• MMCA Sri Lanka Chief Curator Sharmini Pereira on providing a platform for modern and contemporary art

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka (MMCA Sri Lanka) is transforming the way we enjoy, appreciate, or engage with art. Currently located at Crescat Boulevard, Colombo 3, with plans to move to a permanent location next year, MMCA Sri Lanka presents modern and contemporary art in all its forms, styles, and mediums in a way that is accessible to all.

In order to understand the museum’s role and its importance, The Daily Morning reached out to MMCA Sri Lanka Chief Curator Sharmini Pereira, who enlightened us on what qualifies as modern and contemporary art, the value of our artists, and their role as researchers.

Following are excerpts from the interview:

What is contemporary art?

Contemporary art is defined as art that is made today. It is made by artists who are working in a very different world to where we were 50 or 60 years ago. What makes it different is also what redefines that art. We are in a more technologically progressed world. It’s a more interconnected and diverse society. We are also a society that is generally more inclusive and on a quest to look at what is being forgotten and the stories that are not being spoken about.

Artists come from diverse backgrounds, so you have more women artists today. You have artists working in diverse mediums, and they are often well versed in the fact that we are globally a more technologically interconnected society.

You may see artists asking the most provocative questions. You’ll see artists in different parts of the world, definitely in Sri Lanka as well, willing to put their hand out to say no; to protest. A very defining aspect of contemporary art in Sri Lanka is that it looks very closely at who we are in terms of a society. It has been interesting to see this reflected in the work of contemporary artists, especially because we have artists living in different parts of the country.

We have artists living not only in Colombo, which is where you usually see the highest concentration, but artists outside the capital, who are looking at the question of who we are as a country, which is often quite different and at odds with artists based and living in Colombo. There are stories that might be dominated in the capital; there are ways of understanding who belongs and who doesn’t in places outside Colombo.

Without putting too fine a point on the political disjunctions, there are ways in which that voice from Colombo can be very dominating. More and more of what we are seeing in Sri Lanka is artists from outside, from the north, east, and south, who are looking at the society we are living in through a very distinctive, located, grounded way.

Do we value our contemporary artists?

Not enough. And I think it’s because we are only looking at value through the monetary, which plays a role, but it should not lead and it should not dictate. What is crucial is to be able to value art without the monetary aspect. The value of an artwork is in what is being said, what is intrinsic to it, who the artist is, their exhibition history, and their work being part of another value system. You have to look at where the artist was trained – if they were not trained – and their work at certain places of their career.

Value that only comes from ‘how much is it?’ is not a fair value. It’s a value being taken out of context.

What we have is a market-led way of looking at art, so you’ll see a lot of collectors buying artists because everyone’s buying them – the herd mentality – or because they are being sold at a commercial gallery. What about the artists who are not represented or who are not in a commercial gallery? There’s only a small group that’s being represented or shown in commercial galleries.

How does MMCA Sri Lanka provide a space for the different mediums of contemporary art?

The current exhibition, ‘88 Acres: The Watapuluwa Housing Scheme by Minnette De Silva’, is on an architect who is no longer living. What’s more is that there are no original artworks in terms of her drawings or models. When we began curating the exhibition, the problem was: what can we include? We took this as a nice challenge and looked at contemporary artists who are living with us to ask them to help us with the research.

The three artists we invited were Sumedha Kelegama, Sumudu Athukorala, and Irushi Tennekoon, who share an interesting variety of backgrounds: two are practicing architects, one is an animator. They worked together and have, through their research, made a fascinating animation documentary film which looks at the question, and this is also the title of their work: ‘is this an architectural documentary?’

Contemporary art, often, is not a uniform way of working. It can borrow from one medium or mix mediums together; in this case, mixing animation and documentary to create something that is a moving image. It is still storytelling, but not in the way we expect.

This is a way that we, as a museum of modern and contemporary art, are seeing artists as other than a community that makes artwork. We can support them through their recognition as brilliant researchers. We overlook that they look at the world in a very different way, not just to reproduce it or create photographic replicas, but to help us ask ourselves what it is we are looking at. They are not giving us answers but prodding us to ask questions of ourselves.

I think this was an opportunity to not just display contemporary artists’ work, but involve them as researchers and as part of the curatorial process. Artists are overlooked as people who can carry out incredible field work and research.

Do you see that artists are aware of this role as researchers?

In the case of Kelegama, Athukorala, and Tennekoon, it was a very specific research topic, looking at Minette De Silva’s Watapuluwa Housing Scheme. If we put that aside, any artist, without being given a research topic, will have unconsciously or subconsciously thought about or made work around some subject. When you look at the level at which they understand that subject, you will be assessing their knowledge of it.

Some artists employ research very seriously. They are knowledgeable or set out to become knowledgeable if they are not. Today, as an artist, that is something you are expected to do. It is not something you can get away with. You need to know your subject if you are going to make work around it. It’s almost the bottom line of what you do in your studio.

When you can give them a subject to research, there are artists who are going to do a really interesting job and there are artists who wouldn’t have the methodology or research skills to conduct research.

What kind of a platform does the MMCA Sri Lanka provide?

The MMCA Sri Lanka is the first museum in Sri Lanka to focus on modern and contemporary art, so we are plugging a gap that is huge because, when I talk about contemporary art being art that is seen and made today, we would also use that term for art that was made in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.

In 1943, there was a group that came together as the ’43 Group, saying: ‘We want to make art of now, for the present’. The collective of artists was well known and well documented. At the time, they would have called themselves contemporary, but now we would describe their work as modern.

I bring them in because there isn’t a museum in the country that focuses on, showcases, or describes that story of the ’43 group. There was a need for a museum to display, preserve, and create discussion around this long history we have that predates the 1940s, and that is why the MMCA Sri Lanka has decided to establish a permanent museum that will be looking at this period of modern and contemporary art.

The MMCA Sri Lanka is open throughout the year, and the only days that are closed are public holidays, which we are really proud of because most art projects in Sri Lanka are short term. They are on for two weeks. They are important, but they don’t have what we have, which is year-round programming. The importance of MMCA Sri Lanka is to make sure that at any one time, you can see an exhibition that is talking about our modern and contemporary cultural heritage.

We are also a museum that is setting itself up to preserve this artwork. This climate is not kind, unfortunately, to modern and contemporary art, and so we have to set up a professional institution which will look after it for us but also generations to come.

The MMCA Sri Lanka is important because those of us who live in Colombo often look at what we can do. While there may be a lot more things to do today with shopping and dining, there isn’t much to do culturally. There are cinemas and a handful of museums, but they are not attracting a certain generation of people.

We don’t have museums that attract people who visit the space to meet their friends, enjoy a Saturday morning looking at an exhibition before grabbing coffee, or go to on a Friday evening before going elsewhere. The MMCA Sri Lanka is ahead of the curve with this: we engage the public about the art, but art plays a role in other reasons for which you would come to a gallery.

The museum that we envisage will be one that is seen as a community, a place where you come together, socialise, and connect through the art, but also with friends or family. It will be outside of what people traditionally think of as a museum.

The MMCA Sri Lanka has been holding engaging programmes since its inception. What has the visitor response been like?

That’s been one of the real success stories. When we first set up in December 2019, we had about 30 people on average coming through. We now have on average 76 people a day. That’s almost a 300% increase in five years. And those five years were not easy: two of them were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and another by the political and economic situation. So it’s staggering that we have managed to increase our average daily audience by nearly 300% in this timeframe. The participation of learning programmes also goes up month to month.

It’s worth reiterating that if a project is for two weeks, you would expect to see people coming in everyday, but if it was for a month, people would come in at the beginning and rush in at the end. Our exhibitions are on for such a long period of time – the current exhibition opened to the public on 30 November 2023, so we’ve been open for three months and got over 7,000 visitors. And that’s going up; it wasn’t that they all came at the beginning.

We do so much of our work in Sinhala, Tamil, and English, whether it is through social media, labels, or tours. On any one day we have a roster of people who can speak all three languages. A tour can be in a level of Sinhala or Tamil that is of a high quality, and not as a second thought.

Often, the problems are the terminologies. We see a lot of other organisations trying to do trilingual labels, which is great, but when we read the labels, the quality of the translations isn’t good. That, for us, is the most important factor. It’s not just doing a translation. It’s also the quality of the translation. Those two are inseparable.

If Sinhala or Tamil is your mother tongue, it is more insulting to see a translation written up badly. It feels tokenistic, when your language is written, but is clearly saying rubbish.

What comes next for MMCA Sri Lanka?

We usually only keep one month between one exhibition closing and another opening. The new one will be one exhibition in three parts, opening in September with each part being up for five months.

We are a relatively small and young team. We don’t have a fast turnover, suggesting to me that there is something very exciting in the work we do. It’s a place that will, I hope, in time be seen as an institution, but also a place where people will want to work. I hope that when we open at our permanent venue, it propels the cultural sector, with more people who haven’t seen the cultural sector as a viable career coming into it.

I hope that we encourage more people to come for tourism or from creative economies, and I think we will have more potential for partnering with sectors, like food and beverage, and other art activities.