Nalini MALANI — an Indian pioneer of video and performance art
Disclaimer: The information provided in this episode comes from multiple sources and are not my scientific studies or discoveries. Bear with me as I am editing all the texts and crediting the authors. Thank you!
Welcome to HerArt podcast, a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. In our second episode, we will talk about Nalini MALANI — a pioneer of video and performance art that emerged at a time when the Indian art scene was male-dominated. My name is Nata Andreev and I am going to tell you seven curious facts that you didn’t know about the artist who wove personal narratives and social issues to communicate her ideas. It will be amazing if you could join me for the tenth session of my Wknd Study Group this Sunday, February 24th, right after you cast your vote in this year's parliamentary elections! We will discuss a highly ornate and often extravagant style of art which is Baroque.
Curious Fact #1
Nalini Malani was born in Karachi, just a year before the creation of the modern state of Pakistan. She and her parents fled as refugees into India when she was a child, where she studied at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, graduating in 1969. She went onto study fine arts in Paris for two on a scholarship from the French Government. She also received two scholarships from the Government of India and in 1989 won a grant for travel and work in the United States.
Curious Fact #2
As a student, Malani received very traditional training in painting. Between 1969 and 1971 Malani was a member of the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) convened by Akbar Padamsee, one of India’s better-known painters. Set in his Bombay apartment, Padamsee brought together painters, printmakers, animators, sculptors, cinematographers, and even a psychoanalyst, and the workshop aimed for multidisciplinary exchange. Malani and painter Nasreen Mohamedi, who had a practice of geometric abstraction, were the only two women to be included in the workshop, where Malani was its youngest participant.
Curious Fact #3
Nalani began making work in the 60s, during the rollout of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Modernism was the language chosen by Nehru for the new India, and Nehruvian Modernism was a narrative of progress. Malani was one of very few artists of the time to be cognizant of how South Asia was simultaneously enacting multiple Modernisms, and that several regions were approaching the modern subject differently. “We were thinking about the Indian figure, and how we could use our different local stories to connect with our audience, and with each other,” says Malani about her collaborations, as she worked closely with other local artists.
Curious Fact #4
In the summer of 1979, Malani walked down Wooster Street in New York to visit the recently opened A.I.R. Gallery. Taken by the gallery’s fierce determination to create a space for the work of female artists, in a city whose galleries otherwise almost never showed female work, let alone women of color, Malani returned to India with the aim of extending the formula. Such a space did not exist in India, and Malani speaks often about the patronizing treatment she received from her male peers for most of her career. After years of negotiation with various public and private institutions, a show entitled Through the Looking Glass, featuring the work of multiple local female artists and Malani herself, traveled to India between 1986 and 1989.
Curious Fact #5
Malani has always been vocal about her feminism, which is at first interested in making women visible outside narratives of ‘femininity’. Her work often speculates the gestures and voices of women who have been silenced, particularly by ‘great’ works of literature, such as Sita from the Ramayana, whom she places alongside the Greeks Cassandra and Medea. In Cassandra a painting that unfolds across a 30-panel grid, the princess is reborn as a kind of eco-prophet, in visions that warn of sickness, climate change, and mass exodus. Bodies, insects, worms, crocodiles, shrimps, and mollusks appear on a yellow background, as if caught in amber, like the remains of an ecological disaster, while Cassandra herself is seen in broken parts — a bald head, itinerant arms. “My own art was from the very start female-oriented. I believe this is natural, a given, as women have a completely different relationship to the body than men. And women also hold a different position in society, anywhere in the world, compared to men.”
Curious Fact #6
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, exceeding the conventional and initiating dialogue.
Curious Fact #7
In the 1990s she became part of India’s first-generation of video artists. Her practice also encompasses multi-media installation and experimental theatre, although painting and drawing remain central. In the last decade, she has had six solo museum exhibitions amongst which a major retrospective in 2010 at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland; the Museum of Modern Art, in Dublin; and the New Museum, in New York. Her work was recently included in group shows at Centre Pompidou, in Paris; the National Museum of Modern Art, in Tokyo; and Biennials in Venice and Sydney. Her work has appeared in solo and group gallery shows worldwide. She lives and works in Mumbai.
Thank you so much for listening to the second episode of HerArt podcast — a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. If you want to follow more of what we do, find us on Facebook and Instagram. Don’t forget about our monthly giveaways! Share your favorite artwork created by a female artist and be rewarded with feminist stickers. And don’t forget to tune in next month, when I am going to tell you about Yayoi KUSAMA — the woman who has devoted her life as an avant-garde artist. I’ll see you later!
