Much of Mani’s work tests the concept of borders, between the mind and the body, interior and exterior domains, art and medium.
By BARRY DAVISFrom left: ‘My Name Is Black’ (performance; duration: 45 minutes). Kolkata International Performance Arts Festival; Kolkata, India, 2014; ‘Beef Project’ (duration: five hours). Chatterjee & Lal , Art Thursday; Mumbai, India, 2014; ‘Liquidity Ar’ (performance), Sajan Mani; Kampala, Uganda, 2016(photo credit: SAJAN MANI)
Musrara Mix has been one of our more inventive arts events for some time now. The 17th edition of the festival takes place in the eponymous neighborhood on June 6-8, with a typically eclectic offering engineered by perennial artistic director Avi Sabag.The festival program is true in spirit to the host establishment’s location, on the seam between east and west Jerusalem, with all the associated cultural and sociopolitical baggage. Sabag, who normally earns a crust as director of the Naggar Multidisciplinary School of Art and Society, has cooked up yet another fascinating array of exhibitions and other art projects.The official festival theme is “Terra Incognita – East and West in a Hybrid World,” with a host of plastic and other arts exhibits, plus musical ventures, laid on over the three days. The works will be viewable and audible in public spaces, as well as in the yards of some local residences and the school’s gallery spaces, with visitors free to flit between them all as they desire.On the music front, Musrara Mix includes nine shows, featuring such high energy cross-cultural outfits as the hafla-oriented The Pearl of the East, psychedelia indie band Hynom, and ethereal leaning Thirsty Fish, as well as an intriguing confluence between Crunch 22 – described as three hyperactive musicians who ply their craft along psychedelic groove channels – and stellar genre-leaping vocalist Shai Tsabari.There’s more to Musrara Mix, so much more. There’s also a whole bunch of musical ventures that tend toward the experimental side, proffered under the category Musrarasonics – Electro Acoustic Program. The left-field acts include Jerusalemite duo Pica/Cain, school sextet Electronic Ensemble with their Levitation show, New York-based improv and sound artist Ben Vida, as well as the purely acoustic, unamplified Mines trio of violinists Ilan Volkov and Yael Broleski, and drummer Rama Gabay.And that’s only the musical side of the jam-packed festival lineup. There is also a ton of exhibitions lined up, both for the school’s interior galleries as well as all kinds of external public spaces. Some 40 arts displays across a range of disciplines and genres, from photography to dance with much betwixt, address such identity- associated themes as gender, the perfect marriage, and the influence of digital technology on traditional craftsmanship.In addition to some of our own leading creators, the artist roster includes guests from Germany, China, the United States, Poland, Cameroon, India, Russia, the UK and Turkey.Sajan Mani certainly toes the festival’s thematic theme. The Indian artist’s portfolio features a variety of performance-related works that come at accepted social wisdom from all sides. His outdoor contribution to Musrara Mix is called Politically Incorrect Bodies, a 24-hour performance which examines the relationship between animals and the human body. Mani comes from the Dalit caste, which occupies the lowest rung of the Indian caste system.The caste system is a staple of Mani’s work, which he normally presents in a basic corporeal manner. “My physical appearance, my body, I put myself into public spaces,” he notes. “This is, in itself, a political act. Through the body I inquire about physical and mental borders. I try to understand this world, from the larger perspective.”Mani is clearly not afraid to step into choppy waters, as he demonstrated in 2014 when he was on a residency program in Vancouver, Canada. During his time on the West Coast he conceived a live performance he called Citizen Ship Burn It Down! which aired at the Vancouver Biennale.”I looked at who else was there before me, and I found out that 100 years back there was a ship that went there with people from India from different social backgrounds,“ says Mani. It seems that the ship, most of whose passengers were Sikhs, ran into Canadian politically motivated barriers and, after being held offshore near Vancouver for a month, it was eventually sent back whence it came. It became known as the “Komagata Maru incident,” one of several in the early 20th century in which exclusion laws in Canada and the United States were used to keep out immigrants of Asian origin.Mani was determined to bring the sorry affair back to contemporary consciousness. “It was a story that Canada did not want to remember, but I did a performance with my body,” he explains. “I invited people from different ethnic backgrounds and age groups to make black boats, which I attached to my body, and walked along the seashore, and I took the boats into the water.”That sounds like quite a physical effort, but Mani is made of sterner stuff. He puts a lot of effort into highlighting the evils of the caste system, particularly in his own country. He doesn’t mince his words either.“In the Indian art world and art community, they are not ready to address the social hierarchy. I would call it ‘caste apartheid.’ It is one of the biggest slave systems in the world. I believe it is my responsibility as an artist to address this thing. I think, as an artist, I should address the time I am living in.” That can take different forms. “I mostly in my work address the politics of food, caste and the body, especially in an Indian context.”While Mani is particularly engaged with political goings on in his own country, he also considers wider issues that are prevalent in other cultures and societies around the world. “In some religions and cultures, certain animal species are considered impure, an aversion that spreads even in democratic societies, in the name of political correctness,” he says, noting that this doesn’t stop us exploiting the bodies of the same creatures for other needs. His work in this area focuses particularly on the pig, which he feels is often misunderstood and even derided.When he received an invitation to come to Musrara he initially thought of doing something based on the Black Panther social protest movement which originated in the neighborhood in the 1970s. “But I am continually working on the politics of food, so I will be doing something on the connection between the animal body and the human body.”Much of Mani’s work tests the concept of borders, between the mind and the body, interior and exterior domains, art and medium, the real and the imaginary, and the place of historical lessons and contextual positioning.His focus on what he terms as “the politics of food” may resonate none too comfortably with many of us and may leave us with food for thought.For more information: www.musrara.org/
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