Over 50 local and foreign artists to explore ‘Language is Migrant’
A bundle of joy stitched on fabric: A work by Hema Shironi
Exploring the theme ‘Language is Migrant’ the Colomboscope Festival to be held from January 20-30, 2022, across multiple venues in the city, will unveil an exciting and engaging array of artistic encounters.
Originally scheduled for January 2020, the seventh edition of the interdisciplinary arts festival which has been many months in the planning was shifted to August 2021 but the pandemic lockdown having scuttled that, it will now take place this month. Curated by Anushka Rajendran with Artistic Director Natasha Ginwalla, Colomboscope brings together intergenerational cultural practices from across Sri Lanka, South Asia and varied international contexts with artists, writers, poets, musicians, film makers, social theorists, designers and scientists all responding to this theme.
Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuna’s work ‘Language is Migrant has formed the foundation around which the over 50 participating artists both local and international have formulated their work. “Journeying from Cecilia Vicuña’s poem-manifesto, Language is Migrant, this edition of Colomboscope holds that circulation is primordial to all life forms, and always has been, from migratory birds and tectonic shifts to our own transience in this world,” says Anushka who has worked with Natasha and the rest of the Colomboscope team to guide the festival to fruition in the face of many challenges.
“The practices that this edition of the festival features, embody not just expressions that have flourished through history but also those that have been erased or are confined to the fringes. Language is a carrier of inter-generational history, memory and also visceral experiences that exceed its capacity for meaning-making and recede into its interstices to often emerge in abstract and poetic forms that claim grounded belonging,” Anushka notes.
Through many difficult months of COVID restrictions in 2021, they kept faith, going ahead with most of their planned projects, including digital programmes and artist residencies across the island. Among them, Pakistani artist Omer Wasim along with Sri Lankan artist Thisath Thoradeniya travelled to the Jaffna peninsula researching botanical species associated with memory, the afterlife of conflict, as well as colonial legacy and social histories of salt, exchanging views with environmentalists, horticulturists, artists and writers before holding an open house in Hiriketiya in the south.
Berlin-based Afghan artist Aziz Hazara and Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah from Batticaloa documented sonic traditions and rituals. Their research in coastal areas looked at landscapes as testimonial sites, internal displacement, and terrestrial conflicts in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan collaborating closely with cultural organizer and founder of Kälam, Kirutharshan Nicholasin astudio space inVaddukoddai.
Artists participating at Colomboscope include: Aaraniyam, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mounira Al Solh, We Are From Here, Abdul Halik Azeez, Palash Bhattacharjee, Muvindu Binoy, Shailesh BR, Lavkant Chaudhary, Jason Dodge, Liz Fernando, Dora García with Jayampathi Guruge, Aziz Hazara, Baaraan Ijlal, Areez Katki, T. Krishnapriya, Mariah Lookman, Imaad Majeed, Danushka Marasinghe, Vijitharan Maryathevathas, Sharika Navamani, Yoshinori Niwa, Christian Nyampeta, Pınar Ögrenci, Packiyanathan Ahilan, Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah, Pallavi Paul, Rajni Perera, Saskia Pintelon, Mano Prashath, Ahilan Ratnamohan, M. T. F. Rukshana, Marinella Senatore with Hasanthi Niriella and Ashley Fargnoli, Hema Shironi, Hanusha Somasundaram, Pangrok Sulap, Anojan Suntharam, Slavs and Tatars, Thisath Thoradeniya, A Thousand Channels, Cecilia Vicuña, T. Vinoja, Elin Már Øyen Vister, Omer Wasim, Jagath Weerasinghe, Belinda Zhawi.
Next week: Colomboscope’s six venues
| Artists as storytellers of our times | |
| The seventh edition of Colomboscope journeys from a poem-manifesto by Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña titled Language is Migrant. She writes: Words move from language to language, from culture to culture, from mouth to mouth. Artists compose, decipher and perform as vital travellers and storytellers of our times. Often, repairing relations by drawing material articulations from deep losses, silence and erasures while inventing language forms as bridges between communal narratives, official records, and submerged histories…. Language is Migrant invites embodied narratives that are written into lived rhythms and evidence framed by the senses; restorative forms of correspondence amidst estranged kin; the muscular task of learning a foreign language, song lines leaking over border zones and losing one’s mother tongue while crossing an ocean. In the mode of a pitchfork, such encounters emerge from states of witnessing and testimony, they are relational pursuits that flow into each other, for we realize, one ceases to be without the other. For more on the festival please see www. colomboscope.lk
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