The travel and media industries head to London this week for World Travel Market. Juliet Coombe catches up with ARTRA Editor-in-Chief Azara Jaleel to talk about Sri Lankan art experiences and the arty travel trends reshaping South Asia.
Azara Jaleel is the rock ’n’ roll rebel of contemporary Sri Lankan and South Asian art. She has smashed through the whitewashed walls of the conventional Western gallery. Her avant-garde thinking has launched the world’s very first interconnecting Island Gallery travel experiences.
A powerhouse of out-of-the-box creativity, Jaleel has spent 14 years as Editor-in-Chief of ARTRA Magazine. In that time she has interviewed every Sri Lankan art academic and practitioner. She has also reshaped the island’s cultural landscape and made it accessible to all who visit. Recognising a new appetite for connecting through art, she has joined forces with Sam Clark at London’s Experience Travel Group. Together they offer travellers exclusive Art & Architecture Experiences in Sri Lanka. These unique experiences open the doors to Geoffrey Bawa’s private houses and the homes of contemporary artists across the island.
A Sri Lankan Voice in London’s Art World
London knows Azara for her talks at the Royal Academy, Grosvenor Gallery, Phillips London and Experience Travel Group. She has one aim: to increase the world’s knowledge of Sri Lankan and South Asian art through art experiences. Her programs capture the hearts of travellers and the intrigue and reverie of the art community.
Her ongoing conversations stretch from Frieze London, held each year in Regent’s Park, to Fair Play Art. It took over No. 1 Marylebone – a former church with its Soane Hall, galleries, vaults, gardens and greenhouses. These talks explore exciting new ways to show art outside the usual gallery format. Over the past couple of years, she has sparked growing interest in her raw, immersive explorations of Sri Lanka. They fuse geography with fine art and the spirited island people who make her home so meaningful and special.
Sri Lankan Art Experiences: Inside the Island Gallery
Women Love Travel caught up with Azara before World Travel Market. There she will talk about Sri Lanka and the arty travel trends reshaping South Asia. It gives young artists the opportunity to work in the field they have studied and love.
Her ARTRA Island Gallery programs with Experience Travel Group go to the heart and soul of Colombo, Sri Lanka’s buzzing commercial capital. These Sri Lankan art experiences explore different artists’ homes. They also take in heritage boutique hotel spaces in Galle Fort and gardens such as Brief, Bevis Bawa’s celebrated garden. There you can meet Dooland, who was Bevis Bawa’s protégé.
Azara helps visitors imagine life at places such as the Sapumal Foundation when it was an artists’ haven. Then she brings them up to date with today’s art scene. She explains how three houses beautifully showcase all ten artists of the ’43 Group. You’ll find them in Colombo 7, the city’s equivalent of London’s Mayfair, and at De Soysa House, where the family still lives.
These are just some of the reasons Azara is captivating art critics. They see this as a wonderful way to learn first-hand about contemporary art in Colombo and around the island. Experience Travel Group will also help you choose spaces to suit your interests and explore the island’s architectural history. The programs embrace all religious backgrounds and styles of practice. They offer a chance to better understand the island’s rich cultural history, extraordinary Bawa architecture and contemporary art movements.
From the Page to the Canvas
Azara studied English Literature at the University of Colombo and in Virginia, USA, but chose the canvas over the page. “I use visual storytelling to map the intricate, emotive inner workings and perceptions of the unbridled human mind,” she explains. She has just spent an exciting morning talking about Sri Lankan art with H.E. Nimal Senadheera, Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.
She remains an ardent devotee of the written word. But it was the surrealist defiance of Salvador Dalí, whose visual illusions questioned reality, that truly set her course. She was equally fascinated by the genius of Sri Lankan modernist masters Justin Deraniyagala and Lionel Wendt. Their rebellion against Western discourse fascinated her most: they incorporated Sri Lankan motifs for the first time while exploring the human condition. These powerful works broadened Azara’s thinking about how art can carry the voices of her people to the outside world. They also steered her away from a career as a writer alone.
Enamoured by art’s unique capacity to strip back highly political and challenging subject matter, Azara curates visual narratives of both beauty and bereavement. This lateral thinking turns complex regional truths into profound, universal human sentiment.
“We are transforming this space of sorrow into one of scintillation.”
Azara Jaleel
A case in point: she recently transformed a Jaffna civil war bunker into an art space for local contemporary artists.
Sri Lankan Art Experiences Beyond the Gallery Walls
This mix of permanent and pop-up installations, in a kaleidoscope of very different spaces, creates important new opportunities. Azara’s experiences set the stage with the catalytic ’43 Group. These artists broke away from the colonial styles of Western art and reignited Modernism with Sri Lankan subjects. They did so at the Sapumal Foundation and De Soysa House – dynamic places where artists experimented with different mediums and materials. It was a remarkable thing to do under draconian colonial laws. Artists even created works from rusty nails, as seen in Ismeth Raheem’s masterpiece at Bawa’s Bentota Beach Hotel.
The island explorations end with the contemporary artists who fearlessly brought the ugly and macabre character of the civil war to the forefront. That brutal conflict nearly broke the country. “You take a piece of beauty and bereavement that fought through rebellions and resistance, and you come up with a potent piece of art, which was once seen as part of the civic movement,” Azara says.
She points to the Aragalaya – the Sinhala word for “struggle” – the protest movement that began in March 2022 and, from April, centred on Galle Face. People across classes and ethnicities came together to protest peacefully to oust a government they saw as corrupt. Over several months there, Azara met many artists and reimagined where people could see art.
Opening Doors for Young Sri Lankan Artists
Breaking every rule about what an art space can be, ARTRA’s Island Gallery is a composition of public and private spaces. They include the bunker, boutique villas and artists’ homes, where Azara believes art can transform the very spaces that hold it. “While galleries do play a critical role in sustaining the growth trajectory of talented artists, this encourages a wider audience, growing the art market and those who can work in it,” she says.
Azara converted the Jaffna bunker from a space of sorrow into one of thought-provoking art. It also gave artists from the region a place to showcase their work. Azara explains that fewer than 1 per cent of graduates from the fine arts faculties of Sri Lanka’s public universities have the support and infrastructure to carve out a career. Bold decisions like these create more opportunities for artists. They can reveal new styles of contemporary art, reimagine history and challenge the status quo on art’s place and position in the world.
Jasmine Nilani’s Fences of Care
A powerful example from the Jaffna bunker exhibition that Azara curated is the work of storyteller Jasmine Nilani. A second-generation artist from Jaffna, she subverts the idea of fences in her installation of silver cooking pots on sticks. The work is the centrepiece of Junctures: ARTRA Trail Edition II. It astutely transforms borders – symbols of partition, pillaging and patriarchy in the context of Sri Lanka’s civil war – into symbols of care, feminine architecture and rebellion. She reimagines them through delicate blue ballpoint-pen drawings on the cooking pots.
Nilani places each pot atop the fence to represent the small exchanges between people – food, clothing and robes among them – that become part of the structure. This brings those gestures of connection back into barriers deliberately built to divide and mark territory.
ARTRA and the Galle Literary Festival
Azara is a powerful advocate of storytelling in art. It’s no surprise, then, that ARTRA is also festival partner of the Galle Literary Festival. She plays an important part in Sri Lanka’s literary scene as well as its art world. This year she was one of three judges for the 33rd Gratiaen Prize, the island’s most important literary award.
Booker Prize-winning author Michael Ondaatje founded the prize. He used all of his 1992 Booker winnings for The English Patient to establish the Gratiaen Trust, which recognises outstanding writing in Sri Lanka. It has created an ecosystem that has yielded phenomenal results, such as Shehan Karunatilaka winning the 2022 Booker Prize for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Ondaatje named the prize in honour of his mother, Doris Gratiaen – a fiercely independent lover of the arts, and of dance in particular.
The Galle Literary Festival Art Trail is all about mixing art and literature to give creative people in every medium a voice. Azara is particularly proud to be part of this interdisciplinary festival. The late Geoffrey Dobbs created it some 20 years ago, during the height of the civil war, in the ancient city of Galle Fort. In 2007 Harper’s Bazaar voted it the No. 1 literary festival in the world for its spectacular setting and incredible five-day program.
Five Days of Storytelling in Galle Fort
Each year the 400-year-old, UNESCO World Heritage-listed Galle Fort transforms into a hub of storytelling, exhibitions and private dinners with top chefs and famous writers. There is a dedicated children’s program too. The 2027 festival runs from 17 to 21 March – all good reasons to book a ticket now. Azara explains that ARTRA’s exhibitions and magazine launches beautifully complement the festival. The festival has attracted leading global literary figures including Gore Vidal, Germaine Greer and Anthony Horowitz. Alongside the literary program, visitors can enjoy ARTRA’s latest portfolio of artists who are shaping South Asian narratives through modern and contemporary art and architecture. It all seamlessly connects different creative worlds within this fascinating ancient port city.
It’s always a buzzy, exciting few days in a fort voted Sri Lanka’s No. 1 tourist destination in 2026 for its historic significance and cultural hybridity. Ultimately, for Azara, the Galle Literary Festival and ARTRA Art Trail offer a front-row seat to extraordinary cross-cultural splendour. They are also a chance to enjoy her dynamic island culture first-hand. This vibrant, deeply hospitable community lets you enjoy Sri Lanka’s artistic disruptors while hanging out with global authors, chefs and publishers. All come together to celebrate the dynamism of this storytelling island.
How to Book ARTRA’s Sri Lankan Art Experiences
To unlock ARTRA’s exclusive art adventures, let Experience Travel Group design a stunning itinerary around your tastes in accommodation, travel style and dates. It will weave in Azara Jaleel’s curated, face-to-face Island Gallery encounters. On these Sri Lankan art experiences, you won’t just stand back and look at the art. You’ll meet the people behind it, and perhaps take one of their masterpieces home with you. After all, it’s the ultimate reminder of how wild, meaningful and unforgettable a trip to Sri Lanka with Azara Jaleel and Experience Travel Group can be.
Book: Exclusive Art & Architecture Experiences in Sri Lanka: ARTRA x ETG
Explore: artra.lk and follow ARTRA’s stories on Instagram at @artramagazine
More from Juliet: Discover Sri Lanka’s devil-dancing healing tradition and meet the mysterious slender loris.
