How artist Nalini Malani’s show at London’s National Gallery dismantles patriarchal dominance and challenges linear viewing

For the London exhibition that opened last month and continues till June, a 10-minute trailer ran on a 4K LED screen, the largest of its kind in Europe, at the legendary Piccadilly Circus. Those who followed the images to the museum were introduced to alternate ways of viewing in Malani’s “animation chamber” that stitches close-ups and details from 25 paintings of Western masters — from the collections of the National Gallery and the Holburne Museum — with her animations, to subvert colonial narratives, dismantle patriarchal dominance and challenge linear viewing in the exhibition “My Reality is Different.” So, in her version of The Judgement of Paris (German School, mid-16th century) the three goddesses do not compete for the golden apple but share a sensual bond. Susanna fearlessly resists the molesting advances of the two elderly men in her animated retake of Susanna and the Elders (1622) by Italian Baroque painter Guido Reni.

Nalini Malani, This is not My Reality, 2022, Animation Chamber, nine projections, 25 minutes. Installation view, National Gallery London. Photo Luke Walker.

The medium is as radical as the approach. In the time span of the fellowship of two years (2020-2022), Malani was working on her iPad with a selection of 25 hi-resolution images of the masterpieces that she carefully transformed into hand-drawn animations, superimposed with interventions. It was a method she devised in 2017 when she first began using an app to make drawings in motion. Since May 2018 she has been sharing “animated notebooks” on Instagram. “My endeavour has always been to make art that addresses not just those who visit art galleries but the larger public, and moving images have a wider appeal. Also, this way, I can connect with my viewers from wherever I am. What better agora than Instagram?” says the Mumbai-based artist.

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Malani was still a student at the Sir JJ School of Art when she had her first solo exhibition in 1966 at Mumbai’s Pundole Art Gallery that was representing some of India’s most prominent artists at the time. She was sharing studio space with some of them from 1964-69 at the famed Bhulabhai Memorial Institute, a multidisciplinary centre for the arts. At the time, it had artists such as VS Gaitonde, MF Husain and Tyeb Mehta, surbahar player Annapurna Devi and theatreperson Satyadev Dubey, among others. “I was very young, and they were all very generous with sharing books and knowledge. I learnt about art, film, theatre, music — it was like a perfect art school. My parents’ house was next to the institute and I used to work there before school hours and in the evenings. I also assisted Dubey in designing theatre sets, and, at times, he would come to my house for home-cooked meals,” recalls the artist.

Nalini Malani, In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012, Video/Shadow play, six projectors and 5 reverse painted rotating Mylar cylinders, 11 minutes. Installation view ICA Boston, 2015. Photo Ranabir Das.

As a young girl, her interest in drawing was stimulated by her admiration for her biology teacher in high school — who also imparted the life lesson that “drawing is about communication”. But, Malani’s artistic trajectory has been far from predictable. In 1969, she was the youngest participant and the only female at Akbar Padamsee’s Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) equipped with resources for experimental photography and filmmaking. Here, as its most prolific artist, she made a series of cameraless photographs, two black-and-white films and her first stop-motion animation film Dream Houses, inspired by utopian modern architecture, including architect Charles Correa’s plan for New Bombay. “She started experimenting with new media early on. Though painting has remained important to

her practice, the surfaces, techniques and treatment have constantly evolved,” notes artist Sudhir Patwardhan.

If Mumbai is where she honed her skills, Paris — where she studied on a French government scholarship from 1970 to ’72 — is where she rediscovered India and the world. “For me, India became the main focus while I was in Paris. It provided the intellectual and philosophical part of my art studies, and I consider this period the university of my life. I attended lectures by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Charles Bettelheim and Claude Levi-Strauss, met filmmakers such as Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chris Marker, and learnt how film was also a tool of cultural and political criticism,” she adds.

Nalini Malani, Remembering Toba Tek Singh, 1998. Video play, four projectors and 12 monitors, 20 minutes. Installation view World Wide Video Festival Amsterdam. Photo Gert Jan van Rooij.

Back in Mumbai, from 1978 to 2002 her studio was located at the bustling wholesale market of Lohar Chawl, the lives of whose inhabitants often found reflection in her work. The feminist purpose that has continued to be integral to her oeuvre also appeared in works such as Taboo — a film exploring the caste system and its effect on women —she shot while assisting director Mani Kaul during the filming of Duvidha in Borunda village near Jodhpur in 1973. “Understanding the world from a feminist perspective is an essential device for a more hopeful future. We have followed linear patriarchy for too long, and I believe feminism will come into its own when we hear men speak about these problems as their own. I’m waiting for that moment,” says Malani. Over the years, her lexicon of cross-cultural images has included Medea from Greek mythology, Alice from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Cassandra, the Trojan princess in Greek mythology whose visionary powers earned contempt. Mythology and myth have become what she describes as “link languages” she appropriates to connect with people, alluding to familiar stories and contextualising them to contemporary situations.

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Born in 1946 in Karachi, Malani was too young to remember Partition but the bloody legacy and the political division has continued to inform her practice, just as it also shaped her life. Her family relocated first to Kolkata, and then to Mumbai, where her father worked with Tata Airlines. “I use the Partition as a warning signal. You have to recall history to prevent repeating it. Even today, sectarian issues keep popping up and there is bloodshed. The violence that we witness is so regressive. Humankind has achieved so much technological progress, so why is it that the human psyche doesn’t progress beyond medieval prejudices and bigotry?” says the artist who has often confronted her audience with questions like these.

Nalini Malani, In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012. Video/Shadow play, six projectors and 5 reverse painted rotating Mylar cylinders, 11 minutes. Installation view ICA Boston, 2015. Photo Danita Jo.

Her first large-scale video installation in 1998, Remembering Toba Tek Singh, is based on Saadat Hasan Manto’s satirical short story about a mental asylum inmate in Lahore who refuses to be transferred across the border in the wake of the Partition.

Incidentally, it is not just political boundaries that she continues to question. In the late 1970s, she formed a group with artists Vivan Sundaram, Patwardhan, Jogen Chowdhury, Bhupen Khakhar and Gulammohammed Sheikh to push for narrative figuration, breaking away from the then dominant abstract visual narration. Their seminal travelling exhibition “Place for People”, in 1981, signalled the transition from modernist to postmodernist art in India, according to art historian Parvez Kabir.

The feminist perspective she underscores in her art, meanwhile, also reflects in her choices as an artist, including taking initiative in 1979 for organising the first exhibition solely dedicated to women artists in India, that began in 1985. Featuring watercolours of Nilima Sheikh, Arpita Singh, Madhvi Parekh and Malani, the show “Through the Looking Glass” travelled to Bhopal, New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. “I wanted to organise a larger exhibition and even made a list of 17-18 artists, but we were unable to find a sponsor. Finally, Arpita suggested that only the four of us should exhibit. This was a historic show organised on a shoe-string budget and required a lot of determination. We were travelling across India in trains with our babies. We were critiquing each other, discussing each other’s work, and that was very important,” shares Malani. It fostered a friendship that has spanned decades. Parekh recalls, “We would shop, eat together, and, at times, even cook together… The exhibition was extremely well-received and the four of us have stayed in touch since.”

Nalini Malani, In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012, Video/Shadow play, six projectors and 5 reverse painted rotating Mylar cylinders, 11 minutes. Installation view ICA Boston, 2015. Photo Danita Jo.

A people’s artist, the ceaselessness of possibilities and the diversity she aspires through her art also extends to the range of mediums she pursues, from painting to videos, from animations to shadow plays and Mylar cylinders painted in reverse glass technique that she learnt from Khakhar in 1988-89. She also invites different participants to erase her wall drawings at the end of the exhibition period. For instance, in 2010 at Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, the audience was invited and given erasers, and in 2017 at Centre Pompidou in Paris, the director and the exhibition team were handed bouquets of dried red roses for the erasure. “I still remember my first wall drawing in 1992 at Gallery Chemould (Mumbai). Over the 10 days I was sketching, so many people who may not otherwise enter a gallery, from the peanut seller to the chai wallah, would observe me, be critical, offer suggestions, and when I erased it, so many of them wept,” says Malani.

Nalini Malani, In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012, Video/Shadow play, six projectors and 5 reverse painted rotating Mylar cylinders, 11 minutes. Installation view Castello di Rivoli, 2018. Photo Ranabir Das.

In the last decade, she has had over 25 solo museum exhibitions, including four retrospectives. “I really believe in museums. We should have more museums, that’s where art should be. It opens people’s imagination, fantasy life and dream life,” she adds.

Though her long list of museum exhibitions and awards — including the coveted 2013 Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize and 2019 Joan Miró Prize — are testament to her global stature, as an artist she aspires the opposite of exclusivity. “The art, the artist and the viewer, the three together make art, otherwise it lies dormant,” she says. With Instagram, she says, everyone can “own” her work. “They are low-resolution animations that can be downloaded and screened. I only ask that no one should morph it in Photoshop.”