🎨🌍 Jasmine Nilani Joseph: Capturing the Pain and Beauty of Sri Lankan Refugee Life 🏞️❤️
💬 "Raw & Real: GenZ Conversations with Thisuri
In this episode Thisuri discusses Jasmine Nilani Joseph. She is a student journalist with us on a placement organised by the Oxford University Career Services. This article was self-edited.
🎧 listen to Thisuri’s backstory here - she discusses her motivation & research as well.
Thisuri also wrote a short 2 min read article about Jasmine Nilani Joseph with a summary inforgraphic.
Born in Jaffna in 1990, Jasmine Nilani Joseph is a visual artist based in Sri Lanka. She completed her degree in Art & Design at the University of Jaffna in 2015. Her work has been exhibited at various galleries and venues across the globe, including her recent exhibition at the University of Exeter in 2023 “Debris”.
Joseph’s art takes great inspiration from her own life experiences, namely the difficulties her and her family faced during the Sri Lankan Civil War, between the two main ethnic groups in Sri Lanka: the Sinhalese and the Tamil people.
During the British colonial dominion, the Tamil people were often favoured over the Sinhalese for a variety of reasons. This internal hierarchy manifested in ethnic-tensions and exasperations amongst Sri Lanka’s citizens, ultimately culminating in the Civil War.
The Civil War was led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam against the Sri Lankan government, and its demands included regional independence, official recognition of the Tamil language, as well as equal opportunities for both ethnic groups.
In 1983, the anti-Tamil pogroms took place in Sri Lanka from July 23rd to July 30th. Sinhalese mobs killed around 3000 Tamils, demolished 18000 homes and 5000 businesses, and forcefully displaced almost 150000 Tamils.
Although armed conflict ceased in 2009, the hatred and anti-Tamil beliefs still persist in Sri Lanka today.
In 1995, Jasmine and her family were forced to leave Jaffna and move to Vavuniya, where they lived in refugee camps for several years, before settling down in a government sponsored housing scheme.
In her work, she painfully incorporates the socio-political effects of these events blended with her own personal and intimate experience living as a refugee. Jasmine especially focuses on themes of displacement, domesticity, geographical borders, and through the medium of her art, she poses the timelessly complex question: “Where is home?”
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