—
Video
15:30 Min.
—
a film by Moira Zoitl & Sajan Mani
EN_ [Sajan Manis] movements in the video are slow, very slow, and become slower. Viewers have to adapt their gaze to this tempo, become accustomed to the slowness, become attentive.
His gaze is rarely directed straight at the camera. His gaze escapes the all-recording eye of the camera. He handles objects. One of these objects is a stamper made of wood. Another one of the objects is a hoe. A further object is a measuring wheel. As is characteristic of Zoitl’s and Mani’s way of working, these three objects are to be grasped both literally and as double entendres and dialectically as well as performatively as objects of examination. The objects are examined and the objects are utilized in order to carry out precisely this examination. The objects are deeply enmeshed in the history of work, capital, colonialism, and the dispossession of land. The examination becomes performative. The objects are utilized, they are presented, and they are operated with the body. The examination is carried out with the means offered by the body. It is not the detachment that scholarly examination still maintains, as close as the words may seem to be to the object of their examination. The performance generates transhistorical proximities, echoes, resonances.
(excerpt from Elke Krasny: The Artist as Translator—Telling Objects, Performative Gestures)
Goluk. O my child! Is it easy to leave one’s country?
My family has been here for seven generations. The lands which our fore-fathers rented have enabled us never to acknowledge ourselves servants of others.