INHABIT #7 // Sajan Mani
Photo by Billie Clarken, courtesy Artist and NOME gallery.
April – July 2022
Sajan Mani is an intersectional artist hailing from a family of rubber tappers in a remote village in the northern part of Keralam, South India. His work voices the issues of marginalized and oppressed peoples of India, via the “Black Dalit body” of the artist.
Mani’s performance practice insists upon embodied presence, confronting pain, shame, fear, and power. His personal tryst with his body as a meeting point of history and present opens onto the “body” as a socio-political metaphor.
During his residency at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics Mani will delve into caste slave songs and explore how the sonic spaces created by these songs produce collective emotions and memories in Dalit communities and urge them to claim a “politics of presence” in hegemonic sonic spaces and thus inquire into possibilities of alternative modes of archiving.
He will continue his ongoing research into colonial archives and collections that touch on Kerala, with a special emphasis on tracing and/or re-imagining sonic dimensions of Dalit history through these materials and on critical reflections with and within various research groups of the Institute. As the culmination of the residency, he imagines a multi-sensorial participatory performative installation and a new moving-image work.
Biography
Sajan Mani received an MFA in Spatial Strategies from the Weißensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin; a BFA in Applied Art from the Karnataka State Open University, Mysore, India; and a BA in English Literature and Journalism from Kannur University, in Kannur, India. Mani has participated in numerous international biennales, festivals, exhibitions, and residencies, including at Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, CA (2021–2022); Lokame Tharavadu Kochi Biennale Foundation, IN (2021); Times Art Center Berlin, DE (2021), Nome Gallery, Berlin (2021); CODA Oslo International Dance Festival, Norway (2019); Ord & Bild, Sweden (2019); India Art Fair (2019); “Specters of Communism,” Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017); Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2016); Kampala Art Biennale, Uganda (2016); Kolkata International Performance Arts Festival (2014–2016); and Vancouver Biennale, CA (2014). Since 2019 he has been the recipient of an artistic research grant from the Berlin Senate, a Fine Arts Scholarship from Braunschweig Projects, and an Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, as well as, in 2022, a Prince Claus Mentorship Award.
