Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Nalini Malani hits us with a truth that our Western arrogance stubbornly refuses to admit: contemporary art is not limited to your sanitized galleries where champagne is served to an elite pretending to understand white squares on a white background. No, the Indian artist born in 1946 in Karachi, one year before the bloody Partition of the subcontinent, offers us a visceral, political, and sensory work that transcends the artificial boundaries between media. Through her video installations, hypnotic “shadow plays,” digital animations, and reverse paintings on mylar, this innovative material derived from polyester that offers a very thin and very resistant surface, Malani tears through the veil of cultural consensus to confront us with truths we prefer to ignore.
When she exhibited for the first time at the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai in 1999 her installation “Remembering Toba Tek Singh,” inspired by Saadat Hasan Manto’s heartbreaking story about the Partition, it was not to flatter collectors’ egos but to confront 3,000 museum visitors daily with the devastating consequences of underground nuclear tests carried out by India. The work is not a wall decoration meant to enhance the status of a bourgeois living room, but a political act, a gesture of resistance against the madness of leaders who, in the name of nationalism, threaten the very survival of humanity.
But Malani relentlessly attacks political violence, the oppression of women, and social injustices. Her installation “Unity in Diversity” (2003) responds to the bloody riots in Gujarat in 2002 that cost the lives of more than a thousand people, mostly Muslims. In a room evoking a middle-class Indian living room, female musicians of diverse cultural origins are abruptly interrupted by gunfire, while nationalist speeches by Nehru and images of bloodied victims resonate in the background. The title refers to the founding ideal of modern India, a pluralistic and secular vision now threatened by forces of religious sectarianism.
Malani’s aesthetics are never gratuitous. Her technical mastery serves a purpose, an urgency. When she uses reverse painting on mylar, a hybrid technique between traditional Indian and contemporary art, it is to explore the complex relationships between memory, identity, and historical violence. In her series “Stories Retold” (2002), she reinterprets Hindu myths to give voice to the women forgotten by history. Her Radha is no longer simply Krishna’s spiritual lover as contemporary sanitized interpretation would have it, but a goddess embodying the full spectrum of sensual pleasure, freely floating in her own flesh.
What strikes in Malani’s work is her cinematic intelligence. Trained at Mumbai’s J.J. School of Arts, she experimented from 1969 with film thanks to the Vision Exchange Workshop, initiated by Akbar Padamsee. The short films she then made, notably “Still Life”, “Onanism”, and “Utopia”, already reveal an artist who refuses conventions. In “Utopia” (1969/76), she constructs an abstract urban landscape that deconstructs the modernist architecture promoted by Nehru, thereby questioning Indian post-colonial idealism and its unfulfilled promises.
The cinematic resonance of her work is no accident. Malani mingled in Paris, where she stayed from 1970 to 1972, with intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. She even met Jean-Luc Godard there. This international openness, combined with a deep knowledge of Indian traditions, allows her to create a singular visual language that, as she herself says, seeks to “establish a link between different cultures” [1].
Her approach to video and installation owes much to theater. During her studies, Malani worked at the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute in Mumbai, a multidisciplinary space where she collaborated with actors, musicians, poets, and dancers. She then understood that theater can reach an audience that would never enter the city’s elitist art galleries. This performative dimension can be found in her “erasure performances” such as “City of Desires” (1992), a temporary mural drawing exhibited for only fifteen days at the Chemould Gallery in Mumbai.
Violence against women is at the heart of her work. “Can You Hear Me?” (2018-2020), presented at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, is a response to the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kashmir. This immersive installation composed of 88 digital animations created on iPad plunges us into a universe of fragmented thoughts where text, faces, and figures form and dissolve at a frantic pace. These perpetually moving cartoons evoke an agitated consciousness desperately trying to make sense of the horror.
What sets Malani apart from so many contemporary artists is her refusal to be confined to a fixed identity. Unlike those who exploit their “Indianness” as an exotic capital to charm Western institutions, she uses her unique position to create truly cosmopolitan art. She draws equally from Greek and Indian myths, as evidenced by her work “Sita/Medea” (2006) which merges these two tragic female figures on the same pictorial plane.
Her practice is deeply rooted in literature. In 2012, for her installation “In Search of Vanished Blood,” she was inspired by the novel “Cassandra” by Christa Wolf and the mythical figure of the prophetess condemned to tell the truth without ever being believed. It is no coincidence that Malani identifies with Cassandra, this woman whose words are systematically invalidated by male power. As a female artist in a male-dominated art world, she has long endured what anthropologist Veena Das calls the “patronizing treatment” by her male peers [2].
The installation “Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of Pain,” created for the Venice Biennale, confronts head-on the sexual violence inflicted on women during the Partition. Drawing on Veena Das’s essay, “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain,” Malani explores how the female body becomes a metaphor for the nation in times of conflict. During the Partition, about 100,000 women on both sides of the border were abducted and raped. As Das writes, “the bodies of women were metaphors for the nation, they had to bear the marks of their possession by the enemy” [3].
What gives Malani her strength is her ability to transform these traumatic subjects into powerful aesthetic experiences. Her “video/shadow plays” such as “Gamepieces” (2003) or “Remembering Mad Meg” (2007) create immersive environments where light, shadow, color, and sound combine to produce a synesthetic experience. The backward-painted rotating cylinders cast moving shadows on the walls, while videos are projected through them, thus creating multiple narrative layers that overlap and intertwine.
Malani’s interest in the figure of “Mad Meg” (Dulle Griet) by Bruegel is revealing. This woman, who wears a pot on her head and kitchen utensils tied to her belt while leading an army of strange creatures, becomes in her work a symbol of female strength and courage. At a time when such women were burned as witches, Meg appears as a figure of resistance, striding through the country with determination.
Unlike so many artists who merely criticize without offering an alternative, Malani suggests a path toward collective healing. In a recent interview, she states that “the future is female. There is no other way” [4]. For her, the dominance of traditional masculine values has led to environmental destruction and the oppression of marginalized people. The solution lies in a balance between the feminine and masculine tendencies that exist within each of us.
Her recent practice of digital animations on Instagram reflects her constant desire to reach a wider audience and bypass the gatekeepers of the art world. These “animated notebooks,” as she calls them, are immediate responses to political and social events. In one of them, created during the coronavirus pandemic, a gun labeled “the State” and an outstretched hand representing “the citizen” flash on the screen, followed by a line from Langston Hughes’ poem “Out of Work.”
What makes Malani’s work so relevant today is also her ability to transcend the artificial divisions between East and West. In the exhibition “My Reality is Different” at the National Gallery in London, she uses her iPad to animate and transform Western masterpieces, confronting them with her own perspective. Red sketched figures fall through fragments of great paintings, sliding along the frets of the lute in Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” or breathing life into the air pump in Wright of Derby’s “The Doctor’s Nightmare”.
This dialogue between cultures is not gratuitous appropriation. As Malani points out, “the compendium of all cultures is a lexicon for all artists” [5]. She rejects the idea that Western artists like Picasso have more legitimacy to draw inspiration from other cultures than artists from formerly colonized countries, who are often labeled as “derivatives” when they do the same.
The political dimension of her work is never dogmatic. In “The Future is Female”, a recent work, she explores how traditionally feminine values associated with the earth could offer an alternative to the destructive capitalism that treats nature as an infinite resource. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she observed that pollution in Mumbai and Delhi significantly decreased, allowing flamingos to return in large numbers to the city’s marshy areas. For her, this is a confirmation of Cassandra’s vision: the truth is before our eyes, we just have to recognize it and act accordingly.
What makes Nalini Malani great is that she creates art that challenges us on multiple levels. As she explains, “it is a three-body relationship between the artist, the artwork, and the viewer. The three together awaken art; otherwise, it remains dormant” [6]. Her work invites us to actively participate in creating meaning, to engage in critical dialogue with history, politics, and culture.
Over 70 years old, Malani has lost none of her relevance or ability to innovate. As the first recipient of the National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship, she continues to explore new ways of storytelling and challenging dominant narratives. Her practice reminds us that art is not a superfluous luxury but, as she so aptly puts it, “like oxygen, like fresh air” [7], essential to our collective survival.
In a world where dissenting voices are increasingly marginalized, where nationalists and fundamentalists are gaining ground in many countries, Malani’s work reminds us of the importance of resistance, bearing witness, and imagining alternative futures. She shows us that art can be both politically engaged and aesthetically powerful, that it can seduce us with its beauty while confronting us with the most disturbing truths of our time.
- Malani, Nalini. Interview with Johan Pijnappel, 2005. Artist’s website, nalinimalani.com.
- Pijnappel, Johan. “Nalini Malani”, Frieze, January 1, 2008.
- Das, Veena. “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain”, in Social Suffering, edited by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock. Oxford University Press India, 1998.
- Rix, Juliet. “Nalini Malani, interview: ‘The future is female. There is no other way'”, Studio International, 2020.
- Luke, Ben. “Nalini Malani at the National Gallery review: bringing a new perspective to the collection’s masterpieces”, Evening Standard, 2023.
- Ray, Debika. “Art without borders, an interview with Nalini Malani”, Apollo Magazine, September 2020.
- Malani, Nalini. Cited in “Nalini Malani, interview: ‘The future is female. There is no other way'”, Studio International, 2020.
