Sajan Mani Mentorship Awards recipient

Sajan Mani is an artist who comes from a family of rubber tappers in a remote village in the northern part of Keralam, South India. His work voices the intersectional 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 “body” as socio-political metaphor that engages issues like caste, slavery and racial profiling. Several of his performances employ the element of water to address ecological issues particularly related to the backwaters of Kerala, as well as to the common theme of migration. His recent works consider the correspondence between animals and humans, and the politics of space from the perspective of an indigenous cosmology.