COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — My country has lived through four centuries of colonization, three decades of civil war and terrorist attacks incited by disruptive ethnic, religious, and linguistic policies, and in 2022, a severe economic crisis caused by decades of poor governance by a family-led regime. I started working in the visual arts in 2018, wanting to find answers as to how Sri Lanka’s art ecosystem can engage audiences when it seems to be one of the last things on people’s minds.
I have learned that this happens through conviction. Career artists, curators, conservators, archivists, and designers with a knack for visual art have always led innovative projects in the country’s modern and contemporary history. And new interests and ideas are emerging with a new generation. This guide highlights independent art spaces in Sri Lanka with dedicated missions of education and community-building. They receive zero state and corporate funding.
704, Galle Road, Colombo, Sri Lanka
First on the list is one of the most influential — many arts professionals in Sri Lanka will say that they found inspiration for their projects during gatherings at Barefoot Art Gallery. Artist Barbara Sansoni founded the space as the Colombo Gallery in 1966. The gallery space and its adjacent courtyard have been a platform for early-career Sri Lankan artists since the 1970s, holding exhibitions, concerts, quiz nights, and workshops. The gallery attempts to reduce the linguistic and financial barriers that often hold artists back from showing their work in public with low commission rates and staff fluent in all three official languages of Sri Lanka. The most recent group exhibition, Many Roads Through Paradise, for example, showcases works on the theme of landscape by emerging artists. With accessibly priced works, Barefoot Art Gallery is also an incubator for new art collectors.
No 50, Kandy Road, Jaffna, Sri Lanka
Established in 2020 amidst the pandemic by independent arts professional Kirutharshan Nicholas, Kälam holds programming and community events to build bridges between artists, writers, intellectuals, and academics from Jaffna and other parts of the country and world. It hosts symposia, workshops, exhibitions, and film screenings, as well as partners with art initiatives across Sri Lanka who wish to engage audiences in the north. Recently, for instance, the interdisciplinary arts festival Colomboscope exhibited works from their recent edition Way of The Forest at Kälam to incite dialogue about ecology and land. Newly commissioned artworks by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka traveled to Kälam to activate discussions about land conflicts in Sri Lanka; the country’s disrupted north-south relations, which led to Civil War; and reparative mechanisms.
Dedduwa, Bentota, Sri Lanka
Geoffrey Bawa, another Sri Lankan Modernist, built Lunuganga, a country estate of 19 acres, for his personal use in 1948. In 2019, the Geoffrey Bawa Trust decided to open its doors to the public. The Trust runs programs informed by Lunuganga’s architecture, collections, and garden, as well as Bawa’s personal archives. For the space’s 75th anniversary last year, several senior contemporary artists were commissioned to create installations engaging with Bawa’s approach to ecology and the environment. Currently on view is The Order of Nature, an exhibition that is activated by performances, a reading room, talks, tours, and workshops that engage with the queer ecology of the site, drawing from Bawa’s contentious queer identity. The project draws a line from Bawa’s time to today, when same-sex relationships remain a criminal act in Sri Lanka.
Matara Road, Koggala, Sri Lanka
Martin Wickremesinghe was renowned for his fictional and critical writings on rural 20th-century Sri Lanka. Four years after his death, in 1981, his ancestral home was turned into an eponymous museum, and a charitable trust was established to follow his wishes of collecting, curating, and displaying his personal papers, effects, and books, as well as the folk art and artifacts that inspired him. Because Wickremesinghe used the Sinhala language while his fine art contemporaries like the ’43 Group predominantly used English, one might presume that he had no direct affiliation with the visual art scene in Sri Lanka. A visit to the museum, however, walks the visitor through how folk art traditions permeated his process and oeuvre. Moreover, it shows that he collaborated with other cultural practitioners of his time, including visual artists and filmmakers such as Lester James Peries, David Paynter, and Richard Gabriel in the last few decades of the 1900s.
Sapumal Art Foundation
4, 32 Barnes Place, Colombo, Sri Lanka
The Sapumal Art Foundation is the birthplace of the ’43 Group, an artist collective that experimented with photography and the moving image, grappling with themes like fundamentalist nationalist thought, governance, and religion in hopes of creating a truly “Sri Lankan” cultural politics outside of state control. Founding members of the collective, such as Lionel Wendt and George Keyt, would shape South Asian art history in the decades to come. In 1974, member Harry Pieris founded the Foundation, turning his home into an exhibition space. Today, the space is a freely accessible educational space with artworks, a library, and an archive of critical and informative readings about the ’43 Group.
199 Temple Road, Jaffna, Sri Lanka
In 2013, soon after transport between Jaffna and Colombo resumed after the civil war ended, art historians Sharmini Pereira and T. Shanaathanan started a mobile library project. That soon became a permanent space in Jaffna, in the war-torn north of Sri Lanka. The space, which is also activated by exhibitions and lectures, provides free educational access to modern and contemporary art from around the country and beyond. Influenced by Pereira’s passion for art book publishing and Shanaathanan’s footing in academia, the space is also a center for critical discourses about visual art with a particular sensitivity toward the civil war, which isolated their immediate community from the culture of the rest of the country.
Studio Kayamai
302 Havelock Road, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Studio Kayamai is a labor of love of designer-cum-entrepreneur Aadhi Jayaseelan, who is primarily passionate about the creative endeavors of young adults and children. The space allows for the nurturing of creative pursuits via peer feedback, experimentation with technique and medium, and open discussions about financial stability as an arts professional. These aspects are often not covered by Sri Lanka’s formal education system in arts and design; open discussions about money, in particular, tend to occur only among closely knit circuits that seem impenetrable for new practitioners. Since opening to the public in 2022, Kayamai has been active with programming, including workshops, talks, performances, and exhibitions. Its recent exhibition Three Points of View showcased several young artists’ versions of Sepali, a fictional character they developed together. The space celebrates the multivocality of Sri Lanka, encouraging young people to think beyond demographic classification systems of ethnicity, religion, language, place, and aim to unite instead through creativity.
Slave Island, Colombo, Sri Lanka
In 2015, Firi Rahman embarked on a quest to better understand and document his neighborhood of Slave Island and its unique history, resulting in the project We Are From Here. Many believe that this community came into existence during Dutch occupation, when colonial workers passing through Sri Lanka stayed in the area due to its proximity to the Colombo port. Its rich colonial legacy continues into the present via architecture, artistic and cultural practices, and a multicultural community. Firi’s artistic background and insider knowledge of Slave Island helps him archive and activate this potent history via murals, photography, and oral histories. Firi also approaches the neighborhood from a neocolonial perspective, engaging with Sri Lanka’s present economic and political dependencies on global powers like India and China, whose investments in urban development projects affect the everyday life of Slave Island.
