Shayari de Silva: It is Essential to be There: Drawing from the Geoffrey Bawa Archives

Shayari de Silva, based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, is trained as an architect and focuses on curatorial and editorial projects. She joined the Geoffrey Bawa Trust in 2018, where she is currently Chief Curator, and manages the programmes around exhibition, publication, research, and conservation. Recent exhibitions include The Gift; five site-specific installations at Bawa’s garden Lunuganga by Kengo Kuma, Lee Mingwei, Dominic Sansoni, Dayanita Singh and Chandragupta Thenuwara, part of the Bawa 100 Centennial Celebration (2019–2020), and It is Essential to be There, the first exhibition to draw from the Geoffrey Bawa Archives, which was on view in Colombo (Park Street Mews) in 2022, in New Delhi (National Gallery of Modern Art) in 2023, and New Haven (Yale School of Architecture) in 2024. Shayari edited the Trust’s most recent publication, Geoffrey Bawa: Drawing from the Archives (Lars Müller publishers, 2023) and co-edited Perspecta 51: Medium, the Yale Architecture Journal published by the MIT press in 2018. She has worked previously at the Yale Art Gallery and Yale Centre for British Art, where she was a Bartels Scholar in Building Conservation. Shayari received her Bachelor’s degree in Architecture (History, Theory, and Criticism track) in 2011, and her Master’s from the Yale School of Architecture in 2016. Current projects include To Lunuganga, an 18-month public programme spanning three monsoon seasons looking at the intersections of art, architecture and ecology on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Bawa’s garden in Bentota. As part of this programme, Shayari co-curated with Aneesha Mustachi site specific installation by Reena Kallat and Firi Rahman titled Fluid Geographies and In between: the Existence of Firdaus respectively, as well as Botany and Batik: the Living Archives of Ena de Silva, an exhibition at the Ena de Silva House designed by Geoffrey Bawa.