Aranya Art Center is pleased to present the first exhibition in China by Swedish artists Nina Mangalanayagam and Marie Dilmaya Bergqvist, featuring the audio-visual work A Song from Across the Sea (2026). The work is co-commissioned by Colomboscope 2026 and Aranya Art Center, and supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet).
Mangalanayagam works across photography and moving image to address diasporic experiences and postcolonial histories, while Bergqvist draws on oral traditions to explore themes of separation, enforced transformation, and survival. In this project, the artists collaborate with The Whale, a transnational choir of Swedish adoptees. Led by conductor David Juan Andersson, the choir draws on its members’ diverse personal experiences, treating sound as a vessel for memory, dialogue, and connection across histories and geographies. The choir’s name traces back to a blue whale calf killed and taxidermied in 1865, to which the choir first performed at the Gothenburg Museum of Natural History in spring 2025—linking their own positions and stories to this embodiment of colonial displacement.
At the core of the work is a sound installation capturing the choir’s collective humming of an 18th-century musical score. Drawn from the research of Swedish historian Fredrik Thomasson, the score relates to Sweden’s colonial presence in Saint Barthélemy—a largely overlooked chapter of Swedish history that forms part of Mangalanayagam’s ongoing research. Each speaker in the installation transmits the isolated hum of an individual choir member; as these voices overlap and respond to one another, they gradually blend into a shared resonance. Through this call-and-response structure, an unspoken conversation emerges, allowing non-verbal sounds, unconscious memories, and forgotten melodies to surface, touching on themes of belonging and the unseen wounds of adoption.
In a collective act of remembrance, this work intertwines human and non-human histories to question the boundaries and hierarchies produced and sustained by this dualism, while performing Sweden’s early colonial history and reflecting on its contemporary legacies.
The exhibition is organized by Curatorial Assistant Li Fangwen at the Aranya Art Center.
Co-commissioned in partnership with Colomboscope 2026.
The exhibition is supported by the Embassy of Sweden in China.
Nina Mangalanayagam
Born in 1980 in Lund, Sweden; lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Mangalanayagam is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. She is currently working on a three-year artistic research project, Colouring-In Sweden, funded by the Swedish Research Council, focusing on hidden and forgotten histories of Sweden’s colonial past in Saint Barthélemy. In 2025, she co-curated the exhibition and publication Bugs and Metamorphosis at the Hasselblad Centre, Sweden.
Mangalanayagam holds a PhD from the University of Westminster and an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, UK. She exhibits and publishes her practice and research widely internationally.
Marie Dilmaya Berqvist
Born in 1980 in Kathmandu, Nepal ; lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Marie Dilmaya Bergqvist has a background in Gothenburg’s indie music scene and Angereds Writing School. She holds a Master’s degree in Fine Art (2025, HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg), during which she assembled the choir The Whale to explore community and singing.
