Nalini Malani

Born 1946 in Karachi, Pakistan Lives and works in Mumbai, India Nalini Malani emerged at a time when the Indian art scene was male dominated. Amongst a new generation of women artists who wove personal narratives and histories into their practice, her early works were cathartic autobiographies. The female protagonists of her paintings expressively negotiate family relationships. With a focus on the body, interaction and layering becomes a metaphor to illustrate the complexities of Indian society and the emotions they elicit: oppression, anxiety, self absorption and anger. Working initially with overtly Indian themes, Malani eventually sexualised and de-gendered her female protagonists, highlighting the extreme roles for women in Indian society from urban proletarian to street acrobat. Her focus has been on unconventional women – Mad Meg from Breughel’s painting, Medea, Sita, Radha, Akka, Alice from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Some of these women existed, others are legend, each subverted male dominated social customs to define new roles. Figures appear in isolation or intertwined – not in expected contexts but in multilayered narratives open to interpretation. Malani started to receive international acclaim in the 1980s and 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. Her experimentation in post-painterly media is for her a means of retrieving the early experience of learning to paint. Video provides unrestricted spatial and temporal density with which to explore a painterly approach. Always attuned to global discourses which shape female identity Nalini uses a singularly personal idiom which weaves local history and social issues to communicate her position. Her works are populated with appropriated and reappropriated imagery, which furthers her narrative, in itself often a telling and a retelling within a work. Her collaboration in the performance Medeamaterial inspired her to explore human emotions and their expression through bodily changes. In her installations she combines painting with light and shadow. The first of these works came about following a stage-set designed by the artist for a theatre production in which actors interacted with painted forms on stage, in her art installations, however, the human presence is removed. These works further explore layering especially as she paints onto transparent cylinders that rotate with light projected through them to populate the room with shadows. Referencing Buddhist prayer wheels whose rotations express a desire for change within the stability of cyclical continuity; the cylinders’ revolutions and images build a continuous narrative of epic proportions that appears and vanishes simultaneously. Accompanied by music and text, the historical, cultural, personal and psychological elements combine to present allegories of political and ecological dangers, with images recalling the horrors of war, the industrial revolution, and the utopia/dystopia that followed. The twelve piece suite entitled Tales of Good and Evil featured in Indian Highway allude to forms of communication and oral transmission of tales, myths and legends of Indian origin which were transmitted through the centuries via the great commercial arteries of roads which linked north and south and east and west. Savita Apte, Rebecca Morrild

Nalini Malani Part Object, 2008