Sajan Vazhakaparambil Kolavan Kalyanikutty Mani is an artist whose practice interrogates the intersections of performance, archives, and Dalit consciousness. A central theme in his work is the reverberation of ancestral voices, critically engaging with the weight of colonial history and its contemporary manifestations. He configures installations, videos, drawings, and performances as sites of imaginary dialogue, activating counter-narratives to dominant historiographies. Mani's long-term project Wake Up Calls for My Ancestors functions as a critical artist-archivist intervention, addressing the appropriation and exhibition of subaltern subjects in colonial archives. By focusing on South Indian photographs housed in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, he initiates an interdisciplinary discourse that challenges Eurocentric archiving practices, proposing a deliberative counter-movement against the presumed exactitude of colonial photography.
