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“Nalini Malani: Transgressions” at Asia Society Museum

April 29, 2014•Art

New York: The Asia Society Museum in New York is currently showing their latest contemporary exhibition, “Nalini Malani: Transgressions”. Malani received her technical training in painting at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai and throughout her career has focused on a number of controversial topics such as feminism, race, gender and global politics. This was especially powerful in the 1980’s when feminist topics were less prominent in art on the Indian subcontinent. In her process the artist is inspired by myths and allegories from a variety of cultural backgrounds including Hindu and Greek. “Transgressions” is no exception as it brings forward a strong narrative depicting globalization and transnational current events focusing specifically on the powerful western influence in postcolonial India.

Transgressions II by Nalini Malani. Source: http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/nalini-malani-2/

Transgressions II by Nalini Malani
Source: http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/nalini-malani-2/

 

I was fortunate enough to slip into the Asia Society thirty minutes before closing, the ideal time to experience the central installation of the exhibition: “Transgressions II”. This enchanting piece, created in 2009, is part of the Asia Society Museum’s collection and depicts cultural negotiations in India. The piece consists of video projections combined with shadows utilizing three large transparent cylinders. “Transgressions” is both playful and visually haunting with the multifaceted use of a variety of mediums and sound. Each aspect of the work is an independent artistic expression that when combined, brings forward a dramatic multisensory experience for the viewer. Malani’s paintings on the transparent cylinders are in homage to the Chinese reverse glass painting of the 18th century and are aesthetically engaging all on their own. Viewers can walk freely through the projections and examine these dynamic paintings individually. The only other additions to the exhibition aside from the large installation are a selection of books by the artist depicting the drawing and painting technique in full. This addition invites Malani’s audience into her artistic process. Holistically, the work creates an engaging contrast between histories of seasoned storytelling and modern technology.

“Transgressions II” by Nalini Malani Source: Asia Society

“Transgressions II” by Nalini Malani
Source: Asia Society

 

As a viewer, I felt fortunate to experience the work completely alone and be ensconced in the ever evolving and shifting visuals of animals, characters and designs. Accompanying the moving colors and imagery was a poem written and read by the artist. Both the painting and poem touched on the artist’s central topics of colonialism and world politics. However, the visuals rarely depicted the poem in a literal sense, creating a dizzying, dreamlike quality. “Transgressions II” is an all-consuming and enthralling installation that allows Malani to fully absorb her audience in her multiple levels of creative expression and storytelling. This exhibition is a uniquely beautiful success for both the artist and the Asia Society Museum. While in New York this summer be sure to take in “Nalini Malani: Transgressions”. The exhibition will be up through August 3rd 2014.

 

Nalini Malani: Beyond Print- Memory, Transference, Montage

September 24, 2013•Art, Installations

Ambika Rajgopal of Saffronart shares a note on Nalini Malani’s upcoming exhibition in Belgium

London: The Belgian museum Centre de la Gravure et de l’Image imprimée will host the first ever exhibition of the Indian artist Nalini Malani in the country as part of Europalia. It is the first time that an exhibition links the artist’s installation work to her printed work.

Memory, 2009, Nalini Malani. Image Credit: http://www.artslant.com/ny/works/show/217399

Memory, 2009, Nalini Malani. Image Credit: http://www.artslant.com/ny/works/show/217399

Malani’s oeuvre has long since explored the aftermath that the India- Pakistan partition has had on individual sensibilities. Herself, a refugee of the partition, through her work Malani denounces the rampant violence against women, which proliferated during the partition time. Though her characters are often derived from myths, the language she incorporates and the stories she tells are contemporary.

The Duck, 2002, Nalini Malani, Lot 23, Saffronart Autumn Art Auction. Image Credit: http://www.saffronart.com/auctions/DurWork.aspx?l=9015

The Duck, 2002, Nalini Malani, Lot 23, Saffronart Autumn Art Auction. Image Credit: http://www.saffronart.com/auctions/DurWork.aspx?l=9015

The mythical characters of Cassandra, Medea, Sita and Alice play a recurrent role in Malani’s work. She borrows the Greek tragic character of Medea and contemporizes it so as to infuse her own personal history into it. Through the character of Medea, she links the exploitation of women to the history of colonialism, where in Medea represents the colonized and her husband Jason represents the colonizer.

Cassandra 30 panel polyptych, 2009, Nalini Malani. Image Credit: http://www.artslant.com/ny/works/show/361985

Cassandra 30 panel polyptych, 2009, Nalini Malani. Image Credit: http://www.artslant.com/ny/works/show/361985

In a similar manner, Malani also manages to retell the tragedy of Cassandra- who was cursed by Apollo and lost her power of persuasion despite being able to prophesize accurately. Cassandra stands as a metaphor for the stifling of the female voice by male dominated society. This myth is at the core of many of the works featured at the exhibition.

In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012, Nalini Malani. Image Credit: http://www.stylepark.com/en/news/observations-in-space-and-time/334166

In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012, Nalini Malani. Image Credit: http://www.stylepark.com/en/news/observations-in-space-and-time/334166

The work ‘In Search of Vanished Blood’, first created for the Documenta at Kassel in 2012, has five painted, rotating Mylar cylinders, which project shadows on the wall. These cylinders are superimposed with projections from six video sources. The poem translated by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, which gives the work its title, can be heard recited by the artist in the background and imparts the work an imposing acoustic dimension. This work seeks to examine the social structure of the women in India, through the metaphor of different female characters from myths.

Despoiled Shore, 2005, Nalini Malani. Lot number 24. Saffronart Autumn Art Auction. Image Credit: http://www.saffronart.com/auctions/DurWork.aspx?l=9016

Despoiled Shore, 2005, Nalini Malani. Lot number 24. Saffronart Autumn Art Auction. Image Credit: http://www.saffronart.com/auctions/DurWork.aspx?l=9016

Even though she explores traditional morality plays, her work gravitates towards using an excessively new media, which imparts her work with a modern voice. Her work spills out of the pictorial surface so as to cover surrounding space by the inclusion of walls drawings, installations, shadow play, multi projection work and theatre.

Two of Malani’s works are being auctioned in Saffronart Autumn Art Auction on September 24 & 25 2013.

The exhibition commences on September 28th 2013 and carries on till January 5th 2014. For more information visit the website.

Nalini Malani: Fukuoka Prize Award Winner 2013

July 2, 2013•Art, Exhibitions

Elizabeth Prendiville of Saffronart shares a note about Nalini Malani’s Arts and Culture Fukuoka Prize

Nalini Malani Working at Home, Mumbai, 2013

Nalini Malani Working at Home, Mumbai, 2013. Image Credit: http://fukuoka-prize.org/en/laureate/prize/cul/nalinima.php

New York: Acclaimed Asian artist Nalini Malani was awarded the Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize 2013. The Fukuoka Prize (Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize) was inaugurated in 1990 with the intent of promoting and understanding the distinctive cultures of Asia and it celebrates those who have made outstanding contributions to academia, arts, and culture in Asia.

Malani is most notably known for her large scale paintings and installations.  Her work focuses on controversial and intricate topics such as religion, gender, war and nature.

Nalini Malani Installing the Retrospective Exhibition, Nalini Malani: Splitting the Other at Musèe Cantonal des Beaux Arts, Lausanne, 2010

Nalini Malani Installing the Retrospective Exhibition, Nalini Malani: Splitting the Other at Musèe Cantonal des Beaux Arts, Lausanne, 2010. Image Credit: http://fukuoka-prize.org/en/laureate/prize/cul/nalinima.php

Born in Pakistan, Malani received her primary art education at the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai. She then went on to pursue her artistic studies in Paris with a scholarship awarded from the government of France.  She now works primarily in Mumbai, but her work displays a variety of international inspirations. Additionally, she was the curator of the first all female organized exhibition in India, Through the Looking Glass. Malani is well known both in India and internationally for creating memorable work that takes on controversial topics, even in the most conservative art markets. From this international perspective, she addresses great universal problems that our world faces today.  Her dedication to discuss these issues through her work has opened international opportunities in esteemed institutions such as The New Museum in New York City, the Venice Biennale and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan.

Listening to the Shades 7, Nalini Malani, 2008

Listening to the Shades 7, Nalini Malani, 2008. Image Credit: http://www.nalinimalani.com/painting/shades.htm

Although she has chosen very controversial themes for her work, Malani balances these with a classic and historical aesthetic. She utilizes traditional Indian motifs as well as employing a mystical use of color and light in her work.

This internationally influenced and applauded artist is a commendable recipient of the Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize 2013. On September 14, Malani will give a lecture in Fukuoka titled “For a More Progressive Society-The Potentials in Our World and Arts”.

To learn more about the Fukuoka Prize and Arts and Culture Prize winner Nalini Malani click here.

Nalini Malani in conversation with Jyotsna Saksena, and Elvan Zabuyan at Kadist Art Foundation

May 21, 2013•Art, Exhibitions

Manjari Sihare shares details of a forthcoming event at the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris

Paris: The Clark House Initiative (Bombay) is currently presenting an exhibition at the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris of three Indian art practitioners, Padmini Chettur, a contemporary dancer, Prajakta Potnis, a visual artist, and Zamthingla Ruivah, a master weaver. The works in the exhibition are in dialogue with those of a group of Indian artists who were living in Paris in May 1968, including Nalini Malani, Krishna Reddy and polymath artist and magician Jean Bhownagary.

Nalini Malani, "For the Dispossessed", 1971 Image courtesy: Kadist Art Foundation, Paris

Nalini Malani, “For the Dispossessed”, 1971
Image courtesy: Kadist Art Foundation, Paris

The Kadist Art Foundation and the Clark House Initiative have organized a series of public events around the exhibit, one of which is a conversation between Nalini Malani, political analyst Jyotsna Saksena, and art historian Elvan Zabuyan on Friday, 24 May at 7 pm. The talk will center around Malani’s time in Paris which she describes as a ‘prise de conscience’. She has lent to the exhibition a small papier mache head, ‘For the Dispossessed’ made in Paris in 1971 of the vivid pages of Le Nouvel Observateur, and referencing photographs of refugees fleeing the genocide during the Bangladesh Liberation War. The head also references what was happening in Paris at the time, demonstrations for Angela Davis, and protests of the Vietnam War.

Event details:

Friday 24 May, 7pm: Nalini Malani, Jyotsna Saksena, and Elvan Zabuyan in conversation at the Kadist Art Foundation, 19 bis-21 rue des Trois Frères, F-75018 Paris.
tél. +33 1 42 51 83 49 | www.kadist.org

Click here for more details.

Nalini Malani on Thomas McEvilley (1939 – 2013)

April 25, 2013•Art

Veteran artist, Nalini Malani pays tribute to the esteemed art critic, Thomas McEvilley, who recently passed away

Thomas McEvilley and Bhima (named for the second and strongest of the Pandava Brothers in the Indian epic, the Mahabharata. Photo: Joyce Burnstein Image credit: The Huffington Post

Image credit: The Huffington Post

Mumbai: Thomas McEvilley, the internationally esteemed art critic, cultural historian, and scholar of Greek and Indian philology passed away on March 2, 2013. I was very saddened to hear of Thomas’ passing away. He was still young and had much to finish. We became friends since our very first animated, passionate and intense arguments during the days he visited me in my studio in Lohar Chawl, in the wholesale markets of Bombay in 1985.  And then we would pick up the thread whenever I met him in Johannesburg, New York, Amsterdam and Dublin.  His lifelong work “The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, 2001” is a compendium of deep research and knowledge and I have carried it with me since he gave it to me with a beautiful inscription in his own hand in Greek. Yes – the true scholar that he was – he was learned in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. And I had heard him chant the Heart Sutra from the Buddhist scriptures, for his deceased friend, the artist James Lee Byars at the Appel in Amsterdam.

I wish I could chant the Heart Sutra for him in his passing.

Saffronart is thankful to Nalini Malani for sharing her thoughts. Thomas McEvilley is best known for his influential essays on contemporary art and criticism written over a span of twenty years for the trade journal, Artforum. He has written about Nalini Malani’s work since 1986 and has contributed  major essays to a monograph published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art (for Malani’s first major solo exhibition in Europe in 2007) and the Brooklyn Rail. His seminal work,  The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, mentioned above spans thirty years of  his research, from 1970 to 2000. In this book, McEvilley explores the foundations of Western civilization. He argues that today’s Western world must be considered the product of both Greek and Indian thought, both Western philosophy and Eastern philosophies. He shows how trade, imperialism, and currents of migration allowed cultural philosophies to intermingle freely throughout India, Egypt, Greece, and the ancient Near East.  A recently published  obituary of the critic in the New York Times credits him for being a vital alternative voice in the 1960s, when the art world was dominated by formalist thinking. McEvilley was also a distinguished teacher, lecturing art history at Rice University (1969 to 2004),  Yale University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He  founded the MFA program in Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2005, and served as the Department Chair there for three years. Learn more about Thomas McEvilley here.