About MOMAC
About MoMaC
MOMAC is a virtual museum-archive space that brings together art initiatives and multimedia resource material supported by ICES over the years. It also actively invites artists to join the digital platform in order to share their work with wider audiences.
Our Vision
To highlight our common humanity, honour and celebrate our diversity, and generate ideas that inform and guide policies and institutions in order to promote justice, equity, and peaceful coexistence in Sri Lanka.
To read more on ICES and its projects click here.
Why a Museum?
Museums are sites of interaction between personal and collective, between memory and history. They can be points at which cultures, nations, ethnicities, religions and genders intersect in a visual sharing and comparing of experiences. Museums ignite complex processes of learning, remembering, celebrating, cautioning and directing the future. Museums thus encourage deep introspection and catharsis which are essential for community healing and progression.
Why now?
In a post conflict setting, Museums can play an important role in national reconciliation and healing as they have the potential to unleash processes of self-reflection and learning that go beyond other interventions. By combining images with text and digital tools with installations, theatre, music, and possibly the culinary arts, they are easily accessible, appeal to a wide strata of society, and trigger a broad range of emotional and intellectual responses, both spontaneous and long-term. They can shock, they can instruct, and can help people engage with a variety of human experiences, collective and individual. More importantly they can help heal and facilitate communication across social groups and across value systems.
An ICES initiative
Recognizing this potential, the International Centre for Ethnic Studies presents a digital, museum derived from artistic experience which is accessible to the public and appeals to the multimodal nature of human experience. The digital museum is a precursor to a more physical setup which is envisaged as a mobile museum. Through these platforms, ICES intends to tap human experience by involving marginalized communities in producing and curating art works or installations that reflect issues and concerns specific to each community.