Sajan Mani's act of history making
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. At the Shrine Empire, New Delhi, a scarlet-hued wall comes into sight. It serves as a backdrop to six drawings by artist Sajan Mani.
Though small in scale, the layering of visuals, colours and text adds a certain complexity to each of them. The text, underlying the visuals, has been extracted from pages of German missionary reports about Kerala available in archives in Berlin and other German cities. And for the visuals, Mani has referred to photographs taken by German anthropologist Ego (Freiherr) von Eickstedt in the 1920s of Dalit and other indigenous communities in Kerala.
Like an archaeologist, Mani has excavated through layers of colonial perceptions and prejudices to create an alternative way of documenting and archiving narratives of marginalised and oppressed people. Part of Mani’s first major solo in India, the Multiple Legs of a Historically Wing-Chopped Bird series features drawn forms and video sequences. The show carries forth the intersectional artist’s ongoing effort to create new forms of history making, and bring the personal and the political together.
“I made a conscious effort to bring certain elements from Eickstedt’s photos to the foreground. It was a deliberate act for me. The lives of indigenous people have long been buried in these archives," says the artist, who lives and works between Berlin and Kochi.
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