Academics at the University of Visual and Performing Arts have challenged what they describe as a long-standing misconception in Sri Lanka — that studying the arts offers no future, and that medicine and engineering are the only routes to prosperity.
The message came at a media briefing announcing UVPA PRAXIS 2026, an international conference running at the university from 16 to 18 September, the Daily Mirror reported.
”The Arts is used from birth to death”
Vice Chancellor Professor Rohan Nethsinghe argued that the arts are embedded in daily life far more widely than most people notice. A child is exposed to music from birth, he said — the first song it hears is a mother’s lullaby.
He extended the point to fields usually treated as purely technical. When a doctor reads an X-ray or an ultrasound scan, he said, they are looking at a work of art depicting the inside of a human body, produced using modern technology.
He also made a preservation argument for arts research. Sri Lankan farmers once used cattle for paddy cultivation; few do now, with machinery having displaced them, and some rituals performed by indigenous communities are dying out. Future generations, he said, will learn of those traditions only through research papers — which is why research in the arts is essential, and why it generates opportunity in a field others dismiss as useless.
A career fair, and twenty institutions
The Vice Chancellor appeared alongside Dr. Chani Imbulgoda, the university’s Registrar, and Professor Tharanga Dandeniya, Director of its Centre for Research and Creative Work and Knowledge Dissemination.
The stated aim of PRAXIS 2026 is to show outsiders what the university does and what it offers in career terms. School students, teachers and young people were invited to attend.
A career fair on 17 September forms part of the programme, with around 20 government and private-sector institutions taking part, intended to show young people what qualifications are needed to secure work in the arts.
The wider conference comprises keynote addresses by local and international speakers, panel discussions, performances, film screenings, and painting and photography exhibitions. Sessions span traditional arts, history and memory, dance identity and cultural continuance, digital media, visual semiotics, heritage and ritual space, music education, therapy and performance pedagogy, movement and scenography, and community memory.
International folk music expert Professor Svanibor Pettem and performance artist Tim Crouch are among those expected to take part.
“We hope to build a bridge between tradition and cultural heritage and modernity,” Nethsinghe said.
A note on the record
The Daily Mirror’s report spells the Vice Chancellor’s surname three different ways within a single article — Netthsinghe, Nethsinghe and Nettisinghe. We have used the form that appears most often. The report also dates the briefing only as “recently” rather than giving a date, though the conference it announces opened on 16 September.
Not reported
The report gives no employment or graduate-outcome data for arts degrees in Sri Lanka, which is the evidence the academics’ central claim would rest on. It does not name the 20 institutions attending the career fair, give enrolment trends at the university, or specify what form the alleged misinformation takes or where it originates.
