Colomboscope 2026

Details

The ninth edition of Colomboscope takes shape and form with the title Rhythm Alliances, held 21–31 January 2026, conceived and curated by guest curator Hajra Haider Karrar with artistic director Natasha Ginwala and the festival team.

Rhythm Alliances is an exercise of attunement to the varied dispositions of rhythm—energizing, contrasting, haunting, recurring, turbulent, and imagined. Far more than a static exhibition, since experiencing rhythm-making is also an invitation for time travel, the acts in this edition assemble a communal score of creation, resistance, and alliance-building. Involving over 50 artists and collectives, musicians, choreographers, filmmakers, and cultural organizers, the festival programme will continue its pluriversal journey across freely accessible venues in Colombo.

Festival venues include Barefoot Gallery, Colpetty Townhouse, Kamatha at BMICH, Liberty by Scope Cinemas, Musicmatters, Radicle Gallery, Rio Complex, and Soul Studio. Colomboscope is grateful to all venue partners for this edition. Follow our website and social media platforms for the latest information.

This edition of Colomboscope draws on a range of vocabularies embodying rhythms of remembrance, dissent, and renewal. From the noise of a global order where hyper-consumption and war are rife, how may sonic counter-currents transmit the ingredients of struggles today, make paradoxical realities audible, echo in lifeways of migrant belonging, and resonate shared dreaming?

Inviting the frequencies and percussive knowledge from ritualistic drumming in Sri Lanka, Nyabinghi ‘groundations’ in Rastafari tradition to broader Asian cosmologies and Pan-African notions of world-making through vibrations upon the drum head, drumming signals rupture and freedom, as well as cosmic dramas of birth, clashes, and decline. The drum as a powerful communication tool was forbidden on the plantation, as Amiri Baraka reminds us when recounting histories of Black music. In multiple parts of Sri Lanka, healing rites, ceremonies, processions, and exorcisms are performed through a primacy of drumming. The drum is thereby present as a pulsating guardian and emissary, channeling complex beat structures and polyphonous environments, in use to ward off apparitions, devil spirits, and to invoke divine forces and seasonal festivities.

Artistic director Natasha Ginwala notes:
“This edition of Colomboscope is likely to be our most heterogeneous and versatile one so far with a groove that will be lasting. Constellations of artistic works gain momentum between the exhibition spaces, sonic vibrations, scores, and bodies in action. Dedicated to listening and choreographies of dissent, remembrance, and renewal, Rhythm Alliances endeavors to resound with sensory intelligence and reciprocity.”

Berlin- and Karachi-based guest curator Hajra Haider Karrar reflects on the curatorial approach:
“Reverberating across generations and geographies carried by the oceanic flows, the ninth edition is an invocation of rhythmic transmissions. The different formations of sonicity by the tongue, body, and its encounters experienced in the artistic provocations are initiations into the layered architectures of sound and resistance. Here, the voice, musicianship, and aesthetics of the handmade converge in motion, crafting a language that liberates even as it remembers. Within these resonant gatherings, rhythm asserts its agency, a pulse that speaks, insists, and transforms.”