Crossing boundaries

Colomboscope is on! There are over 50 artists contributing to the festival at venues across the city, exploring how language relations form our selfhood and affinities that outweigh the bind of nationhood and citizenship. Here are snapshots of a handful of them and their work:

We Are From Here

Three artists come together to capture the dying (and dead) ways of Slave Island. Firi Rahman, Parilojithan Ram and Manash Sheriff explore the archives of a disappearing community using many a medium. ‘Ashray’ tells the myriad stories that get buried beneath sleek new cities (of which beloved Kompana-veediya will soon be a part)- the impersonal skyscrapers effacing the eclectic past.

The middle class lives of the last century with rotary dial phones and black and white portraits; the respectable poverty of tiny rooms in dark old buildings; discarded love notes of this year and very early hazy photos of cargo boats and even recordings of mundane conversations: it is a pungent, nuanced evocation of lives in this melting pot.

Ashray is featured at the Public Library.

Areez Katki

Areez Katki is from Wellington but with roots in Mumbai. A writer and artist, he explores his genetic landscapes via processes that include embroidery, weaving, painting, sculpture and printmaking.

The work he is presenting at Colomboscope is ‘ Words are Pilgrims’, where four handkerchiefs become a place of convergence and mark-making for words bearing Persian roots that have settled into the English tongue: Musk, Khaki, Algebra and Alcohol. These words, like travelling bodies, become hybrids, and leave traces of their crossing with the four elements in Zoroastrian cosmology.

Areez Katki’s art is displayed at Barefoot.

Packiyanathan Ahilan

Jaffna-born and bred, Ahilan is a senior lecturer in Art History at the University of Jaffna and primarily a poet, with three collections to his name.

For Colomboscope he contributes his installation poetry, where he “captures the grief-filled days of the civil war as experienced by the Tamil community: the losses and their recollection, and the echoes of past love”.

Ahilan’s installation poetry can be viewed at the Public Library.

Pinar Ogrenci

Pinar, artist, filmmaker and lecturer from Berlin, is engaged with tracing material culture, feminist and communal historiographies related to forced displacement, exile and dispossession across geographies.

She has an architectural background which often plays a role in her aesthetic and social approaches toward urban and industrial built environments, vulnerable neighbourhoods, and vernacular living practices. In recent years, she has focused on issues such as state violence, discrimination and assimilation related to architecture and urban planning. For her, art is a tool for conveying the effects of current and historical displacement policies on people, places and cities to an audience in a poetic language, and it is always associated with writing.

Cinema, poetry and literature, which she has been passionately attached to since her childhood, are the main sources of her art production. Pinar Ogrenci’s art is at the Rio Cinema.