Colomboscope back in January with rhythm as universal language
When Colomboscope returns to Colombo this January, it won’t just be another art festival; it will be a collective heartbeat. Running from January 21 – 31, 2026, this ninth edition, titled Rhythm Alliances, gathers artists, musicians, choreographers and filmmakers from around the world to explore rhythm as a universal language—one that remembers, resists and reconnects.
Hajra Haider Karrar
Curated by Hajra Haider Karrar alongside Artistic Director Natasha Ginwala, Rhythm Alliances unfolds as “a communal score of creation, resistance, and alliance-building.” Over 50 artists and collectives will transform Colombo’s galleries, cinemas and performance spaces into vibrant sites of sound, movement, and sensory exchange.
Rhythm Alliances will bring together an expansive lineup of artists from Raven Chacon, Charwei Tsai, Vivian Caccuri, Sadia Mirza, and Pinaree Sanpitak, to Sri Lankan creators including Chamindika Abeysinghe, Imaad Majeed, Gayan Hemarathne and the legendary Chitrasena Dance Company, to name a few.
Since its founding in 2013, Colomboscope has grown into one of Sri Lanka’s leading platforms for contemporary art, facilitating encounters across disciplines and geographies. Each edition has taken on a new theme, from memory and technology to ecology and migration, but the core has remained constant: a spirit of collaboration and curiosity. In Rhythm Alliances, that spirit takes form through sound, through vibrations that travel across generations and oceans, inviting audiences to listen deeply and move together. As Hajra says, “Rekindling these polyrhythms that share an affiliation beyond kin to the land and the sea is a celebration and reassertion of interdependencies that enable being and becoming.”
Natasha Ginwala
Even the festival’s visual identity moves to a beat. Designed around a radiating waveform motif, the image echoes the pulse of a drumbeat, a visual rhythm that ripples through the festival’s posters, digital platforms, and performances. Drawing inspiration from Sri Lanka’s ritualistic drumming traditions and healing ceremonies, as well as from Pan-African and Rastafarian sound cultures, Rhythm Alliances looks to rhythm as both archive and compass—a way of remembering, resisting, and reconnecting.
In the Sri Lankan context, the drum carries a spiritual charge: a guardian and emissary used in healing rites, exorcisms, and seasonal festivities, channelling complex beat structures to ward off spirits and invoke divine forces. Across oceans, in African diasporic histories, the drum took on a different yet equally powerful role: one of resistance and communication. Once forbidden on plantations for its capacity to mobilise and connect, it became a covert language of liberation, its pulse echoing through generations of Black musical expression.
“Reverberating across generations and geographies carried by the oceanic flows, the ninth edition is an invocation of rhythmic transmissions,” says Hajra. “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.”
Natasha calls this edition the festival’s “most heterogeneous and versatile one so far, with a groove that will be lasting.” She also remarks, “Dedicated to listening and choreographies of dissent, remembrance, and renewal, Rhythm Alliances endeavours to resound with sensory intelligence and reciprocity.”
Over 35 new commissions will debut during the festival, spanning installations, live performances, films and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Among them are Weather Reports, Repropriation Riddims Project, Bread Molecular, and CoCA Art.
For details and programme updates, visit www.colomboscope.lk or follow @colomboscope on social media.
| Beyond the gallery | |
| As always, Colomboscope stretches beyond the gallery, inhabiting the rhythm of the city itself. The 2026 edition unfolds across Barefoot Gallery, Colpetty Townhouse, Kamatha at BMICH, Liberty by Scope Cinemas, Musicmatters, Radicle Gallery, Rio Complex and Soul Studio, each becoming a resonant space for gathering, reflection, and improvisation.
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