Still Cool Works and a Book
Subjectivity and History are the two central categories of modern thought. While subjectivity dealt with the experiences and interactions of ‘I’ with the world, history focused on rationality, progress and just forms of social organization and cultural interaction. But given the interminable array of brutality and violence that human history represents, both the aforementioned categories have come under increasing analysis in post-modern/post-colonial discourses, interrogating received meanings of past events. Nalini Malani, one of the compelling woman artists of India, since the last two decades, has positioned herself on the precarious axis of these two categories, mapping complex inheritances via aesthetic interventions including painting, collaborative installations, performance and video based works, interrogating the political dynamics in the governance of the Indian nation state, the process of globalization and the victimization of women. In her opinion, in today’s dynamic flux of time it becomes important to keep retelling stories, keying in images in linkages that are interrogations of the human condition.
The book, Nalini Malini, which accompanied her solo exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, presents a lucid analysis of Malini’s work, encompassing several decades from her evolution from a painter to her exploration of multimedia and theatre. With texts by Enrique Juncosa, Thomas Mc Evilley, Chaitanya Sambrani, an interview with Johan Pijnappel and first person narratives by Malani, the book offers multiple perspectives and clarity of ideas for the reader to understand Malani’s complex works, positioning her practice against the larger social and political realities of the nation; the layering that enters her work via the trajectories of history, memory and desire and her eclectic appropriations, both Western and Non-Western, where she claims both cultural inheritances to be equal, without hierarchies.
Born in 1946 in Lahore, Malani was aware of the horrors of the Partition, and her own experiences of migration and dislocation left a significant mark on her artworks. A distinctly political interrogation of how the nation-state of India emerged from the ashes of the Partition, the nightmares of history, the correspondences of national/sectarian violence and women, an alignment with marginalized voices, class politics, gender, sexuality and how the human body can be a site for locations of memory has been the foundations of her art practice. Malani trained at the J.J. School of Art in Mumbai (1964-69) and simultaneously worked as the only woman student in the all male studio of the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial institute (1964-67). The dominant language at J.J. School of Art was a high modernist abstraction, ahistorical in approach. It was later in Paris on a French Government scholarship (1970-72) where she came across existential questions of the youth, especially after the events of 1968 and the alternatives of critical thought that such an exposure provided, that her language as an artist with a social agenda formed, strongly rooted to the issues of her native land, and locative in the feminine gaze.
With the backdrop of the Emergency in the 1970’s, it was also a time for cultural practitioners to start movements and posit challenges for the authority. The seminal exhibition ‘Place for People’ (1980-81) forwarded a reassessment of India’s figurative tradition by Geeta Kapur in which Malani participated with her male contemporaries (Jogen Chowdhury, Bhupen Khakkar, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gulamohammed Shiekh and Vivan Sundaram). This was followed by traveling group exhibitions with women artists Nilima Shiekh, Arpita Singh and Madhvi Parekh ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (1987-89). Transformations from the ‘Grieved Child’ (1981) to ‘Rethinking Raja Ravi Varma’ (1989), Lohar Chawl (1991) to her breaking out of the frame in City of Desires (1992), and transiting to theatre installations, Medeamaterial (1993), shadow plays, Stories Retold: The Sacred and the Profane (1998), video installations, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998), Hamletmachine (2000) Unity in Diversity (2003), Game Pieces (2003) and Mother India: Transactions in the Constructions of Pain (2005), and other public art projects and interdisciplinary initiatives have not only subverted spectatorship modes, but has also placed her work in the two-pronged trajectories of globalization opening up cultural translations between places and people, while fundamentalism imposing a violent and restrictive cultural establishment in her home country. Such an existential dilemma makes the artist state that “Our points of reference, ideas and values are not confined by man-made borders”.
It is with this conceptual and aesthetic defiance that Malani has borrowed from the art and literature from both Indian and European traditions since her formative days. Alice (Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland), Medea (the alchemist princess of Greek myth), Sita (Ramayana) and Akkamahadevi (a girl rebel from a 12th century Indian myth) visually fuse with the conceptual influences of the poems of Muddupalani (a South Indian courtesan of the 18th century), the sociological/feminist texts of Veena Das and the writings of Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva. Throughout the book, and in all the texts, an interesting discourse emerges of the derivativeness of western ideas in the Indian context, and Malani emerges as a key figure who, via her aesthetic interventions, disputes this very notion vigorously, while remaining an influential woman artist in the global art scenario, where international curators vie for her work in massive Biennales and Triennales (she has been represented in the central pavilion of the Venice Biennale, 2007) and will also participate in the Sydney Biennale in 2008. As Malani says candidly in the interview with Pijnappel “As I get older, it’s great to see that young hip artists and intellectual curators think my work is still cool!”
One would heartily congratulate the publisher, the editor and the writers for such a wonderful publication of unburdened jargon-free texts! Worth collecting!!
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