SAJAN MANI’S BODY OF WORK
Winner of this year’s Berlin Art Prize, Sajan Mani will keep using his body to fight discrimination
Thirty-nine-year-old Sajan Mani is a Berlin-based intersectional artist, but he identifies himself as a “Black Dalit Body”. It’s the idiom of Mani’s work, which has recently fetched him the much-feted Berlin Art Prize. The annual prize—a cash component of €5,000 (Rs 4.3 lakh) and a citation—was instituted by Berlin’s Akademie der Künste in 1971, and it is presented to artists as well as cultural practitioners in six categories. Mani received the honour in the visual arts category. Yet, he feels, “I don’t think art happened to me; rather, I happened to art.”
Mani, who was born into a family of rubber tappers in a remote Kannur village in Kerala, chose to pursue the path of performance art after completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Karnataka State Open University, Mysore. Mani’s personal stories are critical to his work. “I don’t really differentiate my life from my work,” he says. “I have been carrying my postcolonial Black Dalit Body around. The experiences and discrimination it has faced—at airports in north India or in other parts of the world—made me want to confront the pain, shame, fear, and power in a rather critical way.”
Through his performance art, Mani hopes to provide the Dalit perspective in postcolonial narratives that are largely outcomes of the “Brahmanical knowledge production”. His criticallyacclaimed show, Alphabet of Touch >< Overstretched Bodies and Muted Howls for Songs, at NOME Gallery, Berlin, which opened last year, stands as testimony. As part of the performance, Mani filled the room with artistic renderings of protest songs by Dalit activist and poet Poykayil Appachan (1879-1939). “Performance is a suitable art form. And my tryst with my own body as a meeting point of history and the present instigated me to concentrate on my body as a socio-political metaphor,” he adds.
Currently, Mani is working on an ongoing artistic research project, ‘Political Yoga’, which is supported by Berliner Projekfonds Kulturelle Bildung. “Indian nationalists are using yoga as a soft-power strategy and trying to obliterate the other issues. The cultural influence of yoga serves to hide the repression of various minorities such as Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims,” he reasons. “Through this project, I hope to explore how social, cultural and geopolitical power dispositions are reproduced in one’s own meditation and body practices.” He will thus draw attention back again to his “Black Dalit Body”, which serves both as a medium of art and expression.
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