Alphabet of Touch >< Overstretched Bodies and Muted Howls for Songs
Solo Show, Nome Gallery, Berlin, Germany,2020
Exhibition Catalogue
Photo Documentation
Just because a howl is muted, doesn’t make its source less painful, nor its purpose less potent. The “muted howls” of the exhibition’s title refer to Sajan Mani’s translation of the protest songs of Dalit activist and poet Poykayil Appachan (1879–1939), from the suppressed history of South India to the drawn-upon walls of the European gallery. Appachan was a slave child born into the lowest caste of the Dalits, considered the ‘untouchables’, and grew up to become a social reformer. Sajan’s dynamic performance over two days covers physical space with expressive renderings of the original Malayalam songs. Hand connects with paper in a haptic experience responding to the call of Appachan’s early lament: “There was none on the earth to write the story of my race.”
Sajan hails from a family of rubber tappers in a north Keralan village. Rubber is inextricable from extractive colonial histories and the utilitarian products of the capitalist present. In Mesoamerican cultures, the indigenous sap has a mysterious and sacred role in spiritual practices, and now it gathers a sensorial place in the artist’s memory. These multi-layered significations animate several works on display: the video Unlearning Lessons from my Father (2018) depicts his father at work with the rubber trees, projected onto a stretched piece of this same material, while the white silkscreen prints of the artist’s body, I want to touch the BWO of the rubber tree (2020), also on stretched rubber, extend a politics of touch. This collection of works embodies Sajan’s moving philosophy, which happens in the intimate space between personal and collective histories.
Photography Billie Clarken
“A brilliant performative exhibition and publication by @sajan_mani on spirituality, casteism, racism and appropriation, on touch and untouchability, on writing as in bodily writing, which I have called corpoliteracy, on writing in and as space, which is to say performativity as writing, and on the impossibility of imposing Western notions of abstraction on that which is not meant to be abstract… abstract beyond abstraction. And on the transformation of spiritual elements (like rubber that Tully and others called the devil’s milk) to capitalist resources and the reason to ravage from India to Congo and beyond. On indentured labour.”-
– Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (curator, writer and founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin )
source: Instagram
“I take Appachan’s songs as a source of political excavation, a resistance, an enquiry into other modes of archiving. When I perform these songs, I become a collective body.”
— The Indian Express (source: Indianexpress.com)
“Much of Mani’s practice is rooted in research. Besides the complicated history of rubber, he has been reading philosophical and political writings about body and space. “I am influenced by the politics of touch”he says.”
— Mint Lounge (source: livemint.com)
“In an effort to resurrect ignored voices, Mani went back to the songs of the early 20th-century Dalit activist, social reformer, and son of slaves, Poykayil Appachan (1879-1939). His are the “muted howls” of the Nome exhibition’s title. Appachan started out as Christian but left the fold when he realised that the church treated the Dalits as inferiors too. He started his own religious protest movement to empower and consolidate the marginalised. His songs, which he never wrote down, borrowed the prophetic language of the Bible to communicate the lived experience of Dalits in visceral language. It is lines from his songs that Mani rendered artistically in Malayalam on the gallery floors and walls: “Not a single letter is seen / On my race.””
—The Hindu (source: thehindu.com)
“South Indian artist Sajan Mani's exhibition at Berlin's Nome Gallery focuses on the powerlessness of India's lowest caste, the so-called "untouchable" Dalits.””
—Deutsche Welle (source: dw.com)