Echoing the overarching theme of this year’s edition, Rhythm Alliances,  their works incorporate cinema, choral practice and moving image, engaging memory not as a fixed archive, but as something carried in bodies, voices and everyday acts.

Basir Mahmood, a visual artist who works between Lahore and Amsterdam, presents ‘A Body Bleeds More Than It Contains’, a work shaped by more than a decade-long engagement with Pakistan’s declining film industry, Lollywood. Born into a creative family, he learnt early through watching his father write poetry, his brother sculpt, and his sister paint. He describes himself as a quiet witness to creative expression, an attentiveness that continues to inform his work.

It was only later, after turning to drawing and sculpture and receiving a scholarship to study art, that the camera entered his practice and altered its rhythm. “The camera brought a different kind of excitement. It allowed me to think, write, record, and edit all in the same day. Some of the most exciting works I’ve made came together in just a few hours,” shares Basir.

Working with film, video and photography, his project begins with everyday gestures that are often starting points for wider conversations. The work at Colomboscope traces its origins to post-meal walks with his father in Lahore, in the vicinity of the film studios of Lollywood. “My father would murmur lines under his breath,  lines that would later be published. At the same time, I observed the labour of filmmaking unfolding in those studios. This quiet convergence of two creative worlds became the ground for long-standing reflection,” he explains.

When one of Lollywood’s oldest studios was recently sold and partially demolished, Basir was confronted with a sudden and irreversible loss. Denied a space that had shaped much of his practice, he turned instead to sound and collaboration. “I realised then: if we cannot enter, perhaps our voices still can. That moment shaped this work,” says Basir. “I invited my collaborators – technicians, performers, voices of Lollywood – to let their echoes seep through that now-closed door.” This sound is a collective response; an affirming presence in the face of erasure. Anger, unusually explicit in Basir’s process, becomes a generative force; one that insists on presence even as familiar structures collapse.

Where Basir works through cinematic memory and collective voice, Nina Mangalanayagam and Marie Bergqvist approach sound as an embodied site of inheritance. Their collaborative installation, ‘A Song from Across the Sea’, emerges from a shared interest in how histories of race, colonialism, and belonging are often carried silently within the body.

Nina, a visual artist working with still and moving images, brings to the collaboration a research-driven yet deeply personal practice. Holding a Master’s in Photography from the Royal College of Art and a PhD by practice from the University of Westminster, her work frequently adopts a semi-autobiographical lens to explore hybridity, representation, and the instability of identity.

Originally trained in photography, Nina turned toward moving image as a way to challenge the medium’s historical role in categorising bodies – particularly through racialised portraiture. Video, with its capacity for sound, fragmentation and multiplicity, allowed her to resist fixed readings while continuing to interrogate photography from within.

Growing up in Sweden as the child of a Tamil father and a Danish mother, she became acutely aware of how identity is shaped not only by self-understanding but also by how one is seen by others. “Since representation is central to how we understand photography, I became fascinated by the way identity can feel unstable – shaped not only by who we are, but by how others read our faces. That tension continues to drive my work,” says Nina.

Marie’s practice is grounded in sound, music, and collective listening. Based in Gothenburg, she began her creative journey as a musician, playing guitar and performing within the city’s indie music scene. “Growing up, I struggled to understand myself, the world, and my position as a transracial adoptee through rational language. Music gave me a space to explore chaos intuitively and through improvisation,” she shares. “I remain drawn to – and continue to wrestle with – the relationship between words and the wordless in my practice, as well as with finding ways to integrate my musical background into my art.”

Drawing on archival research into Sweden’s colonial presence, their work brings together historical fragments and contemporary voices. Central to the work is The Whale, a choir of transnational and transracial adoptees formed by Marie, whose collective presence anchors the installation. The choir’s formation was initially centred on performing for the blue whale calf that was killed outside Gothenburg in 1865, and later taxidermied for the Gothenburg Museum of Natural History.

The emotional heart of the project comes from their shared experiences living in Sweden, tracing how colonial logic continues to shape emotion, power and the production of whiteness. Under the direction of conductor David Juan Andersson, humming, repetition and improvisation form the core of the process. Rather than aiming for precision, the work unfolds through reciprocal listening, allowing sound to emerge gradually and collectively.

The installation prioritises effect over explanation. It creates a slowed, immersive environment; one that invites rest, attunement and embodied awareness. Singing becomes a means of accessing pre-verbal layers of memory, holding grief, loss and ambivalence in suspension.

Across these practices, voice operates as both medium and metaphor. Whether through cinema’s emotional arc or the collective resonance of humming bodies, the works resist silence and singular narratives. At Colomboscope 2026, Basir, Nina, and Marie hold space for loss, offering works that attend to what remains.

 

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Letters to the Editor

Appreciations

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Using art to bridge the human-elephant conflict

Mahagama Sekera, the artist on view

Personal perspective on adversity