The MMCA Art Exhibition

By Nitara Waduge

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You must be wondering when was the last time we went on a school trip. Well, the Literature students of some of the grades had the pleasure of going on one. And this blog post will tell you all about the Form 4’s visit!

The Form 4 Literature students visited the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Sri Lanka after school hours on the 3rd of March. The visit was organised by Miss Shannon, who along with Miss Hema, Miss Ashani and Miss Asuka, accompanied them to Crescat Boulevard- the museum’s new location. The exhibition was on the second floor, where they met with the MMCA team and were escorted inside. The place was a sleek and open space upon first sight.

Pramodha Weerasekera, Assistant Curator Education and Public Programmes took the students on a curated tour of the exhibition. “The exhibition came out of research cataloguing our Curatorial Team (Chief Curator Sharmini Pereira and Assistant Curator Sandev Handy) did of the John Keells Holdings and George Keyt Foundation collections. They have rather large collections of art and our curators picked them according to certain themes”, she said of the exhibition. “We organised this exhibition during several lockdowns. Starting from the initial research period to the day we opened it for public viewing took us almost one and a half years”.

The first two works were by world renowned Sri Lankan artist Senaka Senanayake. The first one centres around the Non-Aligned movement and is reflective of the effect student activism had on the artist while he was in the USA. Later on, we were guided to “Lotus Power V”, a digital print on archival paper by documentary photographer- Abdul Halik Azeez which portrays the Lotus tower “to signify Colombo’s process of purification and transformation from ‘unclean’ to ‘clean’…”.

Some of the artworks also featured themes of love and friendship. For example, George Keyt’s “The Friends” which explores the ideas of intimacy and closeness. Pradeep Thalawatta’s “Athi Vishesha”- a mixed media- also features similar themes. Both these works illustrate how love or friendship can’t really be defined.

Another eye-catching work was Asal Rasiah’s “(life) craftsman”. The oil on canvas adopts to social realism; a style linked to regarding the social and political conditions of the working class.

“These works were picked according to certain themes like love, intimacy, family, and recent history and politics surrounding the Non-Aligned Movement. The curators usually think of themes in relation to the museum's priority of being a public museum of modern and contemporary art that is a space for learning” explained Pramodha Weerasekara when asked about the selection of the works. “Some themes were included because of their universal nature. Anyone can relate to them. Some themes were selected in order to highlight how art depicts modern and contemporary history of the country”.

When she was asked about the future of contemporary art in Sri Lanka, she replied saying “The future of contemporary art in Sri Lanka is bright. We have many artists who are doing exciting things, and patrons who are interested in supporting art. The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka is one such space that is a platform for modern and contemporary art to grow even further”. And that’s a brief recount of the Form 4 Literature students’ visit to the second exhibition of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka.

Thank you for reading!