Whitechapel Gallery Curator Emily Butler On Indian Video Art Pioneer Nalini Malani’s New Commission
By Something CuratedLaunching on 23 September 2020, Whitechapel Gallery unveils a major new work titled Can You Hear Me? by Nalini Malani as part of its celebrated annual programme of artist commissions. Born in Karachi, Malani now lives and works in Mumbai, India. Embodying the role of the artist as social activist, Malani gives voice to the marginalised through visual stories which often take the form of multi-layered, immersive installations, exploring themes of violence, feminism, politics, racial tensions and social inequality. Widely considered the pioneer of video art in India, Malani has a 50-year multimedia practice that includes film, photography, painting, wall drawing, performance, theatre, animation and video.
Whitechapel Gallery curator Emily Butler tells Something Curated: “Nalini Malani is an artistic pioneer in all senses of the word. She is one of the most important international female figures working in new media. Her work has always shown an urgency to address important socio-political questions, in particular feminism, politics, violence, racial tensions and social inequality since the 1960s. She responds both to critical present issues but shows a constant sense of experimentation that is both inspiring and engrossing. Whilst she has a 50-year practice, working prolifically across many media, only in the last fifteen years has she seen overdue international recognition in important exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (2007) and dOCUMENTA (2012). We are honoured after major solo shows at the Centre Pompidou and Castello di Rivoli (2018-19) to host her first major UK exhibition and commission.”
Butler continues, “Malani started experimenting with photography and film after completing her art studies in Mumbai in the late 60s, and was the only woman to hold a studio at the avant-garde interdisciplinary VIEW (Vision Exchange Workshop). She also spent time in Paris in 1970-72 soaking up the post May-68 fertile cultural scene meeting iconic figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Luc Goddard, Chris Marker… Her early experiments with animation, abstraction, layering of the moving image, hand drawn-images, filtered throughout her career into to her paintings, drawings, wall-drawings, theatre sets, erasure performances and installations such as her Shadow Plays and her Animation Chambers, a more recent digital series of projections which she is presenting at Whitechapel Gallery. Here overlapping moving drawings, writing and sounds fill the walls of the Gallery, transforming the space into a 21st century form of an artists’ notebook.”
Offering insight into what we can expect from the new commission, Butler explains: “The installation Can You Hear Me? features 88 hand-drawn iPad clips made between 2017-2020 projected directly onto the bare brick walls of the space, where image and text take the form of moving graffiti. The installation will appear like a babble of hand-drawn images, sounds, as well as fragments of quoted text. In this installation Malani fills the former central reading room of the Whitechapel Public Library once more with books as she transcribes passages by influential writers such as Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Bertolt Brecht, Veena Das, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Milan Kundera, George Orwell and Wislawa Szymborska. I hope the installation will inspire people to immerse themselves in the environment, to watch the mesmerising drawings and words in order to really listen to the message the artist is trying to convey: to open our eyes to political realities and not be duped by the global flow of misinformation. By referring to past authors, Malani puts current affairs into perspective, aiming to reach higher truths to inspire people to watch, listen and think.”
Nalini Malani: Can You Hear Me? at Whitechapel Gallery | 23 September 2020 – May 2021
Feature image: Nalini Malani, In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.