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.
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.
Early life and education
Malani is the only child of Satni Advani (Sindhi Sikh) and Jairam Malani (Theosophist). 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.
Malani studied Fine Arts in Mumbai and obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts from Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in 1969. 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. She received a scholarship from the French Government to study fine arts in Paris between 1970-72. 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.
Career
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. 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.
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."