Building a Museum Without a Blueprint
In Colombo, Sharmini Pereira reimagines what a museum for contemporary art can be when there is no precedent, only possibility.
Byline: Namrata Dewanjee
Who is art for? “In the case of Sri Lanka, art has served an extremely narrow segment of the population, and its purpose has largely only been defined by what it costs,” Sharmini Pereira tells us. For a country with centuries of artistic history, it is startling how rare art exhibitions were and that not a single museum dedicated to contemporary art existed until recently. The obstacle was never talent; Sri Lanka had that in abundance. “All that was missing was the museum itself and the training,” she notes.
As Chief Curator of Colombo’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), and simultaneously its Project Director and Head of Development, Sharmini is intent on rewriting the rules. She refuses to treat art as a luxury commodity, framing it instead as a shared cultural space. Her role, as she describes it, is both visionary and facilitative: shaping the museum’s artistic direction while creating conditions for artists, audiences, and communities to thrive.
An Unafraid Voice
Founded in 2019, the MMCA set out to be more than a traditional museum. Beyond just showing artworks, it also builds knowledge and professional networks to strengthen art education across the country. Its exhibitions and programmes often turn art into a lens for pressing civic issues: the exhibition 88 Acres (30 November 2023 – 7 July 2024) revisited Minnette De Silva’s Watapuluwa Housing Scheme in Kandy, reflecting on housing, affordability, and community, while in May 2025, attorney Bhavani Fonseka’s lecture unpacked Sri Lanka’s fraught land disputes. These projects position the museum as a forum for dialogue rather than a neutral space of display.
Since the MMCA does not rely on state funding, it can explore questions other institutions might avoid, such as the complexities of land and politics seen in the aforementioned programmes. “Artists are agitators. Being a private institution allows us to experiment, take risks, and respond quickly to social and political realities,” Sharmini explains. Yet freedom comes with responsibility: ensuring debate leads to understanding, sparking urgency while respecting communities.
This responsibility rests on transparency and accountability. The museum is open with donors about resource use, represents artists fairly, and commits to programming that remains relevant and meaningful. Sharmini acknowledges that although all museums must navigate the tension between financial sustainability and curatorial responsibility, at the MMCA, integrity is non-negotiable, and exhibitions are never shaped by trends or diluted to attract patronage.
Educational Outreach
“Being privately funded, it’s even more important to show that our model isn’t transactional, and for us to never lose touch with the public work we are involved in,” she insists. This commitment to genuine exchange anchors the way the museum interacts with its audiences, steering their work to be relevant and meaningful. In recent years, the MMCA has encouraged teachers to treat the MMCA as a classroom, bringing students into the galleries where the museum becomes a resource to support school-based learning. This approach extends beyond O-level or A-level Art. It actively supports the teaching of English, History, or other subjects that benefit from analytical thinking, situating itself as an ally to broader educational development.
The MMCA’s understanding of audiences and community has grown to recognise them as active contributors whose knowledge, perspectives, and questions can shape exhibitions and programmes. Still very much a museum in the making, Sharmini notes that it still has a long way to go, and it will continue to build this understanding through upcoming projects and the team it employs.
Making Art Accessible
In a country with limited public arts infrastructure, Sharmini often feels that MMCA must “do everything” from supporting artists to shaping policy. To ease this, it builds capacity through global partnerships and local training. Their Museum Intensive series equips professionals in public and private arts organisations, while the Dialogue and Civic Engagement Fellowship empowered practitioners in Northern, Eastern, and Uva provinces to use art as a tool for civic dialogue and conflict resolution. These initiatives extend debate into practice, preparing others to continue the work.
Without an existing blueprint, the MMCA has set its own rules and guiding principles. Instead of following other museums, it grows from its context by listening to audiences, amplifying artists’ voices, and filling cultural gaps. Free entry, the freedom to linger, and an unpressured environment make the museum welcoming. Its first public home was not a gallery space on a posh street but a bustling shopping mall, Colombo’s Crescent Boulevard. Visitors stumbled upon art as part of their everyday routines, often by accident. That ordinary, unconventional space turned into a gift: it stripped away the rules of “proper” museums and let curiosity take the lead. No doors, no reception desk, just open space where audiences could breathe and explore.
“People treated the museum almost like an extension of everyday life,” Sharmini recalls, “stopping to take selfies, lingering, asking questions, chatting to our Visitor Educators, and even returning multiple times.” This welcome was extended through language as well. Every label, text, and digital resource is in English, Sinhala, and Tamil. In a country of multiple linguistic groups, seeing one’s own language on the wall is a powerful way of creating a sense of belonging and respect, eliminating self-consciousness and promoting deeper engagement. It also ensures that the museum is open to the widest possible audience, challenging the perception of who is and is not welcome inside.
By tearing down layers of stiffness, be it architectural, social, or linguistic, the MMCA makes art something to live with, touch, think with, and come back to. These lessons will shape the permanent museum, which is soon to open, making sure that belonging and freedom to explore remain at its heart.
Parallel Practices in Sri Lanka
Reflecting on her early journey, she situates the museum against the art world of the 1980s and 90s. “I was guided by values of accessibility and representation for artists whose voices were not being heard or seen. Thirty-five years ago, the world was a different place; artists from the [Asia Pacific] region were largely overlooked.” Sharmini wanted to change this narrative. The challenge was to understand how to support artistic voices, make them available to the public, and yet remain independent of established institutions.
In addition to her work at the MMCA, Sharmini’s commitment to accessibility and representation led her to found Raking Leaves in 2008, an independent not-for-profit commissioning artists to produce books for international distribution. Through its reach and also its format as a book, these publications bypass the exclusivity of galleries, making art tangible and inclusive across the globe.
Works such as The Incomplete Thombu (2012), which is now sold out by T. Shanaathanan, which recorded oral histories of displacement during Sri Lanka’s civil war, and The A–Z of Conflict (2019), which catalogued the language of disagreement and transformed complex histories into approachable and engaging formats. Through this democratic direction, readers, artists, students, and the public can encounter and engage with cultural trajectories that would otherwise remain elusive.
In 2013, Sharmini, alongside T. Shanaathanan and P. Ahilan, established the Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture & Design in Jaffna. Situated in a city still recovering from decades of war, it functions as a public resource and educational space, facilitating research, dialogue, and exchange. Although independent of each other, Sharmini’s link between the three informs her curatorial practice, thereby helping her shape the MMCA’s programmes and decisions that root the museum in its context.
Towards Global Recognition
The MMCA Sri Lanka sits in a delicate position: a private museum with national responsibility. While global recognition is gratifying, Sharmini approaches it with caution. “We’re very conscious that MMCA does not ‘represent’ all of Sri Lankan contemporary art. We are much more interested in using our role to challenge what this means.”
That challenge begins with definitions. Is a Sri Lankan artist someone who lives and works in the country, or could they be from abroad too? Must they hold a Sri Lankan passport, or can they be shaped by the diaspora? Should their work explicitly reference Sri Lanka at all? “These questions are best answered through programming,” she argues. “We navigate this through the projects we do, allowing them to speak for themselves. Programmes are always ongoing; they don’t remain static but respond to what has come before. For me, the priority is ensuring that the work and the stories we present remain grounded in the realities of Sri Lanka’s communities and artistic practices.”
The museum’s aim is not awe but engagement. “We want to spark surprise, delight, and that all-important aspect of conversation, rather than intimidation or information overload. We want people to leave thinking about their next visit and who they are going to tell about their experience,” says Sharmini. The task ahead is clear: to ensure that art in Sri Lanka no longer answers to exclusivity, but opens itself to everyone willing to engage.
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