Colomboscope has announced the first of the contemporary art festival’s participants. Founded in 2013, the Sri Lankan event has, until this year, been held annually. In 2019 organisers decided – fortuitously, given the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic – to make it biannual. Nonetheless local restrictions and the threat of further rises in cases forced the festival to postpone its scheduled January opening. It is now set to take place over ten days from 12 August 2021.
Curator Anushka Rajendran and artistic director Natasha Ginwala borrowed a line from a poem by Cecilia Vicuña for the title, Language is Migrant, and, as in previous years, their show will spread across various historic venues in the city of Colombo and feature artists, musicians, theorists and scientists. ‘Artists compose, decipher and perform as vital travelers and storytellers of our times’, they write in a curatorial statement. ‘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.’
Vicuña will be joined by Palash Bhattacharjee, Muvindu Binoy, Shailesh BR, Dora García, Aziz Hazara, Vijitharan Maryathevathas, Pinar Öğrenci, Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah, Rajni Perera, Hanusha Somasunderam, Vinoja Tharmalingam, Thisath Thoradeniya, Omer Wasim and Belinda Zhawi, with more artists to be announced.
The organisers have admitted that fundraising has been hard this year; nonetheless they still have international ambitions, though many of the projects will be realised locally with artists from outside the country working with local collaborators.
‘We had planned a series of tandem artist residencies in 2020 for international and local artists to work together in communities all across the island – around the Hill County, Batticaloa, Jaffna, and the Deep South, for example. Due to the ongoing travel restrictions, we have to delay these plans but hope to still be able to partially manifest them before the festival’ they told The Sunday Morning newspaper.
