The interdisciplinary arts festival, Colomboscope 2022: Language is Migrant, took place from 21-30 January 2022 with exhibitions and events hosted across 6 venues in Colombo. With over 50 Sri Lankan and international artists participating in this festival edition, the exhibits and installations were freely available for public viewing at the Colombo Public Library, Rio Complex, Barefoot Gallery, Lakmahal Community Library, and the WA Silva Museum and Printing Press. 

As one of the largest exhibition venues with over 17 projects and works on display, the Colombo Public Library was taken over by the arts. Here are a few highlights of some of the works shown at the Colombo Public Library.

Rajni Perera 

Rajni Perera’s work at Colomboscope emerges from a residency experimenting with terracotta pottery, inspired by utilitarian clay vessels found across the island and its dynamic forms of cones and spheres that have long been associated with cosmographic tableaux and Yantras; sacred energy diagrams related to Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism.

Vijitharan Maryathevathas

Kilinochchi-based artist, Vijitharan Maryathevathas’s practice is formed by his own experiences of the civil war in Sri Lanka and accounts of those who were similarly affected in his community. His work at the Public Library, Colombo deals with the complex and fragmented identity of Sri Lankan Tamils who were forced to migrate from the country as a result of scarcity of resources and ongoing violence.

Mounira al Solh

Artist Mounira al Solh’s ongoing collaborative project ‘In Blood In Love’ was presented at Colomboscope. This collaborative project for Colomboscope involved groups of women across Sri Lanka translating fifty words that relate to love to Tamil and Sinhala and collaborators used embroidery to respond to this lexicon of love on found and acquired fabrics.

Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah

Experimenting with natural and found materials to craft symbolic forms engaging the dramaturgy of violence, minority histories, and civic struggles, Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah uses the memory of water, coral walls of Jaffna Fort, the pandemic’s forced stillness, and transforming the coastal landscape as motifs and dimensional reliefs. His drawings are microcosms entwining human-made infrastructures, housing, and sacred sites with the island’s diverse environment and botanical species.

Pangrok Sulap

Pangrok Sulap, a collective of artists, musicians, and activists based in Malaysia, works with woodcut printing as a slow, performative, and process-based form of resistance to the rapidity of digital methods and circulation of information in the present day. Their project for Colomboscope 2022 was collaboratively done with Sri Lankan music group The Soul to present one of the most visually stunning pieces of woodcut print work for the festival. The woodcut print on the fabric ‘All Nations Are Created Special’ exchanges thoughts on the movement of people from the Malay archipelago to Sri Lanka since 200BC.

We Are From Here 

A project initiated from Slave Island in 2018, when several of this neighbourhood’s iconic sights such as the Castle Hotel and de Soysa building were razed to the ground or collapsed due to neglect. We Are From Here by Firi Rahman, Parilojithan Ramanathan, Manash Baburdeen (earlier including Vicky Shahjahan) and various collaborators have been mapping people’s stories and oral histories from this neighbourhood. Project ‘Ashray’ for Colomboscope 2022 shows souvenirs, picture albums, heirlooms, and ephemera left behind in an archive that not only narrates dispossession and displacement but also brings recognition to philosophies of pluralistic living, forgotten stories, minor historiographies, and tales of places that no longer exist.

Marinella Senatore 

Marinella Senatore’s collaborative project since 2012 ‘The School of Narrative Dance’ explores the potential of choreography, dance, and movement towards non-hierarchical learning and storytelling. Alongside this visual performance, her drawings and collages were also on view, relating to the spirit of togetherness, resistance, mass movements, and vernacular forms that draw from various editions of The School of Narrative Dance.

Artist descriptions courtesy: Colomboscope

Pix by Kithsiri De Mel