Colomboscope 2026

The ninth edition of Colomboscope will take place on 21 - 31 January 2026, titled Rhythm Alliances, conceived and curated by guest curator Hajra Haider Karrar together with artistic director Natasha Ginwala and the festival team.

Timeless Dialogues — An Evening of Viola and Piano © Goethe-Institut

Projects & Artists

Arka Kinari is a floating art and environmental project that combines performances, workshops, and sustainability labs. By day, the ship hosts discussions and workshops on environmental issues and community engagement. By night, the ship transforms into a stage for a performance by Filastine & Nova, blending live music, cinematic visuals adressing climate change and imagining life beyond fossil capitalism. Powered by wind and solar energy, Arka Kinari travels to public waterfronts, offering artist residencies, collaborative art projects, and immersive experiences that blend creativity with ecological awareness.
Perera Elsewhere (aka Sasha Perera) is a Berlin-based, UK-raised sri lankan rooted electronic artist, producer, DJ, lyricist, and trumpeter known for her genre-defying sound that fuses experimental pop, dub, rap, and “doom folk.” Her new album Just Wanna Live Some (2025) expands her sonic palette with 12 tracks that balance raw emotion, poetic lyricism, and deep bass-driven atmospheres. Over a decade after her acclaimed debut, the multi-award-winning producer and multi-instrumentalist continues to blur musical boundaries, weaving together experimental rap, psychedelic grime, and avant-pop. Her strong desire to simply live is reflected in her diverse musical expressions. Despite their variety, all her songs share one thing in common: they are deeply human.

In 2011 the Goethe-Institut & Bang Bang presented Sasha Perera with her band Jahcoozi for the first time in Sri Lanka during a monsoon storm on Mount Laviniya Beach that remains unforgotten by those that attended, 15 years later Perera Elsewhere will be returning with hypnotic sounds and visuals to Liberty by Scope for a cinematic concert experience.
Ayumi Paul is an artist who explores listening and nonlinear time. Trained as a violinist, she studies how sound affects the way we see, feel, and connect with others. Using materials like paper, textiles, and recordings, her work brings together vibration, imagination, and the body to create shared, participatory experiences. She combines scientific tools with intuitive, bodily ways of sensing to explore perception beyond usual limits. Paul has shown her work at major international venues, including the National Gallery Singapore (2018 & 2021), Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2020), SFMOMA (2021), and the Sharjah Biennial (2025).
KMRU is a Nairobi-born, Berlin-based sound artist and producer whose work spans field recording, improvisation, noise, machine learning, radio art, and drones. His acclaimed albums Peel, Opaquer, and Jar established him as a leading voice in ambient and experimental sound. His work marks a shift from DJ culture toward immersive ambient sound art rooted in emotion, place, and attentive listening. Beyond his musical output, KMRU is a core member of Black Bandcamp, a DIY effort promoting music by Black artists and labels. He also hosts shows on Internet Public Radio, NTS and Rinse FM, and organizes workshops for the Nairobi Ableton User Group.
Hajra Haider Karrar is joining as guest curator for Colomboscope 2026. She is a curator and writer exploring ways to challenge colonial and capitalist frameworks in knowledge production, drawing on ancestral and affective ways of knowing. She is currently a curator at SAVVY Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form-Ideas in Berlin, where she has led major research and participatory projects, including Unraveling the (Under-) Development Complex (2021–2024) and Historical Children: Lullabies from Wounds to Wonder (2024–2025). Previously, Karrar was Chief Curator oft he IVS Gallery and Faculty of Visual Arts at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and has co-curated various international exhibitions. Her work has been shown at institutions including Tate Research Centre: Asia, Centre Pompidou, Lahore Biennale, and Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and she contributes regularly to publications on contemporary art and decolonial practice.

Rhythm Alliances is an exercise in attunement to the many dispositions of rhythm – energizing, contrasting, haunting, recurring, turbulent, and imagined. Rather than presenting a static exhibition, this edition unfolds as a living composition of music, performance, film, sound art, and choreography. Bringing together around 50 artists, musicians, filmmakers, and cultural practitioners from Sri Lanka and beyond, the festival creates a communal score of creation.

The Goethe-Institut Sri Lanka supports Colomboscope as a vital platform for interdisciplinary exchange and international collaboration. Since its inception in 2013, the festival has become an integral part of Colombo’s contemporary cultural landscape. It fosters sustainable and context-responsive artistic practices while opening spaces for collaborative and genre-defying creative processes.

Being aware of the importance of supporting the Sri Lankan art scene, the Goethe-Institut also supports over 10 local projects amongst them those of⁠ ⁠Chamindika, Gayan,Wajahath, Imaad Majeed, Mahesha, Sabeen Omar, Dinoj, Tilaxan Tharmapalan, Tissa De Alwis, Nuwan Gunewardana, Sumudi Suraweera and Stephen Champion.