Marine Intersections and Coastlines as Webs, the inaugural convening of The Current V: Ancestral Ocean, led by curator Natasha Ginwala, held in Colombo, Sri Lanka, is a coming together of artists, Indian Ocean thinkers, as well as conservationists, dynamically engaged in the historical crossings, Afrasian cultural confluences and maritime stories formed and held in these waters.
Several of the islands of the Indian Ocean World have remained crossroads of maritime traffic, sustained the movement of monsoon winds and waterways for the oldest trading routes, where polyphonous identities across language, cuisine, sacred and built heritage coalesce, as well as where significant marine species co-habit. The sessions held between January 25–27, 2026, chronicle oral histories, inventive artistic forms, sonic records and conservation research charting ancient cosmopolitanisms, stories of mobility and labour, oceanic kinships, wetland ecosystems, as well as ecological threats to the hydrosphere.
In commencement, Ginwala returns to this reflection by Audre Lorde: “But when the sea turns back, it will leave my shape behind.” Thus, coastal webs are respun and navigated as a planetary commons, to know that salt water runs deep as an ancestor, sustaining multitudinous pasts, inviting return, and the swell of future imaginaries.
Sri Lanka remains one such remarkably diverse island geography—a portal and meeting point from where the journey of this fellowship cycle, Ancestral Ocean, begins. Through thinkers and artists’ dialogues, workshops, screenings, a performance and a walk, timely and spirited inquiries from this island perspective will be mapped while situating ourselves amidst the festival flows of Colomboscope's ninth edition, Rhythm Alliances.
The Current V: Ancestral Ocean is set to cultivate site-responsive artistic and conservation practices across island and coastal nodes, fostering situated learning and creative exchange. Supporting engagements within culturally rooted contexts that encourage slow, conscious mobility and deep listening, The Current V aims to cultivate long-term relationships across the Indian Ocean basin, expanding TBA21’s long-standing commitment to pan-oceanic alliances.
Participants include:
Brook Andrew is a Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal artist, writer and curator whose practice confronts colonial legacies through museum intervention, public art and community-driven research. He is Curator of First Peoples at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Director of Reimagining Museums and Collections at the University of Melbourne, where he founded BLAK C.O.R.E. He also runs the publishing imprint Garru Editions.
Daniel Fernando is a marine biologist and co-founder of Blue Resources Trust, a Sri Lankan marine research and conservation organisation, where he leads the Fisheries and Policy Programme. His work focuses on bridging science and policy and advancing sustainable fisheries management. He is currently the Vice Chair of the CMS Scientific Council’s Sessional Committee and a Fellow of the New England Aquarium’s Marine Conservation Action Fund (MCAF).
Fana Fraser is an interdisciplinary artist, director, performer, educator, and full-spectrum doula whose work is rooted in expressions of eroticism, power, and compassion. She is interested in the study of behavior and being within and of dance, its performance, embodied / and astro-phenomenal creative performance of sound, and singing movement. She is a 2023-2025 Movement Research NYSCA Artist in Residence and Spring 2023 guest at Northeastern University - College of Media, Arts and Design.
Hajra Haider Karrar is a curator and writer invested in articulating questions that destabilize and reconfigure colonial and capital paradigms underlying knowledge production through ancestral and affective epistemes. She is a curator at SAVVY Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form-Ideas, Berlin, and the guest curator of Colomboscope Edition 9, 2026.
Neelima Jeychandran is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar. She is an ethnographer, editor, and scholar who works on oceanic crossovers and material histories of West and East Africa and western India. At VCUarts Qatar, she is the Co-PI of the GA: MA Lab (Global Asia: Mobilities and Arts), a research lab dedicated to studying cultures, arts, and people in transit across the African and Indian Ocean worlds.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson holds the position of Associate Professor of Black Diaspora Art at Princeton University in the departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology. Her books and articles cover the intersections of art, black diaspora history, colonialism, migration, and medicine from the 18th century to the present, and she directs Art Hx, a collaborative research platform that centers art in the exploration of experiences of health.
Arka Kinari is a floating cultural platform, an evocative live performance, a sixty-ton sailing ship on a voyage to promote resilience to climate change and re-engagement with the sea. By day, Arka Kinari hosts workshops on environmental sustainability and conversations with local communities. By night, the ship transforms into a stage for a performance by Filastine & Nova, using music to sound the alarm for climate change and cinematic visuals to imagine life beyond fossil-capitalism.
Laleh Khalili is a professor of Gulf Studies and the author or editor of seven books, including Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020) and Extractive Capitalism (Profile Books, 2025).
Atiyyah Khan is a journalist, cultural worker, sound researcher, DJ and archivist from Johannesburg, South Africa. Common themes in her work focus on topics like spatial injustice, untold stories of apartheid, jazz history and underground art movements. She is also the co-founder of music collective Future Nostalgia that hosts listening sessions in Cape Town, and participates regularly in radio, podcasts, archival work and zines.
Naiza Khan is an Associate Professor in Painting & Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Qatar. She works across ideas of painting, cartography and film. In 2000, she co-founded the Vasl Artists’ Collective Karachi, working to foster innovative projects in partnership with workshops in the region and beyond.
Joseph Kamaru, aka KMRU, is a Nairobi-born, Berlin-based sound artist whose work is grounded in the discourse of field recording, noise, and sound art. His work posits expanded listening cultures of sonic thoughts and sound practices, a proposition to consider and reflect on auditory cultures beyond the norms, an awareness of surroundings through creative compositions, installations, and performances.
Setareh Noorani is an architect, researcher and curator at Nieuwe Instituut whose practice focuses on feminist, decolonial, non-institutional, and more-than-human perspectives in the way we build, remember and change cities. Setareh argues for alternative futures that foreground underexposed voices and forms of collectivity, translating research into exhibitions, publications, and public programmes. She currently leads the project New Currents: Indian Ocean Futures.
Established in 2017, Small Cat Advocacy and Research (SCAR) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to the protection of Sri Lanka's lesser-understood small wild cats and small mammals. Its focus is to gain a better understanding of the three species through conservation and research, and use that knowledge to conserve the species throughout the island by working closely with communities, stakeholders and government authorities.
Charwei Tsai is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the relationship between humans and nature through cultural, spiritual, and ecological perspectives. Tsai has exhibited internationally and participated in major biennials and exhibitions. Since 2005, Tsai has also published the curatorial journal Lovely Daze, held in the library collections of Tate Modern, MoMA, and Centre Pompidou.
