Rhythm Alliances is an exercise of attunement to the varied dispositions of rhythm—energizing, contrasting, haunting, recurring, turbulent, and imagined. Far more than a static exhibition, it is a celebration of energies and experimental forms. Since experiencing rhythm-making is also an invitation for time-travel, the acts in this edition assemble a communal score of creation, resistance, and alliance-building. Involving over 50 artists and collectives, musicians, choreographers, filmmakers and cultural organizers, the festival programme will continue its pluriversal journey across freely accessible venues in Colombo.

The ninth edition of Colomboscope draws on a range of vocabularies embodying rhythms of remembrance, dissent, and renewal. From the noise of a global order where hyperconsumption and war are rife, how may sonic counter-currents transmit the ingredients of struggles today, make paradoxical realities audible, echo in the lifeways of migrant belonging, and resonate shared dreaming? Across live experiences and exhibited works we will also explore the role of listening in producing relationships of reciprocity and engage with the ways in which acoustic leakages and vocal atmospheres compose new public territories that refute borderlines, data harvesting, and oppressive systems.

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SEHER SHAH

Her new series, Woven Nights (2025), displayed at Colomboscope, are a series of handmade concertina books with monotypes and their ghost prints, through variations of line, erasure and traces. She writes, "between absence and memory is a language of shifting details, traces and permutations. And written and erased with infinite variations. Woven Nights speaks to this language between absence and presence through a series of dark-field monotype prints and their ghost impressions. Variations of line between darkness and light through a material absence. The monotypes and their ghost impressions are shared through the structure of a concertina book; nights that travel as waves across the folds of pages."

Between a Home and a Horizon (2025) is a text-based work exhibited alongside Woven Nights, which shares observations and events from a decade in the city of New Delhi. Drawing her way into writing, Shah's poetic words are haunting reminders of moments of resilience, fragility or erasure; of writing on a city undergoing significant social and political transformation. The text has also been translated into Sinhala and Tamil by writers Kaumadi Jayaweera and Saambavi Sivaji.

- Text by Pramodha Weerasekera, for Colomboscope 2026