Since 2014, my artistic practice has become centered in approaches borrowed from the conceptual poetry, documentary poetry, and ecopoetics traditions. All of my work begins with language, the first instinct is always poetic, spurred from the witnessing of a metaphor, and form emerges as I parse through language and seek a vessel that can both hold space for it and allow it to move and move others.
Testimony of the Disappeared (2021 – present)
Documentary Poetics (Zine, Tracings, Posters)
Chobi Mela (2021) and Colomboscope (2022)
The project “Testimony of The Disappeared” includes a chapbook, 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.
An archive too can be [used] (2022 – present)
Documentary Poetics (Lecture-performance)
BuchBasel (2022) and Spielart Theatre Festival (2023)
“We can be at home in an archive,” writes scholar Sara Ahmed, thereby providing artist and curator Imaad Majeed a theoretical springboard for their multidisciplinary lecture performance. An archive can be both a terrain for memory as well as for evidence – in this case, for the many thousand people who vanished during the Sri Lankan Civil War. Starting from traditions in conceptual and documentary poetry, Imaad Majeed processes official records, academic texts, newspaper articles, and fictitious texts through the employment of algorithms such as the Markov chain, methods emphasizing randomness, or blackout poetry. The potential for violence inherent in language thus becomes visible, used, as in Sri Lanka, to extinguish the government’s transgressions from public awareness, even to forcibly disappear people.
the impossibility of leaving / the possibility of coming out (2022)
Documentary Poetics, Ecopoetics (Poetry Film)
Queer Arts Festival (2022) and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka (2023)
On the 20th May 2021, the X-Press Pearl container ship caught fire off the coast of Colombo, Sri Lanka. The vessel was engulfed in flames by the 27th May and declared a total loss. Continuing to burn for 12 days, the vessel finally sank on the 2nd June as it was being towed away to deeper waters. The incident was deemed the worst marine ecological disaster in Sri Lankan history, discharging 25 tonnes of nitric acid, 348 tonnes of oil, and, according to independent estimates, up to 75 billion small plastic pellets or nurdles. The poet interprets this episode against the backdrop of asylum seekers of Sri Lankan origin abroad, involuntary migrations since the onset of the civil war, as well as the more distant history of consecutive colonisations, including the ongoing Sinhala Buddhist colonisation, as a spectre that is haunting the island.
The work borrows its title from Humaira Saeed’s essay “The impossibility of leaving: Queer migration” and from Shyam Selvadurai’s novel The Hungry Ghosts (2013), using these texts as a jumping board to explore the poet’s own desires to migrate — seeking home in an elsewhere — to dissipate the toxicities that they carry within themselves. The poet interprets their inherited environment as toxic and haunted by ‘perethayas’ or hungry ghosts from Buddhist cosmology. The image of the burning ship conjures hopes of migration but also the inability to return ‘home’; the fears of otherness that may wash ashore but also of being othered as a migrant in a foreign land; the toxicities that they carry within themselves that are difficult to bear, to shed, to dissipate, knowing that they have shaped them, and continue to relentlessly haunt their present and their future.
AMBIENT STATE TERROR (2021)
Documentary Poetics (Poetry Film)
The Packet (2021)
Originally created for a series of Instagram stories on The Packet’s account on Independence Day of 2021, AMBIENT STATE TERROR seeks to name the ambient manifestations of structural violence that are experienced by minority communities in Sri Lanka. Speaking from the Tamil Muslim experience, the poet makes the case for how direct violence is not required by a highly militarised, genocidal, hegemonic Sinhala-Buddhist nation state, in order to continuously subjugate minority communities. Employing Google Street View imagery, photojournalism and stock images, the video work makes visible seemingly innocous state violence, set to a jarring, disjointed edit of a sparse “one-note” Sunil Shantha song that is emblamatic of the sound of cultural hegemony, a state-sponsored genre of Ragadari influenced music referred to as Sarala-gee or “light music”. Set to these elements, the text discomforts the lull of the everydayness of these experiences.
DREAMING STATE TERROR (2024)
Documentary Poetics (Poetry film)
Instagram
This poetry film finds inspiration from my lived experience of being jolted awake by nightmares and night terrors, following the Easter Sunday bombings in 2019. They involved armed forces raiding our home, and Sinhalese mobs arriving at our gate, led by the Buddhist monk from the temple on our lane. Surely enough, neighbouring Air Force personnel did indeed raid all Muslim households on our lane, an experience I have documented in my poem “For National Security” later that year. The dreams persist.
How does state terror manifest beyond direct violence? Previously, I have explored “AMBIENT STATE TERROR”, in 2021, positing that there are affective manners in which minoritised communities experience state terror. Here, I explore how these affects can enter the subconscious, disrupting one’s mental health and feelings of safety while living on, and even off, the island.
The poetry film is set against an edit of Nanda Malini’s song “Mage Sihinaya” (My Dream), where she pleased: “Let me dream.” A Tamil family’s experience of enforced disappearance is narrated onscreen through the text. The multiple panels draw from footage of state terror deployed against Tamil and Sinhalese dissidents, both in recent times and in the past. We also see civilians at checkpoints that were “the norm” during the “period of conflict”. These are juxtaposed against footage intended to promote Sri Lanka as a tourism destination, an image that is part and parcel of the state’s attempts to portray the nation as “peaceful” and inviting. Images of trauma and “culture” wrestle for screentime and the viewer’s attention, reflecting the ways in which they contend with each other in the imaginary and the real. The poetry film’s introduction and conclusion subverts a popular Sinhala YouTube content creator’s introduction to “lucid dreaming”, through the metaphor of inception.
With the recent developments of the Anti-Terrorism Act and the Online Safety Bill, these affective forms of state terror are important to name and articulate.
Imaad Majeed 