CHSP Alumni Spotlight: Minal Wickrematunge
Sri Lanka, Reinwardt Academy, MA Applied Museum and Heritage Studies
Minal Wickrematunge is one of the Cultural Heritage Scholarship Programme (CHSP) alumni, who completed her Master's in Applied Museum and Heritage Studies at Reinwardt Academy in Amsterdam.
Her thesis, Residency Remains: Archiving Creative Journeys. Investigating Decoloniality via Contemporary Art Interventions in Museum and Heritage Sites, already hinted at the direction her work would take after graduating. She is currently applying for PhD programmes in artistic and decolonial research, with a focus on female labour and the embodied traces of colonialism. She is also the founder of Memory.Circles, a collective she established in late 2024 that explores counter-archival methods centred on everyday objects. Since its founding, the collective has held workshops in Colombo and Galle Fort in Sri Lanka, as well as in Lagos, Nigeria, facilitated in collaboration with fellow CHSP alumnus Jay Olaniyan.
The collective's growing cross-border archive of everyday objects can be found at @memory.circles on Instagram.
Minal understands that cultural heritage work in formerly colonised nations carries a particular kind of weight; one that cannot be separated from the body, from history, or from the everyday. Her current artistic research project, Cartography of the Body, explores how colonialism remains ingrained and performed within the bodies of people in post-colonial societies. This body of work traces its origins, in part, to a visit organised through the CHSP programme to the CollectieCentrum Nederland, where Minal encountered objects from Sri Lanka and discovered a 17th-century book by Phillius Baldeus. This moment that would later become foundational to her research.
Earlier this year, she contributed to establishing a political arts office in Colombo alongside the Fearless Collective, a feminist arts organisation, resulting in the launch of a gallery space, artist studio, and artist residency for political artists from across South Asia. This was the first of its kind in the city. She has also taken on a training role at Herengracht 401 in Amsterdam, where she trains MA students in creative practices for critical reflection as part of the organisation's Training in the Contact Zone programme. Back in Colombo, Minal remains connected to a monthly reading group formed by Sri Lankan CHSP alumni under the Collective for Historical Dialogue and Memory (CHDM), where participants collectively unpack texts and bring knowledge from their studies back into local intellectual life.
The CHSP scholarship, Minal reflects, was a turning point, not only because it funded her studies, but because it opened access to academic language, frameworks, and a global community of peers that had previously felt out of reach.
Cultural Heritage Scholarship Programme
The Cultural Heritage Scholarship Programme (CHSP) is a Nuffic initiative funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, designed to empower young professionals from Indonesia, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Suriname, and South Africa to pursue a specialised master's programme in cultural heritage management in the Netherlands. The programme aims to foster international collaboration and knowledge exchange, enabling alumni to bring new expertise and perspectives back to their home communities.