PROFILE: NALINI MALANI

: : Victoria Lynn

: : printable version  

‘Whatever a person goes through in his or her life, suppose it was registered on the skin, what would be the feel of that?’ Nalini Malani

When describing her home of Mumbai (Bombay), Nalini Malani has commented that under the ‘everyday skin lies a vast alternate world; sometimes secret, sometimes blatant. Piercing the layers, you encounter old mosaics and montages, a whole archaeology of the city and its inhabitants and immigrants’.[1]

Nalini Malani, one of India’s most prominent artists, has been working with painting, watercolour, installation and performance since the 1960s and creating videos for over a decade. Malani uses the metaphor of the body as a way of reflecting upon her own environment, not only in terms of the activities in the cityscape, but also in terms of the economic, environmental and physical damage that has been done to its inhabitants. The artist has lived through some horrific challenges within India – an escalation of sectarian violence, institutionalised discrimination and fervent fundamentalism. Malani’s concerns stem from an interest in the history of colonial oppression within India and the postcolonial violence that dominates the sub-continent. More generally, Malani is interested in the effects of globalisation on local production and the ways in which we increasingly live through a filter of political, economic and environmental imperialism.

Perhaps one of Malani’s most significant video installations is Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998), made in response to the nuclear tests in India on 11 May 1998. The turbulence of conflict between Pakistan and India is evoked through four large video projections on three walls and twelve videos encapsulated inside travelling trunks on the floor. Two women toss a sari to one another. As it unravels across the screens, the synchronous rhythms of clothing, gesture, body and voice are integrated with the unfolding and repeated references to displacement, migration and war. The central screen depicts nuclear bombs dropping over cities. The billowing smoke swallows the image and each poetic configuration of the sari takes on metaphoric connotations: the veil, the mushroom cloud, nature, earth. As in all of Malani’s video installations, the imagery consists of a combination of live action shot on digital video (bodies and figures), interspersed with animated works on paper done in watercolour and gouache and found television footage.

The artist’s most recent video is Unity in Diversity (2003), an installation in a living-room setting with a flat screen in a golden frame on a crimson wall. Malani has based her work on a painting by the late 19th century Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma, which depicts eleven female musicians each dressed in a different Indian costume. At the time that Varma was painting, India was examining its own sense of national identity. The video juxtaposes this painting with the racial genocide in Gujarat during 2002.

For Nalini Malani, art is continuous with life; it is a way to manifest in images and sound the matrix of conflict that dominates contemporary India. The tremulous nature of Malani’s figures invoke the fragility of our own bodies in an increasingly globalised environment.

NOTES

1. Nalini Malani, Under the Skin (1989), Nalini Malani, (Gallery 7: Bombay, 1990), unpaginated.

Victoria Lynn is a curator and writer based in Melbourne.