NEW YORK, November 2019: Sri Lanka is planning to open its first museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art next month. The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka, which has been three years in the making, began as a privately funded venture. In 2016, a nonprofit organization was founded to support the project and a committee of international curators, arts professionals, and industry leaders was formed. The institution will be temporarily housed on the 17th floor of the Colombo Innovation Tower (CIT) and will begin welcoming visitors on December 12, according to a report in the New York-based international magazine, ArtForum.
“While the museums of Sri Lanka have sought to serve the past, they have done so at the exclusion of our modern and contemporary histories,” said Ajit Gunewardene, chair of the new institution’s founding committee. “Museums are now striving to be places where all sections of society can be reflected in a museum’s collections, displays, and educational programming. Sri Lanka’s rich historic culture underscores the way in which the island can lead the way in the region as a modern and contemporary museum destination.”
Other members of the founding committee include Shiromal Cooray, chair of Jetwing Hotels and Jetwing Travels; architect Channa Daswatte, a partner at MICD Associates; Sujatha Arundathi Meegama, assistant professor of the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore; Sharmini Pereira, cofounder and director of the Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture, & Design; Suhanya Raffel, executive director of the M+ museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong; and artist and curator Michael Snelling, a former director of National Art School, Sydney.
In addition to presenting a rotating series of exhibitions and educational programming, the museum will work to build its own permanent collection of modern and contemporary art and will spearhead conservation efforts for the artistic community.
‘One Hundred Thousand Small Tales’ Source: Dhaka Art Summit
The institution will be inaugurated by an exhibition titled “One Hundred Thousand Small Tales.” Curated by Sharmini Pereira, the show was first presented at the Dhaka Art Summit in February 2018.
One Hundred Thousand Small Tales took its name from a poem by the Tamil poet Cheran, where he writes about how a “‘bridge, strengthened by its burden of a hundred thousand tales, collapses within a single tear.” Part archive and part inventory, One Hundred Thousand Small Tales aims to provide a starting point for mapping out the various paths of art production in the country from the lead up to Sri Lanka’s independence – which took place in 1948 – to the present. The exhibition that was held in Dhaka last year included several generations of artists and incorporated archival materials in addition to works on paper, paintings, photographs, film, sculpture and animation.
