The ambient circulations and shifting movement of bodies within the ongoing social, economic, and environmental crises of the Global South invite us to ask, how can rhythm be regained once interrupted or discontinued. Basir Mahmood’s practice inhabits the space between memory and reenactment, drawing upon knowledge received, enacted, and regenerated by an individual and the collective. In his decade-long engagement, Mahmood has been collaborating with actors, directors, singers, and dancers from the now decrepit film industry of Pakistan, Lollywood, to examine the underlying conditions of the narrative and narration through informal routines and mundane objects. In his practice, he taps into imaginaries that reveal evolving social behaviours as they adapt to and internalize major political and cultural shifts, both national and global. For the commissioned work for Colomboscope, Mahmood has been working at the site that holds the remnants of the recently demolished film studio, to be replaced by a housing development project. The erasure of this once vital cinematic infrastructure where Lollywood thrived, sustaining livelihoods, nurturing skill sets, and fostering cultural and economic ecologies in its environs, becomes the backdrop of his inquiry. Once again, Mahmood asks the pertinent question of how knowledge and ritual can be carried forward and invoked through gestures and movements to recreate spaces. This invocation across time and space will insist on conjured proximity that can be experienced not just momentarily but sustained as an act of alliance.

Simultaneously, the question arises how can the rhythms of resistance that insist on survival and reworlding be sustained? In a performative rendition of her long-term research, Chathuri Nissansala draws upon gender identity and queering within Pattini cult and Thovil ceremonies from Tamil and Sinhala communities in Sri Lanka. It is an exercise in speculative reclamation, where Nissansala recalls craft oriented ritualistic exorcisms and healing practices from the southern part of the island, re-contextualising these oral histories that host queer ecologies – defying dominance and containment of body and land. By inquiring and activating queer ancestry, Nissansala enables and generates a vocabulary for opacity, and subversion against imposed and dominating patterns of systemic oppressions and violence that enforce a curtailment of movement and disrupts the flow of embodied knowledge.

Subas Tamang’s video work, Songs of Origin is an active reminder and acknowledgement of plants as ancestors relaying narratives of earth’s origins and hosting restorative and healing powers that sustain life. Orature and song are the modes of transmission for the shamanic knowledge, that is embodied through sonic reverberations connecting the ancestors to future generations guiding them to glean and nourish the grounds that carry us. The film encourages an exercise of attentive listening to the ground that hosts indigenous rhythms of encountering the circularity of time and the cycle of creation. Being anchored in this knowledge allows redreaming in the rapidly shifting and collapsing social, political, and environmental landscapes.

In remembrance and renewal, Rahema Zaheer’s sonic and visual interlude drifts like a cinematic meditation, inviting audiences to linger in the thresholds between sound and image, narrative and abstraction. Expansive inner landscapes of knowledge and tradition are distilled into moments of digital brevity, where each visual and sonic rhythm becomes a portal into a wider continuum that exceeds its duration. Here, perception is gently unsettled, reoriented through sound and image, as brief encounters bloom into deeper passages of time, movement, and imagination.