The Packet

The Packet takes the form of a deconstructed, collaboratory book that brings together a collection of Sri Lankan visual artists, writers, poets, theorists and musicians to engage in a community of making and conversation. It was envisioned as a space to respond against, “...questions you ask the people,...not questions you ask yourself.” In the face of “a stratified, exclusionary world” the packet was initiated as “a response to how words are thought about and acted upon...how meaning is given to art and how it is received through specific epistemological, industrial and other hegemonic filters.” With a commitment to make work located in the playful and the intimate, the Packet is the difficult things that cannot be expressed, the situations which cannot be recorded, and involves the making of meanings that expose meanings.

Ultimately, it is involved in introducing a sense of impurity, contradictions and messiness to the things we engage with as artists. The first meeting of The Packet was held in January and continued as a weekly meeting. The Packet was set to go into print toward the end of May, but stalled given the the Easter Sunday Bombings in Sri Lanka and the events that followed. As a community we took the time to recoup and rethink. 

40 editions of the packet are availble, 8 are artist proofs and 7 are exhibition proofs.