Colomboscope 2026, “Rhythm Alliances”

Not long after pulling into Colombo Harbour, the Arka Kinari transformed into a stage for a concert of vocals, instrumentation, and choreography referencing life at sea. Having sailed for twelve days over the Indian Ocean to reach the city, the boat’s crew—stewarded by Nova Ruth and Grey Filastine—were no strangers to scenes of maritime struggle. During the performance, two headlamps scoured the sailboat’s deck while projected footage of a typhoon buffeted its sails. As percussionists played a fervent beat and survival blankets and flare guns were used as props, the concert steered the imagined voyage into the eye of a climactic storm, asserting the necessity to act now—or to “embrace slowness, very quickly,” as one performer put it. An audience of all ages watched in wonder from portside, a scene emblematic of the local engagement that shaped the ninth edition of this ten-day festival, curated by Hajra Haider Karrar with Natasha Ginwala as artistic director.

The Arka Kinari, named after the half-bird guardian of Kalpataru (or “tree of life”) in Javanese folklore, is medium, message, and mythology conjoined. Over the following days, the crew welcomed festival-goers for tours around their floating home, on which they discussed their desire to be energy-conscious and “technologically autonomous” in their past and future ventures, including on a first voyage on the Mediterranean Sea. The principle resonated with Colomboscope’s continued effort towards forging local and international alliances, allowing the festival to run independent of state infrastructure with support from partnerships and patrons. The approach was especially visible in an informal symposium of maritime scientists and thinkers for the launch of “Ancestral Ocean,” a collective research project made in a partnership with TBA21-Academy and curated by Ginwala, which added discursive weight to a program rich in music.

Live acts were the highlight of this edition of the festival, appearing in Colombo’s port, a vinyl library, and a local music school. In the last venue, a twelve-piece ensemble performed Raven Chacon’s abstract musical score …lahgo adil’i dine doo yeehosinilgii yidaaghi (acting strangely/differently in the company of strangers, 2004). Navajo and Pueblo iconography, particularly of ancient petroglyphs carved into volcanic rock around the artist’s home in Albuquerque, inspired the landscape of charged motifs that constituted the fifteen-sheet score. The collaboration transferred the freedom—or burden, as the exhibition text noted—of interpretation to the performers, producing an eclectic composition that surged and whispered with steady resolve. 

While the exhibition component brought together many stimulating works, its pacing felt uneven. This might be thanks to the ambitious decision to commission around two thirds of the fifty works on view. In a region marked by limited funding infrastructures, this is a commendable choice, yet one that inevitably introduces contingencies into exhibition design. Subtle yet commanding, Seher Shah’s display of four monoprints, Woven Nights (I and II) (2025), stood out, echoing the rigor and restraint of Chacon’s composition. Indeed, the white lines scratched across the black horizontal lengths were reminiscent of sheet music, deft abstract notations appearing to be set in motion by the urgency of the moment. Amongst the four were two “ghost prints,” made with leftover ink, the lighter of which was manipulated by further additions of ink, eerily evoking the instability of memory.

The politics of wounded memory were expounded further in the photo-series “Echoes of Stillness” (2026) by Tharmapalan Tilaxan, displayed within the charred Rio Cinema. The movie theater was burned down during “Black July,” a coordinated 1983 pogrom in which the Sinhalese majority killed up to 3,000 members of the Tamil minority, triggering a nearly thirty-year civil war that left tens of thousands dead and displaced hundreds of thousands more, especially in Tamil homelands in the North-Eastern provinces.1 In Tilaxan’s monochromatic images, shot on a vintage camera, solitary presences reclaim moonlit landscapes in regions that are still heavily surveilled and securitized. The dancing figures, some silhouettes and others captured in long-exposure, move like gauze, as though to hold and heal a grief that haunts not only people but the palmyrah tree—a symbol of the region—and its ancestral kin alike. While current and past editions of Colomboscope have prioritized Tamil voices, the fact that many survivors are still awaiting justice underscores a broader challenge, one shared by many biennials, of imagining more direct confrontations with the violence of the host state.2

Inventive musical instruments were a motif of this festival and seemed to propose the contents of a future toolbox. These included a shaker of dangling keys from the family of Mariama Ndure, and Nuwan Gunawardhana’s array of conch shells, both brought together for a performance by Sarah Kazmi in her installation at Colpetty Town House; a deconstructed hybrid vibraphone played by Yara Asmar in Stuttering Music (2024), rooted in the sonic ecologies of Beirut; and “humming as collective speculation,” as Nina Mangalanayagam described a video installation, with Marie Bergqvist and the transnational adoptee choir The Whale, in an artist presentation.

Also at Rio Cinema—curatorially the strongest venue—Dinoj Mahendranathan presented his research on kooththu, a form of musical theater performed by Eelam Tamil communities. In the kinetic installation centering the parai, thavil, mathalam, and udukki drums that comprise the rhythmic backbones of this form, mechanized sticks produce a meticulous, austere beat. Although enlivening the endangered tradition, the circle mourned the absence of the drummer’s palm. What joy without the warmth and spontaneity of the human touch? As we face ever-greater technological uncertainty, this is a reminder that the preservation of cultural lineages is incomplete unless it protects those who keep these rhythms alive.