Now on, The Land Sings Back, Colomboscope’s first international collaboration in the UK
“The land knows you, even when you are lost.” This poetic invocation by Robin Wall Kimmerer anchors The Land Sings Back, an exhibition presented by Colomboscope, Sri Lanka’s leading interdisciplinary arts platform, in collaboration with Drawing Room, London.
Curated by Natasha Ginwala, Artistic Director of Colomboscope and co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 16, the exhibition which continues until December 14, expands the festival’s ongoing engagement with environmental justice, colonial histories, and multispecies futures.
The exhibition presented by Colomboscope, in collaboration with Drawing Room, London
“The Land Sings Back is Colomboscope’s first international collaboration in the UK with the long-running arts institution Drawing Room in South London. Bringing together 13 artists from Sri Lanka, with global creative voices of South Asian, African and Caribbean heritage engaged in drawing focused practices addressing environmental justice, plantation histories and threatened ecologies. Colomboscope has collaborated with Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah, Jasmine Nilani Joseph and Arulraj Ulaganathan since the early stages of this artistic career, it is thus a moment of pride and recognition to share their creative work in this context among enthralled audiences,” says Natasha.
Through drawings, installations, zines, ceramics and sound, these artists trace the entanglements between the human, vegetal and animal—suggesting that to draw the land is also to remember, to grieve, and to repair. Here, drawing is not treated as illustration but as a living, active agent of history and healing—one that reveals how botanical consciousness can reshape our relationships among multitudinous life-forms.
The exhibition’s scope is wide: From Lado Bai’s luminous Bhil-inspired work that dissolves the boundaries between the human and the natural to Charmaine Watkiss’s Plant Warriors, where women of African descent appear entwined with medicinal flora as guardians of ancestral knowledge, the exhibition becomes a layered meditation on kinship.
In Jasmine Nilani Joseph’s meticulous pen drawings, the landscapes of northern Sri Lanka transform into living archives of loss and endurance, mapping the bureaucratic and militarised boundaries that continue to shape displaced communities. Meanwhile, Otobong Nkanga’s delicate works trace the scars left by centuries of extraction and environmental ruin, turning acts of drawing into gestures of mourning and repair.
Growing from artworks first initiated at Way of the Forest, Colomboscope 2024, the exhibition extends those dialogues outward, forging new alliances with creative practitioners in the UK and African heritage artists. Ultimately, The Land Sings Back calls for a reconnection with ancestral wisdom and a reciprocal rather than extractive relationship with the land, reminding us that listening to the earth may yet guide us toward renewal.
The Land Sings Back will be on view at Drawing Room, London, until December 14. The next edition of Colomboscope takes place in January 2026.
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