‘The Foreigners’ exhibition by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka (MMCA Sri Lanka) concluded on October 22, after a successful six-month run at the museum on the ground floor of Crescat Boulevard, Colombo 3.
The show attracted 10,377 visitors, including 489 students from schools and higher educational institutes across the country.
Lead curator of the show Sandev Handy said, “My hope is that the exhibition helped begin a series of broader conversations not only on the relevance of contemporary art, but also on how the experiences of outsiderness, strangeness, and foreignness are in fact defining characteristics of our time.” He said that, “The exhibition introduced a cacophony of voices which together testified to experiences that sit outside of, or depart from, neat and tidy attempts to conflate identity with nationhood or other reductive categories.”
‘The Foreigners’ displayed 19 photographs, performances, video artworks, installations, drawings, and paintings by 15 contemporary artists living and working in Sri Lanka, the United States, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The artists included Arjuna Gunaratne (b. 1976), Danushka Marasinghe (b. 1985), Dinelka Liyanage (b. 1994), Hema Shironi (b. 1991), Hania Luthufi (b. 1989), Imaad Majeed (b. 1991), Janani Cooray (b. 1974), K K Srinath Chathuranga (b. 1987), Nina Mangalanayagam (b. 1980), Reginald S. Aloysius (b. 1970), S.H. Sarath (b. 1947), Shyama Golden (b. 1983), Stephen Champion (b. 1959), and Sumudi Suraweera (b. 1982).
Two of the artworks displayed titled ‘Threshold’ (Part 1) and ‘Threshold’ (Part 2) by Dinelka Liyanage, Hania Luthufi, and Sumudi Suraweera of the Musicmatters collective, were commissioned by the MMCA Sri Lanka in 2021 with the support of the European Union.
These two works, along with ‘Lacuna’ (2009) and ‘Balancing Act’ (2012) by Nina Mangalanayagam, and ‘the impossibility of leaving / the possibility of coming out’ (2022) by Imaad Majeed were presented at the MMCA Sri Lanka’s first international art event in London on October 12.
The event took place alongside London’s Frieze Week (October 11–15, 2023) at and in partnership with The Photographers’ Gallery London and presented these specially curated selection of video works followed by a panel discussion.
“Partnering with The Photographers’ Gallery in London during Frieze Week was a tremendous success. The event was sold out and the response to the artists’ films surpassed our expectations,” said Chief Curator at the MMCA Sri Lanka Sharmini Pereira. She added, “We are pleased to know there is recognition of our work in London, and to have been able to find a new audience of supporters as we stride forward with our plans to establish a new museum of modern and contemporary art in Sri Lanka.”
