Nalini Malani

Pressing feminist issues have become a part of her creative output. Malani uses a visual language that moves from stop motion, erasure animations, reverse paintings and to digital animations, where she draws directly with her finger onto a tablet. Malani made her first video work 'Dream Houses' (1969), as the youngest and only female participant of the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW), an experimental multi-disciplinary artist workshop in Bombay (Mumbai) by late artist Akbar Padamsee. Her works have been shown at various museums, including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the National Gallery in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Malani is the only child of Satni Advani (Sindhi Sikh) and Jairam Malani (Theosophist). Born in Karachi (Sindh) in what was then British India, now Pakistan, in 1946, Malani's family sought refuge in India during the partition of India. They relocated to Kolkata (then Calcutta), where her father worked with Tata Airlines (later Air India) and relocated to Mumbai in 1954, where they lived in a colony built for displaced Sindhis. Her family's experience of leaving behind their homeland and becoming refugees had inspired Malani's artworks. Malani studied Fine Arts in Mumbai and obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts from Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in 1969. From 1964-67, she had a studio at the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute, which used to be located at Breach Candy, Mumbai where artists, musicians, dancers and theater persons worked individually and collectively. It was here that she met and collaborated with artists from allied forms of artistic practice like theatre. She received a scholarship from the French Government to study fine arts in Paris between 1970-72. She was a recipient of two scholarships from the Government of India, as well as a grant in 1989 for travel and work in the United States.

After graduation, she spent a few years working with photography and film. The themes she explored during this period dealt with the turbulent time that India was experiencing politically and socially, as well as the deepening literacy of moving image of its population. In the initial part of her career, Malani mostly focused on paintings - acrylic on canvas & watercolour on paper. She produced a socially based portrayal of contemporary India. She explored techniques such as the reverse painting method (taught to her in the late-80s by Bhupen Khakhar), which she would recurrently use in her future work. She was disappointed with the lack of acknowledgement that women artists had to face in India and resolved to bring them together for a group show, to promote the sense of solidarity. In 1985, she curated the first exhibition of Indian female artists, in Delhi. This led to a series of traveling exhibitions that were taken to public spaces as an attempt to go beyond the elitist atmosphere of the art gallery. The sectarian violence that hit India in the early 1990s after the demolition of the Babri Masjid triggered a sudden shift in her artwork. The renewed religious conflict that had proven to be recurring (bringing back memories of the Partition) pushed her artistic endeavours. Her earlier foray into performance art and her interest in literature brought new sides to her art. She is counted amongst the earliest to transition from traditional painting to new media work. In 2013, she became the first Asian woman to receive the Arts & Culture Fukuoka Prize for her "consistent focus on such daring contemporary and universal themes as religious conflict, war, oppression of women and environmental destruction."

For two-dimensional works, she uses both oil paintings and watercolors. Her other inspirations are from the realm of memory, myth and desire. The rapid brush style evokes dreams and fantasies. Malani's video and installation work allowed her to shift from strictly real space to a combination of real space and virtual space, moving away from strictly object-based work. Her video work often references divisions, gender, and cyborgs. Malani roots her identity as female and as Indian, and her work might be understood as a way for her identity to confront the rest of the world. She often references Greek and Hindu mythology. The characters of 'destroyed women' like Medea, Cassandra and Sita feature often in her narrative. Her work can be broadly classified under two categories; experiments with visual media and the moving image like Utopia (1969-1976), Mother India (2005), In Search of Vanished Blood (2012); ephemeral and in-situ works such as City of Desires (1992), Medea as Mutant (1993/2014), The Tables have turned (2008). Though her work talks of violence and conflict, her main intent is collective catharsis.

Malani's first experimental film made at the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) — the brainchild of late artist Akbar Padamsee — drew inspiration from utopian modern Indian architecture. Made using photographic equipment available at the Workshop, it features use of a cardboard maquette, different light sources, primary colour filters, and a Mamiyaflex camera. For this, Malani drew on the 'ideological possibilities of modern architecture', looking to the work of renowned architects Charles Correa and Buckminster Fuller, and blending in learnings from Johannes Itten's colour theories along with Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion."The subject of Dream Houses is the idealism and hope that modernism brought during the Nehruvian period, in which poverty and housing problems in modern India could be solved through a master plan for urban space." — Nalini Malani 'Dream Houses' was shown at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) (2014), the Goethe Institute, Mumbai, (2019) and the MoMa, New York,(2022), after being 'lost' for 50 years.

Malani's 2003 video play, Unity in Diversity, is based on the 19th century Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma's Galaxy of Musicians, with the overt theme of nationalistic unity displayed through the garb of eleven musicians from different parts of India, seemingly playing in harmony. Malani makes a statement on this idealized version of unity by incorporating later histories of violence into that image.

The video installation was inspired by an essay by the sociologist Veena Das titled "Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain". It is a synchronised five screen wall-to-wall projection combining archival footage with poetic and painterly images to tell the story of how Indian Nationalism was built using the bodies of women as metaphors for the nation. The work speaks of women as "mutant, de-gendered and violated beyond imagination." The Partition of India and the 2002 Gujarat riots are the central events referenced in this installation, as there was a sharp increase in violence against women in these periods.

This installation, which was first produced for the 13th edition of Documenta, consists of five larger rotating Mylar cylinders (metaphorically referring to Buddhist prayer wheels) reverse-painted with images of soldiers, animals, gods and guns. The shadow play caused by this rotation tells the story of bloodshed, especially narrating the story of India since the partition and highlighting the plight of the dispossessed/tribal communities whose lives have been affected by development decisions made by the government.

Between 1987 and 1989, Malani organised 'Through The Looking Glass' with her contemporaries, the women artists Madhvi Parekh, Nilima Sheikh, and Arpita Singh. The exhibition, featuring works by all four artists, travelled to five non-commercial venues across India. Inspired by a meeting in 1979 with Nancy Spero, May Stevens and Ana Mendieta at the AIR Gallery in New York (the first all-female artists’ cooperative gallery in the US), Malani had planned to organise an exhibition entirely of works by women artists, which failed to materialise due to lack of interest and support.

1984-89: Art Research Fellowship, Government of India 1989: USIA Fellowship, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA 2020: Contemporary Fellowship, National Gallery, London, UK

1988: Kasauli Art Centre, Kasauli, India 1999: Lasalle-SIA, Singapore 1999-2000: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan 2003: Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Italy 2005: Lucas Art Residencies, Montalvo, California, USA