Wake up calls for my Ancestors

Colonial archives in different museums and institutions across Europe generate multiple discourses related to history, memory, archiving, art and the authenticity of the colonised nations. Wake up call for my Ancestors is a long-term critical artist-archivist project to give an active call to the muted voices of the Dalit and other archived subaltern subjects who are being appropriated, exhibited, accessed, edited and disseminated as mere photographs. Focussing particularly on the collection of South Indian photographs kept in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, artist Sajan Mani has started an interdisciplinary dialogue inviting three artists and three researchers for a reflective critique on the Euro-centric archiving practices. The project actively hosts internal workshops, research papers, installations, performance, films, photographs, panel discussions, interactions and experimental collaborations for a deliberative counter-moment to reject the exactitude of colonial photography. In search of a space and history from below Wake up call for my Ancestors interrogates the widely accepted postcolonial methodology of engaging the big Nation at the cost of minor locations like Keralam. The possibility of a quotidian space-time which can interlink both human and non-human agents for a compassionate planetary justice makes this inquiry oriented toward both futuristic and historical forms of thought.

The exhibition is generously supported by the

Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.