Born in 1946, Karachi, Nalini Malani received her education in the Fine Arts from Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, India. She completed her graduation in 1969, and later went to Paris.
She is a senior multimedia artist with an extensive exhibition history. Her practice encompasses drawing and painting, as well as the extension of those forms into projected animation, video and film. Committed to the role of the artist as social activist, Malani often bases her work on the stories of those that have been ignored, forgotten or marginalized by history.
She belongs to a generation of Indian artists who, in the 1980s, received prominence internationally. Primarily a figurative painter then she raised issues of race, class and gender through her work. Later, in the '90s, thanks to installations at the 1995 Johannesburg Biennial and other venues, she came to be known as a media artist. Based on German playwright Heiner Muller's adaptation of Euripides, her work 'Medeaprojekt' addressed sexual exploitation as an aspect of colonization. Combining theater, painting and video, the work situated Nalini Malani within a web of references both Eastern and Western, from Gandhi to Bataille.
She is committed to the role of the artist as a social activist. Her politically motivated works have been shown in major exhibitions in India, Japan, Australia, England, Cuba and South Africa and are represented in national museum collections worldwide. She has participated in several landmark international exhibitions, such as Century City (Tate Modern, 2000) and Unpacking Europe (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 2001). Her work Hamletmachine, included in Witnessing to silence was recently shown in a solo exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
The centerpiece of her New Museum show, Hamletmachine (2000), was created during a residency in Japan, again adapting a play by Muller, this time to critique Hindu nationalism. "India is Hamlet," she says, "never quite knowing which way to go, how to decide, and therefore making wrong decisions." The work consists of four video projections, three on walls and the fourth on a rectangular bed of salt on the floor. This last projection was a reference to Gandhi's Salt March of 1930 (a 24-hour walk protesting a government monopoly on the staple), but with swimming fish at times projected onto it, it also served as a metaphor for the unconscious depths.
Malani's distinguished watercolor books, drawings and oil paintings have been concerned with unpacking and reflecting on Western as well as Indian histories of violence and oppression, and her humanist paintings have been committed to opening up 'a place for people'. The artist's video and film works are an expansion of her practices in drawing and painting and in her multimedia installations Malani often utilizes her own drawings as projected animations. Using texts that have been generated through the memories of people who are often ignored or marginalized in the cataloguing of history, Malani uses her art to draw attention to 'other' stories, with a focus on the universal and human aspects of conflict. In addition, her work has been deeply committed to raising a political consciousness of women's particular social experiences of vulnerability and oppression.
Her charged human forms constantly refer to various aspects of a woman's experience within a larger relationship network. Her earlier, autobiographical work, spoke of the woman within a dense fabric of family interactions. A wider canvas now shows symbolic manifestations of a woman as well as the destruction and despair within cities and amongst nations. She also deals with expressing relationships between the exploiter and the exploited on several levels, which have been seen in her more recent site-specific works.
She derives a lot of substance from what she reads and thinks if language is rightly orchestrated, it could prove a great source of painting ideas. Nalini Malani developed the habit of incorporating ideas -- generated from her reading material -- on her canvases early in her career. She has been quoted as saying: "I modeled my way of working like a novelist would. I would not write, I would paint a diary."
She has used his story Toba Tek Singh as a basis for many of her works. The books, Global Parasites by Winin Pereira and Geremy Seabrook and Tending The Earth by Winin Pereira, have deeply influenced her works. She based her series titled `The Mutants' on Pereira's findings about the earth.
Since 1993 she has diversified her practice to include installations. Her solo shows since 1998 include, in 2002-03: Hamletmachine (New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York) 2002: Recent Video Art: Nalini Malani (Apeejay Media Gallery, Delhi) 2000: The Sacred & The Profane (Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai) 1999: Remembering Toba Tek Singh (Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai). Her major group shows abroad include Istanbul Biennale (2003); Twentieth World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam); in 2002-03: Asia Pacific Triennale (Brisbane); in 2001: 'Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001' in Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (Tate Modern, London); Unpacking Europe (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam); in 2000: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan); Third Kwangju Biennale (South Korea); Text & Sub-text (Earl Lu Gallery, Singapore); Seventh Havana Biennale; in 1999: Voiceovers (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney); in 1998: Sixteenth World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam); Private Mythology (The Japan Foundation Asia Center, Tokyo); in 1996: Second Asia Pacific Triennale (Brisbane); in 1995: First Johannesburg Biennale.
Kamala Kapoor and Amita Desai have published a monograph on her work. (Max Mueller Bhavan/Goethe Institute, 1997). Nalini Malani lives and works in Mumbai.
