Nalini Malani is an artist that has used drawing in a wide variety of ways over a long career and I think her work is becoming more and more relevant as we face strange troubled post-covid times. In particular her embrace of both traditional and contemporary media and her ability to fuse mythic imagery with the everyday, allows her to continue to make work of relevance, even though she is now in her seventies.
Nalini Malani: Splitting the Other. 2007: Reverse painting: Acrylic, ink, enamel on acrylic sheet
The first time I saw Nalini Malani's work was in the Venice Biennale of 2007. The 14 panels that comprised the work 'Splitting the other', were set out in an octagonal room of their own and they were organised in such a way that wherever you began looking at the images you began to see interconnected stories emerging.
Some of her imagery is of figures from myths or fairy tales as well as religion and she reflects on war, fanaticism, the isolating effects of capitalism, and the destruction of the environment, always from the position of her being female. She has made paintings, wall drawings, theatrical works, as well as videos and shadow plays.
Her drawings often mythologise figures of women. A loose painterly drawing style is used , which she often applies onto the back of transparent acrylic sheets, painting over the sheets in layers, so that the initial images are embedded in colour and stained textures, a technique that makes her images feel as if they inhabit another dimension, one within which all stories are possible.
The technique of working on the back of acrylic sheets has also helped her to develop projection techniques, these sheets can be bent into curved shapes and have lights shone through them, as well as being capable of being projected on with even more imagery, until wonderfully complex narratives are built.
Nalini Malani watches the shadow play of images as much as she watches the emergence of the forms themselves. This gives her opportunities to shape-shift and employ techniques to heighten a protean metamorphosis, some forms emerging from her painterly application and others from shadow and imagery cross-projection.
She has also worked extensively in film and video often using literature as a narrative driving force. 'Toba Tek Singh' was a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, set two or three years after the 1947 partition. In this allegorical story the governments of India and Pakistan decide to exchange some Muslim, Sikh and Hindu mental patients, the story revolving around the fate of Bishan Singh, a Sikh inmate of an asylum in Lahore. Bishan Singh is sent under police escort to India but upon being told that his hometown Toba Tek Singh is now in Pakistan, he refuses to go any further. The story ends with Bishan lying down in a 'no man's land' between two barbed wire fences. This deeply moving allegory was turned by Malani into a film that equated the Partition of India with destructive atomic bomb like violence, reflecting on the fact that both India and Pakistan had become nuclear powers, their continuing animosity constantly involving the lunatic threat of atomic warfare.
Malani raids the visual larders of all the main religions as well as folk tales and traditions from many of the world's cultures, her process reflecting on the fact that deep down below the superficial differences of cultures, humans are basically the same, but artificial constructions such as nationalism are used to drive wedges between us and to encourage a tribal mentality fostered on the fear of difference, whereby an unreasoning hatred of others is developed, rather than a celebration of diversity.
A Nalini Malanishadow video installation
There is one final aspect of her work that may well become more important. It's that she often works on several small pieces, that when exhibited come together to make large complex presentations. A typical example is at the top of this post. In a time when so many artists have no access to their studios, and when art students are often having to work out of their bedrooms, the ability to construct large pieces of work is getting harder and harder. However if you can envision how several parts can be used to make a large whole, it enables you to make work virtually anywhere and then when assembled it can engage an audience with its scale and complexity.
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