EXHIBITIONS

Side by Side

Kolam - Jaffna 2 - 25 Oct 2025 This exhibition brings together the work of four university-trained contemporary artists who engage with Kolam through both individual and collective practices. Their approach traverses the imagined boundaries between art and craft—challenging conventional distinctions through diverse materials, techniques, and conceptual frameworks.

The art–craft divide is not merely an aesthetic distinction but a deeply political one—shaped by conditions of modernity, colonial legacies, nationalist aspirations, institutional mediations, state and non-state initiatives and ongoing struggles over cultural value and representation. Challenging this binary opens up possibilities for more inclusive and ethically grounded understandings of artistic practice.

By foregrounding the subjectivity of the makers, the exhibition explores how creativity and novelty can simultaneously connect and disrupt established categories. Drawing from both traditional and contemporary cultural vocabularies, the artists layer personal memories and narratives across multiple mediums in playful, experimental ways.

Working across diverse materials and methods—both individually and collectively, for expressive and everyday purposes—the Kolam artists continually seek interconnections, interdependence, and crossovers between imagined categories of art, craft, and design. They transfer knowledge, skills, and sensibilities from one domain to another, cultivating a fluid and reciprocal approach to making.

Through this engagement, they come to understand art and craft not as opposites, but as distinct yet complementary realms of possibility—each offering its own modes of expression, ethics, and aesthetic inquiry. Through this dialogic interplay, Kolam becomes not only a visual motif but a site of inquiry—where aesthetic form, cultural transmission, and embodied knowledge converge.


Curated by T. Shanaathanan

(T.Shanathanan is a visual artist and a Professor of Art History, Department of Fine Arts, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. He is one of the co-founders of Sri Lankan Archive for Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design in Jaffna and founder of Kolam craft initiative.) Read more

Windows, Screens, Mirrors

Mayun Kaluthanthri 28 Aug - 20 Sep 2025 Windows, screens, mirrors presents a series of works drawn from encounters on public transport. On frequent expressway trips to Colombo, weekly errands in Dickwella from his south coast home, and a recent journey to Jaffna, Kaluthantri explores moments of rest, reflection, and tiredness. Looking toward the fleeting and immediate, toward the tender interiority shared on public transport, these quiet, luminous, oil-on-canvas works emerge from his desire for rest and reverie, which led him to develop his practice away from burnout in Colombo.

Mayun Kaluthantri's practice revolves around the tactile-immediacy of painting, photography, print-making and writing, and their function in embodied-meaning-making. His work is energised most by the tensions of masculinity, class, labour and brownness in the various pockets of his fast-developing homeland, and inevitably, that of the “man-made” against the ecological. Mayun also collaborates through artistic interventions at The Packet and by organising third-spaces, such as Monsoon Blues & Co in Colombo. Since quitting a career in tech 4 years ago, Nilwella - a southern fishing village - has been his home. Read more

Texture Matters

Marie Gnanaraj 14 - 24 Aug 2025 Texture Matters maps a journey by Marie Gnanaraj that suggests the approach of a retrospective, as well as a living studio, which brings together finished works, previous exhibition pieces, fragments, samples and unfinished experiments, as well as reworked weaves that shed a light into the labour and dynamism of weaving as artistic process. Read more

Climate Positive

Creative Catalyst Fellowship 31 Jul - 9 Aug 2025 Climate Positive
Presented by the Creative Catalyst Fellowship

What does it mean to dream of a climate-positive future, especially from an island nation facing ecological fragility and economic flux? Climate Positive is not just an exhibition; it is a convergence. A living, breathing manifestation of what becomes possible when creatives step into their power as catalysts, collaborators, and stewards of transformation.

This exhibition emerges from the Creative Catalyst Fellowship (CCF), launched in June 2024, not simply to support individual artists, but to spark bold, collective inquiry across disciplines. A year ago, ten creative practitioners from across Sri Lanka came together for a two-week deep immersion alongside scientists, conservationists, and systems thinkers. What followed was a seven-month mentorship journey, guiding them through research and refining their creative expressions. The result is a body of work, diverse in form, yet united in spirit, that dares to ask: How might we not only sustain our environment, but regenerate it? And how do we bridge the personal, the socio-economic, and the planetary in the process?

In this space, you will encounter creative expressions shaped not in isolation but through connection, with each other, with ancient forests, with forgotten species, with stories of place, and with the quiet clarity that arises in stillness. You will feel the impact of walking through Kaludiya Pokuna forest with leading biologists, of sitting in dialogue with conservation scientists, of working hands on with communities in unheard parts of the island, and of rediscovering the self through shared vulnerability and curiosity. These experiences, grounded in science, storytelling, and lived emotion, are transmuted into works that invite you to pause, reflect, and perhaps shift, however subtly, in your own orientation to the world.

The Creative Catalyst Fellowship is intentionally not institutionalized because the challenges we face demand more than tradition and the known. We built intersections where silos used to stand, knowing that real, lasting change is born at the crossroads of disciplines, perspectives, and lived experiences. This is where creatives, scientists, and citizens meet, not simply to critique what’s broken, but to unapologetically imagine and actively build the futures we need. We’re not here to preserve the status quo, we’re here to shift it.

As you engage with Climate Positive, we invite you to notice what stirs within.

What connections feel alive? What possibilities begin to emerge?

Because sometimes, the briefest of encounters can change everything.


Randhula de Silva
Program Director | Creative Catalyst Fellowship Read more

Mindscapes: Dreams and Memories

V. Vimal & T. Krishnapriya 3 - 26 Jul 2025 Barefoot Gallery is pleased to present Mindscapes: Dreams and Memories, an exhibition featuring sculptures by V. Vimal and works on paper by T. Krishnapriya.

Vimal subjects his raw material of recycled copper metal to cutting, hammering, and scorching. Krishnapriya’s; embossed drawings and detailed lines on paper.

For both artists, these works bear witness to stories that emerge from subconscious depth. Dreams and memories serve as sites of remembrance and resistance, battling distortion and erasure.
Read more

Mother, Junglefowl & Scarecrow

Pathum Sameera 6 - 28 Jun 2025 The Barefoot Gallery Colombo is pleased to present Mother, Junglefowl and Scarecrow, a solo exhibition by Pathum Sameera. Through his storybook-like illustrations, Sameera (b. 1984, Galle) captures the important role women play in Southern Sri Lanka’s rural agricultural landscape.

Drawing from his own childhood and the pivotal role his mother played in raising him, Sameera explores the shifting dynamics of gender roles triggered by the migration of men in search of labour. He comments on how this in turn has shifted the narrative of the women, particularly mothers, who have stepped into dual roles of “man” and “woman” within the household and community.

Illustrated in charcoal and ink, as well as vibrant acrylics, these works evoke both melancholy and wonder. Through a childlike lens, Sameera honours the resilience of village women, portraying them as everyday heroes who are quietly reshaping the rhythms of rural life.

Read more

A Flower Speaks

Isuru Nirangana 2 - 31 May 2025 In his first solo exhibition in Colombo, Isuru Nirangana invites us to consider the human form not as we see ourselves, but as we might appear to the silent, attentive gaze of a flower.

‘A flower speaks’ presents a series of emotionally charged, abstract works that distort and reconfigure the figure - not to alienate, but to reimagine.

What if a flower, rooted and still, could perceive us?
What would it see in our gestures, our chaos, our beauty?

Using oil pastels, charcoal, acrylic, oil on paper and canvas, Isuru experiments with dissonance and layering, building figures that are fragmented, disfigured and alive with tension.

Eyes multiply, mouths contort, colour pulsates - suggesting a fractured humanity observed from a perspective wholly unlike our own.

This exhibition is less about flowers and more about the unsettling power of being seen by something that expects nothing, yet notices everything. Read more

Sentinels

Edwina Thomson 3 - 25 Apr 2025 Read more

Of Mountains and Men

Bilaal Raji Saheed & Senali Nihara Cooray 20 - 29 Mar 2025 The exhibition brings together the works of painter Bilaal Raji Saheed and ceramicist Senali Nihara Cooray to explore humanity’s shared struggles and aspirations through the enigmatic metaphor “of mountains and men”. In this collaborative dialogue, the artists seek to uncover commonalities amidst multitudes, offering a meditation on the human condition... Read more

Design Migrations

Exploring the origins of design through the work of Channa Daswatte 6 - 16 Mar 2025 Design Migrations explores the origins and evolution of design ideas through five distinct furniture pieces by architect Channa Daswatte in collaboration with MICD Associates. This exhibition traces how inspiration transforms across time, function, and context—how a single idea, rooted in history, culture, or personal discovery, adapts and evolves into new... Read more

Nihal Fernando: Journey and Legacy

Exploring Connections Through Shared Perspectives 30 Jan - 6 Feb 2025 Photographing his island home was the ‘personal odyssey’ of Nihal Fernando (1927-2015), founder Director of Studio Times Pvt Ltd., who used his photographs to spur his countrymen to explore this island in the hope that they would protect all that he treasured. He was also a farmer who believed that... Read more

Theatre of Serendib Birds

Sanath Herath 9 - 26 Jan 2025 Read more