Surekha found herself deploying the mode of the photograph-souvenir with sad irony. The ’emerald isle’ conjures up images of paddy fields, coconut groves, pristine beaches and chanting Theravada monks. In fact it is a land riven by an unending civil war. And while we connect the image of Buddhism with peace and non-violence, Buddhists are in fact one of the two communities here that are locked in bloody ethnic strife.

Everywhere on the streets she wandered Surekha found hawkers selling little metallic amulets
that looked disturbingly like bullet casings. Later she learned that the LTIE guerillas carry a dose of cyanide in amulets like this, to ensure they are never captured alive. That these amulets should be popular despite or because of- these associations, disturbed her. For A Moment of Strange Stillness, Surekha had herself photographed while sitting cross-legged and meditating in various locations in Sri Lanka, ranging from bustling markets and building interiors, to temples and hillsides. On one level the recurrence of Surekha against changing backdrops resembles the tourist who has herself photographed at every site she visits. On another level, through her own meditating body Surekha re-instantiates some thingthat is missing from the landscape, something that she expected would be there. Her own body becomes a Buddha-body that reminds us of the absence of peace and nonviolence in this once idyllic land.

The sixty photographs in this series are framed in wooden boxes that are stacked up to form an altar, and each box is draped with the bullet­-suicide-pellet-amulet. Perhaps one day in the future when some sort of peace has returned, the amulets will become just amulets, and will lose the other violent associations that they currently evoke.