Sajan Mani
യമണ്ടൻ (Yamandan): Eruptions from Where You Buried Us, 2025

Across two acts, Sajan Mani’s യമണ്ടൻ(Yamandan): Eruptions from Where You Buried Us unfolds as a live durational performance and residual installation. The title refers to the term ‘Yamandan’, which is commonly used in Malayalam and Tamil to signify something vast and powerful. 
 
Developed specifically for the upstairs space of Bergen Kunsthall as part of across, with, nearby, the work combines movement, script, video, sound, and archival material to examine how caste, colonial histories, and nationalist myths remain embedded in both bodies and institutions. 

Refusing linear historiography or a single narrative, it moves through archival hauntings and layered memories. In act one, Mani’s performance opens with the slow emergence of a sculptural form built from raw rubber sheets and carried on the artist’s head. Natural raw rubber carries a complicated history, with a visceral connection between the artist’s personal biography and memories and the legacies of extractive colonialism, exploitation, and resistance. Through ritualised movement, Mani activates the form as both body and vessel, allowing buried histories to resurface through embodied action.
 
In the second act, ‘Ancestral Resonances’, the space is transformed into a field of living traces. Songs, chants, and spoken fragments from Dalit and Indigenous ancestors are layered sonically and materially across walls and floors, while charcoal drawings accumulate as traces of the performance. In the residual installation, three video works, covered with stitched rubber, lie on the floor among the drawn traces, while printed archival images of eyes from German colonial archives, appearing to watch back over the city and the sea.