In Person: Nimaya Harris on the Minnette de Silva Archive
At the Image Worlds symposium held at the India International Centre, New Delhi, supported by PhotoSouthasia and co-presented by Alkazi Foundation, Offset Projects and Maze Collective on 25th and 26th July 2025, Nimaya Harris presented on the extraordinary architect Minnette de Silva. Harris, who is working as part of the team at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka to create the de Silva archive, examined what de Silva's archive reveals about her as a subject and commissioner of photographs, and as a visual storyteller and photographer. Working towards creating and maintaining de Silva’s archive as part of the team at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka (MMCA), Harris argues that we must think of de Silva as a photographic actor, thereby returning agency to the largely overlooked architect. In this episode of In Person, Harris speaks to us about the range of materials included in the archive, de Silva’s connection with India, the transnational imagination evident in her practice and the activation of the archive by bringing de Silva’s work into critical conversation with Sri Lanka’s art and architectural history.
Nimaya Harris is Project Curator at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Colombo, and Visiting Lecturer at the English Faculty of the University of Kelaniya, Colombo. She is currently involved in setting up the Minnette de Silva archive, the most comprehensive existent record of the pioneering architect's life and practice. Harris studied World Literatures at the University of Oxford, where her graduate research focused on displacement and narrative in Sri Lankan civil war literature. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of architecture, postcolonial narratives and memory. She has earlier worked as a researcher at MMCA, Colombo and the WongAvery Asia Pacific Peace Museum, Toronto.
(Featured image: The Minnette de Silva Archive team at work. Image courtesy of MMCA Sri Lanka.)
Recorded on 24 July 2025.
In case you missed the previous episodes of In Person, watch Neelika Jayawardane discuss her practice of writing alongside images.
To learn more about Minnette de Silva, watch Minal Naomi Wickrematunge speak about her mixed media series featuring images of the architect. To learn more about the work done by the MMCA, Sri Lanka, revisit the ASAP cast episode in which Sandev Handy discusses the role of the museum within the cultural landscape of Sri Lanka and Upasana Das’ takeaways from the recent Experimenter Curators’ Hub.
