He also worked on recreating and archiving the histories of Tamils as citizens damaged by the war, and his project A History of Histories (2009) was the culmination of one such attempt where he displayed the stories of 500 families with an installation including an object from each family that captured their stories and memories. Referring to this project, he said, “in ‘History of Histories’ the act of collage or random association of an object was an attempt to take the individual loss or pain onto the level of a collective. On the other hand it also represents the co-existence of difference and simultaneity of mismatching realities.” The installation was therefore a “collage” or a collated group of objects that contained distinct memories of the Tamil community, but with certain resemblances, a shared existence of being discriminated against by the state. Even after the end of the civil war Shanaathanan continued to explore the politics of historicising and remembering, working with the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Vancouver, Canada. The realities of the two communities appeared to be similar, despite their physical grounding being in different circumstances. The outcome of such intellectual engagement with the lives of Sri Lankan Tamils was the project The Incomplete Thombu (2011) – a book that incorporates conceptualizations of architecture, art, memory and remembering, developed through the collection of and critical engagement with rough sketches of the ground plan of people’s houses. For the Kochi-Muziris Biennale held in 2016 Shanaathanan went a step further with his experimentation with installation art in terms of representing a history of the Tamil community. He created an old-fashioned piece of furniture that had a card index divided into 30 drawers. Each drawer consisted of cards containing details about the manner in which the Tamil community adapted to the circumstances of difference during the thirty-year ethnic conflict. Each experience recorded being limited to the space of the drawers symbolized the suppression of the Tamil community, but the simple fact of the details being present delineated a sort of resistance to the passive victimhood imposed on them. 

His solo exhibition Mismatches held at the Saskia Fernando Gallery in 2011 displayed nine pieces with an inquiry into the phenomenon of dislocation. He began using the jigsaw as his signature piece, with the shape defining the shape of his canvas. The thought of how easily the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle could be dispersed, embodying a sense of incompleteness is fascinating to Shanaathanan, and it reflects the manner in which dislocated and resettled communities of the war feel incomplete without an affinity to their roots. The nine separate pieces displayed in Mismatches encapsulated distinct memories, experiences and encounters brought together as “navagragam” (nine planets).

The solo exhibition Dis/placement (2015-16) is another commentary on “the experience of place in the post-armed conflict context by investigating the relationship of physical space, memory and history”, with compositions of jigsaw pieces capturing the disturbances associated with space. While each jigsaw piece has its own identifiable memorable fragment with its vibrant colours, they are arranged as disconnected pieces in disarray. Referring to the pieces Shanaathanan said, “for me these works talk about the impossibility of linear histories and the impossibility of knowing when memories are displaced, lost, abandoned or buried. Knowing only seems possible through fragments.” Contributing to a larger narrative or experience of the civil war and its aftermath using such fragments of memories is not what he attempts with the motif of the jigsaw, but rather a focus on the intricate details that make developing an all-encompassing history difficult and a tense reality.

As of the late 2010s, Shanaathanan’s interests have mainly been in educating young artists. He has been involved in the curation of a series of exhibitions dedicated to displaying the works of emerging artists with potential. The series began with Seven Conversations co-curated with Sharmini Pereira and was followed by Self-Portraits in 2017. In 2018, he curated the exhibition Being and Becoming held at Saskia Fernando Gallery, which exhibited works by recent graduates in art from University of Jaffna.