Mumbai: As the world watches conflict and violence – Russia and Ukraine, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, the US and Iran – taking thousands of lives, including children, 80-year-old artist Nalini Malani has expressed the collective sentiment: “There is nothing more terrible than an innocent child dying.”
His face, which was glowing a few minutes ago as he counted birds on a tree outside his studio in Colaba, has turned stern. She says, “Nobody asks women why they want to live in this scenario, where they see their children maimed; not just from bombs but also dying from severe hunger. It’s sad – women still don’t have agency.”
Her anger serves as the catalyst for her new site-specific installation, ‘Of Woman Born’. The layered work is the sum of 67 animations combined with over 30,000 iPad drawings, which will unfold into nine videos accompanied by recorded women’s voices. The work will be shown at the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale (May 9 to November 10) as an official collateral project presented by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA).
The title of the work is taken from Adrienne Rich’s 1976 landmark book in feminist literature ‘Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution’. The American feminist poet and writer argues that while the experience of motherhood can be liberating, the institution of motherhood is a patriarchal structure designed to control women. Melanie places her work within this context, while also offering a contemporary reflection on the Greek legend of Orestes in her work. According to legend, Orestes killed his mother to avenge his father’s death. But despite this, the crime is forgiven by the goddess Athena.
Rubina Karode, chief curator and artistic director of KNMA, says, “For Malani, the contemporary world is unfolding like the story of Orestes, where wars are fought in the name of self-defense and there is no accountability for the individuals who commit violence.” “She urges us to rethink the geopolitical demarcations of the world and explore the agency of women who bear the brunt of global conflict.” Thus ‘Of Woman Born’ becomes a chamber of thought and contemplation on women, myth and global conflict. “When an aggressive male head of state starts behaving as if he was born from the gods, it becomes a problem,” says Malani. “It means a woman has been wiped out from that person’s life, which is happening very often. It’s sad and provokes me to make things up. I want to say – look, the only way we can move forward is if we remember how you were born, through a woman.”
political artist
Malani’s six decade long practice has been based on politically engaged, cross-cultural and historical dialogues, staged as complex, layered and multi-dimensional narratives of feminism, nationalism, injustice and violence. Mélanie creates these by superimposing images, animation and sound and drawing – her sources originate from literature, mythology and philosophy.
His 1998 video installation ‘Remembering Toba Tek Singh’ is largely inspired by Saadat Hasan Manto’s 1955 short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’, which criticizes the political race to become a nuclear power. In ‘Search of Vanished Blood’ (2012) he mentioned the partition of India and the 2002 Gujarat riots. Its title comes from Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s 1965 poem ‘Lahu Ka Surag’, which was translated into English by Kashmiri-American poet and translator Agha Shahid Ali. In this video work shown at Documenta (13) in Kassel, Germany, Malani evokes the Greek myth of the Trojan princess Cassandra to link ancient injustice to political violence.
But how do the multiple forms, materials and stories come together in Malani’s works?
“It’s like a biological cellular evolution,” she says. “What do I do if I’m angry about something? I can’t go out into the street and scream. That’s why I draw.” That’s how it starts, boils and takes shape. Melanie says, “Then I want to put the subject in one place, create a sound that goes with it and it goes on and on. The process completely embraces you. And that’s how larger installations are created.”
pioneers of video art
In India, Malani is recognized as a pioneer of video art. His first video work, an 8 mm stop-motion animation film ‘Dream Houses’ was made in 1969 during his time at the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) in Mumbai. It was an experimental multidisciplinary initiative founded by artist Akbar Padamsee. The two-minute film explored modernist Indian architecture and the utopian ideals of the Nehruvian era.
Although he was trained in painting at the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai, he soon realized that long-term works such as cinema, film, video and theater had the potential to attract larger audiences. “Whereas, a painting in an art gallery, especially in our country, does not invite a large audience,” she says, adding that when she showed ‘Remembering Toba Tek Singh’ at the Kumaraswamy Hall of the then Prince of Wales Museum, “5,000 people came every day”.
This installation featured tin trunks used by refugees during the partition, equipped with video monitors showing archival footage of the violence and bombs thrown in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A video shows two women facing each other across the room, trying and failing to fold a saree, highlighting how women often bear the brunt of nationalist violence and are left to raise mutilated people after war.
Malani has mastered the art of creating works that present some of the harsh realities of life as an engaging experience. “I’m not interested in making work that rubs people the wrong way,” says Malani. For him, art is about the artist, the artwork, and the audience. “The three together create the artwork; otherwise, there’s no point. Although I think the people who are doing it best are using humor on talk shows. We artists are still struggling.”
Such eclecticism and inclusivity can be attributed to his early influences of working at the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute – a renowned multidisciplinary arts center located on Warden Road, which followed an open policy for spontaneous exchange of ideas and collaboration among artists of art, music, theater and dance. Artists VS Gaitonde, MF Hussain, Tayyab Mehta and Nasreen Mohammadi had their studios here. Melanie also achieved a feat while being a first year student. Pandit Ravi Shankar established his Kinnara School of Music here, and theater directors Ibrahim Alkazi and Satyadev Dubey used its terrace and rooms for experimental performances.
“Here I got a lot of intellectual knowledge through other senior artists,” she says. “It was a holistic kind of multidisciplinary scenario, where there were no teachers, and you absorbed whatever you could. I really soaked it all up like a sponge.”
The time spent here also influenced his theater collaborations, including a collaboration with actor and director Alaknanda Samarth. Together, they created a performance/installation at the Max Mueller Building based on the play ‘Medea Material’ by German playwright Heiner Müller.
child of division
While Mailani’s time at the institute nurtured her as an artist and shaped her practice, one of her earliest influences came from her family’s move from Karachi to Kolkata during Partition, when she was just a year old. She grew up in a home filled with grief and anxiety resulting from displacement.
“My parents had to start all over again,” she says. When she was three years old, her mother enrolled her in the Metro Cub Club, a marketing initiative launched by the American film studio MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) to build a loyal audience among Indian children for Hollywood films. Malani says, “Seeing Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton was an absolutely mind-blowing experience. The moving image had already made an impression on my mind.”
After moving to Mumbai, then Bombay, he secured a position at JJ where he learned to draw. But during the two years he spent in Paris on an art scholarship (1970–72) he learned to see the world differently. “I always say that Paris was the university of my life because it opened a new chapter for me.” She was listening to the ideas of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and American linguist Noam Chomsky, who taught her to observe and analyze.
And then Mumbai’s metropolitan fabric exploded. She adds, “Mumbai is my whole world. Everything has happened because of this city. I went to school and college here. My children were born here; I will never move out of this city.” “When you walk down the street you hear 10 different languages. That’s not the case in any other city. Also, thanks to public transportation, everyone sits next to each other – the person who sweeps your street might be sitting right next to you. It lifts people up.”
However, she regrets the easy camaraderie between people in the past. “At that time people were much less angry. If there was an accident on the road, people would come out, apologise, shake hands and get back on their way. Nowadays there is a lot of anger and also a sense of entitlement – I don’t know where it’s all coming from.”
