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Polity and history were also rendered invisible, if not actively destroyed.

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00:43:14,760 --> 00:43:21,000
The repurposing of identity photography in this instance and its incorporation index of resistance and national

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articulation against the state served as a powerful and poignant application of political absence of disparity here.

410
00:43:28,380 --> 00:43:34,980
This, again, in turn, is amplified by the digital, where there is space for great amplification,

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extending and consolidating the nation beyond the territorial limits of the state through a dispersed community, as well as a network of hashtags.

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00:43:43,440 --> 00:43:51,660
In his study of transnational Tamil marriages, Siddharth and Monica examines how multiple involuntary displacements and voluntary migrations

413
00:43:51,660 --> 00:43:56,280
have formed the locally and globally dispersed Tamil social and economic political media.

414
00:43:56,280 --> 00:43:59,790
The significance of anticipation, as has been discussed by the Jagannathan,

415
00:43:59,790 --> 00:44:09,240
as well as Mahanagar know of the significance of anticipation that Tamils have with regards to movement, violence and social mobility.

416
00:44:09,240 --> 00:44:18,470
And it's also interesting in terms of understanding these social practises of photography and what it evokes in terms of the political.

417
00:44:18,470 --> 00:44:25,520
The multitude of nation states, submarines and the competing registers of atrocity point to a fragmented world that contrast with the space,

418
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but with an azoulay calls for a spectator to take part where aspirations of nation and state were both conflicted and multiple.

419
00:44:33,860 --> 00:44:38,480
The categories of the governed and the oppressed were also problematic is in such a context.

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00:44:38,480 --> 00:44:44,450
Photography, even or especially in its democratic guise, became a medium through which political claims,

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as well as politically generated violence, realising acts of nation state and citizen making were stimulated and sustained.

422
00:44:51,530 --> 00:45:01,100
Photography's capacity for producing and rationalising violence, especially with the nationalist claims the word play was also dramatised.

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Photographic practises have been shaped by interpreted, contradicted and have contributed to conflicting claims of citizenship.

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00:45:07,730 --> 00:45:14,840
A nation in Sri Lanka mapped against war centred on a demand for political self-determination and building of a nation state.

425
00:45:14,840 --> 00:45:20,570
Photography and religious practises offer new insights into the lived experiences of conflict and the

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00:45:20,570 --> 00:45:28,190
articulations of personal and political futures in the sort of vexed space of the Sri Lankan post-war.

427
00:45:28,190 --> 00:45:35,240
The visual also serves as a lens through which to examine what being Tamil as a project of future becoming might entail.

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00:45:35,240 --> 00:45:42,980
Here, photography serves as a dynamic means for making, visible, claiming, demanding and imagining in the wake of war and enduring oppression.

429
00:45:42,980 --> 00:45:50,660
The medium reveals, importantly, its role in the disruptive formation of the borderless Tamil political sociality and

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solidarity that have in turn strengthened its sort of located claims of the homeland.

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00:45:56,060 --> 00:45:59,870
Thank you.