The eighth edition of Colomboscope will be held 19-28 January, 2024 bringing together interdisciplinary artistic approaches from around the island, South Asia and beyond in characteristic venues of Colombo. This festival edition's visual identity conceived by FOLD Media Collective draws inspiration from an environmental phenomena observed amidst forest treetops called crown shyness, indicating a collective botanical consciousness and survival strategies. Principles of mutual growth, protection, and communication in the fabric of a forest result in these dynamic patterns formed between trees.

"Over centuries ecocidal violence in canopied geographies has systemically accompanied forms of militarisation and the wounding of minorities in Sri Lanka and across South East Asia. These terrains are also where rare earths are extracted to maintain digital thirst and global mobility. As the jungle floor shrinks and burns, it holds animated truths — If we care to pursue its regeneration — a return to dreaming, interdependence, hibernation, and ethical imaginaries shall inevitably manifest. In forests we locate protectors and ghost stories; indigenous worlds, altars to divine beings and rituals long practiced. In the shelter of foliage we may imagine future alliances and collective fictions. Zones of action, waiting, and retreat for the tracing of enduring political grammars of dissent. From the forest we may also learn how to forage, to make use of what exists in abundance; to store what is scarce; and to listen deeply in order to hear the morning chorus." | Excerpt from the Concept Note of Colomboscope, 2024

Colomboscope 2024 will be conceived with guest curators Hit Man Gurung, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Sarker Protick, together with artistic director Natasha Ginwala who have collectively fostered ongoing dialogues that are practice-led which have been rooted in the experience of community centered initiatives. Hit Man Gurung is an artist and curator based in Kathmandu by way of Lamjung. Gurung‘s diverse practice concerns itself with the fabric of human mobilities, frictions of history, and failures of revolutions. While rooted in the recent history of Nepal, his works unravel a complex web of kinships and extraction across geographies that underscore the exploitative nature of capitalism. These narratives revolve around the lived experiences of migrants caught between a dehumanizing transnational labor-based industry and an apathetic nation-state. He furthermore invokes Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies to fundamentally reconfigure contemporary artistic praxis. He has participated in exhibitions at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2020); Biennale of Sydney (2020); Artspace Sydney (2019); Weltmuseum Wien (2019); Kathmandu Triennale (2017); Yinchuan Biennale (2016); Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2015-16); and Dhaka Art Summit (2014, 2016, 2018 ,2020). He was co-curator for the Kathmandu Triennale 2077 (2022), Nepal Pavilion at Venice Biennale (2022), 'Garden of Ten Seasons‘ at Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2022) and ‘12 Baishakh,‘ Bhaktapur 
(2015) alongside Sheelasha Rajbhandari. He has also co-founded ArtTree Nepal an artist collective and Kalā Kulo an arts initiative.

Sheelasha Rajbhandari is an artist and curator based out of Kathmandu who will also be contributing her expertise to Colomboscope 2024. Her works draw upon an embodied and speculative lineage of femininities to question the positioning of women across time, landscapes, and cosmologies. Her practice is a provocation to reflect beyond neo-liberal conception of time in order to decenter patriarchal structures that perpetuate cycles of industrial extraction and individual exhaustion. For her, art-making is about making space for collective action. This questioning feeds into her recent artistic and curatorial approach that recompose notions of Indigeneity, gender, worth, and productivity. Her installation in the traveling exhibition ―A beast, a god and a line‖ (2018-2020) was presented at Para Site, Hong Kong; TS1, Yangon; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Kunsthall, Trondheim; and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai. She has also been an artist in residence at the Bellas Artes Projects (2019) and Para Site (2017). She has furthermore exhibited at Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2022), Weltmuseum Wien (2019); Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2017); and Kathmandu Triennale (2017). As a part of her collective, she has been a part of Dhaka Art Summit (2020) and Biennale of Sydney (2020). Rajbhandari co-curated the Kathmandu Triennale 2077, Nepal Pavilion at Venice Biennale (2022), 'Garden of Ten Seasons‘ at Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2022) and ‘12 Baishakh,‘ Bhaktapur (2015) alongside Hit Man Gurung. She is also the co-founder of ArtTree Nepal an artist collective and Kalā Kulo an arts initiative.

Contributing to Colombooscope 2024, Sarker Protick‘s photographs shall build the narrative around the trope of change; momentary stillness, fleeting light, elemental origins of a place and a lost home. To make the decaying memory tangible, to define disappearing history of a place without confining it, Protick‘s often minimal, suspended and atmospheric visuals are coherently open with vast and solemn distance. Working with Photography, Video and Sound, Protick's works are built on long-term surveys rooted in Bangladesh. The form and materiality of his works often morph into the physicality of time; its raptures and our inability to grasp or hold time, the process of image-making as the way to expand time, to make space for more subdued moments, or more hints of an embodied life. Here we don‘t experience time as moving in a linear direction, rather, we experience it slowing down, recurring, having dips and curves, sometimes changing in a constant flux. Protick studied at the South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka, where he is currently teaching and has been teaching for the last ten years. Protick is a co-curator of Chobi Mela, the longest running International Photography Festival in Asia. His work has received several recognition and fellowships, including Joop Swart Masterclass, Foam Talent, Light Work Residency, Magnum Foundation Fund, World Press Photo Award etc. Protick is represented by Shrine Empire in Delhi.

Natasha Ginwala is Associate Curator at Large at Gropius Bau, Berlin and Artistic Director of Colomboscope. Together with Defne Ayas she was Co-Artistic Director of the 13th Gwangju Biennale in 2021. Ginwala has curated Contour Biennale 8, Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium and was part of the curatorial team of documenta 14, 2017. Other recent projects include Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora (with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Michelangelo Corsaro), 2023; Curated survey exhibitions of Bani Abidi (2019), Akinbode Akinbiyi (2020) and Zanele Muholi (2021) at Gropius Bau, Berlin; Arrival, Incision. Indian Modernism as Peripatetic Itinerary in the framework of 'Hello World. Revising a Collection‘ at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2018; Riots: Slow Cancellation of the Future at ifa Gallery Berlin and Stuttgart, 2018; My East is Your West at the 56th Venice Biennale, 2015; and Corruption: Everybody Knows with e-flux, New York, 2015. Ginwala was a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2014, and has co-curated The Museum of Rhythm, at Taipei Biennial 2012 and at Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, 2016–17. Ginwala writes on contemporary art and visual culture in various periodicals and has contributed to numerous publications.