JEHANGIR NICHOLSON ART FOUNDATION
Nalini Malani is a pioneering artist, renowned for her innovative integration of drawing, painting, theatre, digital media and film. Her works elicit a fluidity of form- she morphs, smears, erases, animates and overlays imagery. There is a state of flux, of becoming, that dishevels set characterizations. Malani's practice features characters from daily life, history, mythology, literature, and art, which bear witness and urge a reconsideration of societal roles and representations of women. In over six decades of her career, Malani’s rigour of experimentation with new mediums and techniques has enabled her to continually reinvent her visual language.
With over a hundred works, of which eighty have never been shown, this exhibition offers the first presentation of Malani's formative works from the 1960s and 1970s. It provides a window into her development as an artist, prompting new readings of her oeuvre in the context of Indian art history.
The Fragility of Time paints a portrait of the artist as a young woman in an equally young nation. Born in 1946, Malani belongs to a league of thinkers after Indian Independence that marked a departure from western modernist ideals that privileged style and universality in art, to subjects that could reflect the socio-political realities of post-Independence India. The exhibition encapsulates this shift within Malani’s own practice, bookended by her watercolour diary of 1965-67 and her oil paintings of the historic ‘Place for People’ exhibition in 1981.
While studying at the JJ School of Art, Malani secured a studio at the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute between 1964 -1969- a hub for artists, theatre groups, dancers, and musicians. Here, she explored interdisciplinary ideas and aesthetics not embraced by the traditional academism of the JJ School of Art: “Abstraction was taboo at the JJ School of Art”. In 1969, the artist participated in the multi-disciplinary Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW), founded by artist Akbar Padamsee, where she made a series of experimental films and camera-less photographs, when these mediums were largely unexplored in art. Further, in Paris (1970-1972) on a French Government scholarship, Malani explored film theories and social philosophies by contemporary scholars- experiences which were crucial in shaping her multimedia expressions.
Malani’s practice is charged with a radicalism that draws from the many alternate spaces she inhabited in the initial years. It provides a chance to trace artist collectives beyond formal pedagogy that impacted the Indian avant-garde and vice versa.
The show reflects Malani’s evolving understanding of the city and society through a female perspective. The draped velvet photographs and photograms with organic forms highlight a femininity in abstraction, while canvases from the 1970s depict the girl child as protagonist within the complexities of urban life. Her studio in Mumbai’s Lohar Chawl neighbourhood influenced her depictions of social stratification, seen in her ‘His Life’ series.
Working on this show with the artist has been a process of reading images through time and memory. With recollections and anecdotes, the exhibition gives an insight into the nodal junctures that impacted Malani as she looks back at her own practice from a present vantage.
Curatorial note:
Nalini Malani was born in 1946 in Karachi. She’s an established multimedia artist who adapts traditional skills to new technology. She graduated with a diploma in Fine Arts from the JJ School of Art, Mumbai in 1969. In 1970, she received a French scholarship for Fine Arts to study in Paris. In 1984, she received an art fellowship from the Government of India.
Committed to social activism in her art, much of her work is consciously political. In the 70’s her themes explore male aggression, gender based violence, marginalization of the vulnerable and are about female identity-the image of the woman destroyed is a recurring one. As art critic Geeta Kapur has pointed out from early in her work, “Malani introduced female trauma as the subject matter in her work. She has drawn on myth, legend, cultural history and literature recreating archetypal figures like Sita, Radha, Medea and Lewis Carroll’s Alice to retell stories of women’s suffering.”
Her earlier works are expressionist while her works from the 70’s become increasingly narrative. Over the 80’s her works become more multilayered and fragmented and embraced other issues such as poverty, hunger and homelessness.
In 1989 Malani made books using the concertina format where she covered both sides of the paper with paintings and monotypes. In the 90’s Malani began combining painterly and performance, video and cinematic elements.
Malani’s work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India. She places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. Hers is an art of excess, going beyond the boundaries of legitimized narrative, excessive the conventional and initiating dialogue.
Characteristics of her work have been the gradual movement towards new media, international collaboration and expanding dimensions of the pictorial surface into the surrounding space as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, multi projection works and theatre.
She has exhibited in over thirty museum solo exhibitions including The National Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; M+, Hong Kong; KNMA, New Delhi; New Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; to name a few. Malani has received several international awards for her work including the Joan Miró Prize, 2019 and most recently the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, 2023. She lives and works in Mumbai.
