Colomboscope 2022: In Conversation with Anushka Rajendran
Curator for Colomboscope 2022, Anushka Rajendran discusses the festival concept Language is Migrant, drawn from Cecilia Vicuña's poem-manifesto of the same title. The festival drinks from the poem's wellspring of movement and circulation as the currents which shape life forms and language, and significantly, all of “ourselves.” These ideas gain valence in Sri Lanka's multitudinous histories of migration, contact and oceanic praxis. In the methodologies highlighted through selected projects, there is a close attention to forms of knowledge-making that have persisted across time, despite denial or erasure from history. Through activating modes of listening, voice hearing and sharing, the festival will situate the sonic and aural modes that galvanise resistance to extinction—of sounds, dialects, landscapes, peoples, and what Vicuña terms as “complex public conversation.” Besides residencies, performances and exhibitons, Colomboscope's interventions are diffused via radio waves, upended in familiar places such as cafes, and broadcast through the festival website.
This conversation took place early in April 2021. Following the tandem rural residency supported by EUNIC with Thisath Thoradeniya and Omer Wasim, mentioned in the conversation, another month-long residency as part of the series also took place with Aziz Hazara and Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah in Jaffna. After this, a series of travel restrictions were imposed across the island in view of the rising levels of the pandemic in Sri Lanka. In the meanwhile, digital programs have continued—also including the release of the second and third episode of A Thousand Channels . Colomboscope will be held from 20 to 30 January 2022.
Anushka Rajendran is an independent curator and writer based in Delhi. Her ongoing curatorial research traces how the notion of public has acquired alternative significance to contemporary art in recent years, as well as the aesthetics of engagement within exhibition frameworks. This is informed by her previous research on responses by artists living in India in the 1990s to political and cultural trauma, which has since expanded to encompass the South Asia region. She is the curator of Prameya Art Foundation, Delhi and her other curatorial projects include Kochi Muziris Biennale 2018 (India), Asian Art Biennial 2021 (Taiwan), as well as Colomboscope 2022 (Sri Lanka).
(Featured Image: Land, Waves, People and Me. Rupaneethan Pakkiyarajah. 2020. Ink and Brush on stone, 7.5 × 4 × 3.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Colomboscope.)
Recorded on 5 April 2021.
To hear Natasha Ginwala in conversation with ASAP about Colomboscope, please click here.
