The project “Testimony of The Disappeared” includes a zine, tracings, and posters that together operate as a vessel where grief and grievances, the trial of waiting, obliterated bodies of experience and information such as witness reports, official mandates, journal entries, and communal testimony coalesce to confront the limits of state law – its codes of erasure, denial, and amnesia. In wrestling with enforced disappearances, missing persons, and abductions, especially in the Northern Province during the civil war years in Sri Lanka, poethical modes claim space by accentuating slippages, repetitions, and redaction. While a singular language toward restorative justice faces obstacles on many fronts, as an artistic pursuit, our attention is held by the affective and volatile journeys of individuals resolute and in unresolved mourning – that which both claims and defies ink. -Publisher

This work features drawings and concrete poetry made from the public testimonies from the activist group, the Mothers of the Disappeared, who have been seeking justice for loved ones killed or missing since onset of the country’s civil war in the 1980s. -Printed Matter

Text in English, Tamil, Sinhala.