Intro
The House of kal in Colombo along with its counterpart in Karachi and Berlin brings together art practitioners whose work explores feminist, anti-fascist, anti-racist and queer possibility.
The House of kal Colombo brings together a group of artists to realize a self-organized space within which studio practices, studio visits, workshops, long-term collaborations, and an open house form an experimental low-residency program from May to September 2021. The House gathers and co-produces discourse and praxis at the crossings of art-making, feminisms, and eco-politics with an emphasis on collaboration and care for each other’s practices. The activities of the House of kal Colombo are conceived in three sessions.
Session One
The first session features a number of workshops, conversations and gatherings that make space for a closer connection between the participating artists to recognize the confluence between their practices, their environments and their politics, fostering community and solidarity. A ‘Drawing Marathon’ facilitated by artist and educator Seher Naveed aims to push boundaries of independent thought and decision-making by encouraging participation and experimentation while also giving artists the opportunity to reflect on the fundamentals of space, energy and the body (June 2021).
'Other Histories’ is a part workshop and part lecture performance facilitated by Floating Space Theatre Company. It will reflect on the socio-cultural dynamics of place, context and narrative as a critical point of departure for understanding/articulating individual and collective senses of practice (July 2021).
A workshop on ‘Urgent Printmaking’ facilitated by artists Anusha Gajaweera and Buddika Nakalanda of the Printmaking Lab will delve into the practice of printmaking in moments of tumultuous personal or socio-cultural political climates without the use of professional equipment but rather through the usage of everyday objects (July 2021).
A multi-part field trip hosted by various artists, researchers and activists will invite the House of kal practitioners to dive into the themes of ‘urbanity, ecology and resistance in the city of Colombo’. The field-trip begins with a city walk with Firi Rahman and Parilojithan Ram of the artist collective We Are From Here who will draw attention to the way in which privatized spaces are transformed into public spaces. The field-trip will then visit some of the city's coasts speaking with local activists and organizers, while mapping the politics of loitering and learning from the traces of complex oceanic ecologies that are present on its shores. The group will then take a boat ride through the canals of the city and into the wetlands that support and surround it. Here they will meet with writer, researcher and urban geographer Meghal Perera, and delve into conversations around colonial ecologies through the study of the water hyacinth and its relationship to empire, industrialization and labor politics. Additionally the group will spend time looking at the ecology of the water hyacinth as a dual metaphor for structures of power and resistance. The field trip will end at the Diyasuru Wetland Park, where the group will take time to discuss, debrief and chart early points of explorations within their collaborative practices. (July 2021)
Session Two
The focus of the second session of the House of kal Colombo is centered around facilitating individual studio and research practices. Each participant will receive a designated studio space housed at the Collective of Contemporary Artists (CoCA-Symbiosis). For a period of 8 - 10 weeks they will delve into individual and collaborative processes of making on ideas of their choosing. This time will be animated by recurring studio visits and discussions with a host of local practitioners of the arts, including curators, gallersists and artists together with consistent conversations with their co-habitants and the House of kal Colombo Curators.
Additionally this session will invite artists in the House of kal Colombo into long-term trans*oceanic collaborations between the Houses of kal in Karachi and Berlin and various international practitioners. Among these is a project by artist and co-founder of OOR Records/OOR Saloon Zurich, A. Frei who will host a 3-day project of a ‘Relational Listening Composing Workshop’ which will focus on collaborative practices of listening-composing and situated, embodied, and queer modes of listening and sounding (August 2021).
Another collaboration by artist and independent curator Vera Ryser based in Switzerland titled ‘The Archive is not a thing of the past, it is a promise for the future’ is conceived as a collective reading practice. Participants will engage through critical text, contemporary artistic practice and historical collections with different forms of archived knowledges to to not only situate the archive in the past, but to turn it into a promise (and a responsibility) for a feminist and anti-racist future. (June - August 2021)
The artist collective The Many Headed Hydra will facilitate a collaborative DIY video zine collaboration titled ‘Rituals for coastal commons’ between the coasts of Karachi, and Colombo. It will take as a starting point sites where property development encroaches on access to bodies of water and will make space for thinking through an expanded field of publishing as a low fi video work, an audio visual zine, made collaboratively. (June - Aug 2021).
Finally NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, a co-founder of the Nepal Picture Library, and Photo Kathmandu will host a series of conversations that look at building ‘imperfect solidarities’ and feminists coalitions across various kinds of borders. (August 2021)
Session Three
The final session of the activities of The House of kal Colombo will involve a week-long open-house in which practitioners will host members of the artistic community and the public in their studio spaces, featuring open studio programmes, in work-in-progress viewings, performances, readings and displays of their work. Participants will also be encouraged to imagine and design their own collaborative participant-led programming throughout the final month of the House of kal Colombo.
The House kal Colombo is curated and cared for by Curator Sandev Handy and Assistant Curator and Productions Manager Sakina Aliakbar.
