Nalini Malani

Nalini Malani (born 19 February 1946) is an Indian artist, among the country's first generation of video artists.

She works with several mediums which include theater, videos, installations along with mixed media paintings and drawings.

The subjects of her creations are influenced by her experience of migration in the aftermath of the partition of India.

Pressing feminist issues have become a part of her creative output.

Malani uses a visual language that moves from stop motion, erasure animations, reverse paintings and to digital animations, where she draws directly with her finger onto a tablet.

Born in Karachi (Sindh) in what was then British India, now Pakistan, in 1946, Malani's family sought refuge in India during the partition of India.

They relocated to Kolkata (then Calcutta), where her father worked with Tata Airlines (later Air India) and relocated to Mumbai in 1954, where they lived in a colony built for displaced Sindhis.

Her family's experience of leaving behind their home and becoming refugees informs Malani's artworks.

From 1964-67, she had a studio at the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute, which used to be located at Breach Candy, Mumbai, where artists, musicians, dancers and theater persons worked individually and collectively.

It was here that she met and collaborated with artists from allied forms of artistic practice like theatre.

Malani made her first video work 'Dream Houses' (1969), as the youngest and only female participant of the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW), an experimental multi-disciplinary artist workshop in Bombay (Mumbai) by late artist Akbar Padamsee.

Her works have been shown at various museums, including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the National Gallery in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Malani is the only child of Satni Advani (Sindhi Sikh) and Jairam Malani (Theosophist).

Malani studied Fine Arts in Mumbai and obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts from Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in 1969.

Her work can be broadly classified under two categories; experiments with visual media and the moving image like Utopia (1969-1976), Mother India (2005), In Search of Vanished Blood (2012); ephemeral and in-situ works such as City of Desires (1992), Medea as Mutant (1993/2014), The Tables have turned (2008).

Though her work talks of violence and conflict, her main intent is collective catharsis.

Malani's first experimental film made at the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) — the brainchild of late artist Akbar Padamsee — drew inspiration from utopian modern Indian architecture.

She received a scholarship from the French Government to study fine arts in Paris between 1970-72.

In 1985, she curated the first exhibition of Indian female artists, in Delhi.

This led to a series of traveling exhibitions that were taken to public spaces as an attempt to go beyond the elitist atmosphere of the art gallery.

She was a recipient of two scholarships from the Government of India, as well as a grant in 1989 for travel and work in the United States.

After graduation, she spent a few years working with photography and film.

The themes she explored during this period dealt with the turbulent time that India was experiencing politically and socially, as well as the deepening literacy of moving image of its population.

In the initial part of her career, Malani mostly focused on paintings - acrylic on canvas & watercolour on paper.

She produced a socially based portrayal of contemporary India.

She explored techniques such as the reverse painting method (taught to her in the late-80s by Bhupen Khakhar), which she would recurrently use in her future work.

She was disappointed with the lack of acknowledgement that women artists had to face in India and resolved to bring them together for a group show, to promote the sense of solidarity.

The sectarian violence that hit India in the early 1990s after the demolition of the Babri Masjid triggered a sudden shift in her artwork.

The renewed religious conflict that had proven to be recurring (bringing back memories of the Partition) pushed her artistic endeavours.

Her earlier foray into performance art and her interest in literature brought new sides to her art.

She is counted amongst the earliest to transition from traditional painting to new media work.

In 2013, she became the first Asian woman to receive the Arts & Culture Fukuoka Prize for her "consistent focus on such daring contemporary and universal themes as religious conflict, war, oppression of women and environmental destruction."

For two-dimensional works, she uses both oil paintings and watercolors.

Her other inspirations are from the realm of memory, myth and desire.

The rapid brush style evokes dreams and fantasies.

Malani's video and installation work allowed her to shift from strictly real space to a combination of real space and virtual space, moving away from strictly object-based work.

Her video work often references divisions, gender, and cyborgs.

Malani roots her identity as female and as Indian, and her work might be understood as a way for her identity to confront the rest of the world.

She often references Greek and Hindu mythology.

The characters of 'destroyed women' like Medea, Cassandra and Sita feature often in her narrative.