Nalini Malani, a Global Storyteller

Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: an international journal Vol 2, No 1 (2015) on-line ISSN 2393 - 1221 Nalini Malani, a Global Storyteller Christine Vial Kayser Abstract Nalini Malani is an Indian contemporary artist who lives in Mumbai. Her work is constructed as a narrative that interweaves Eastern and Western mythologies and aesthetics forms to address interreligious violence in India, especially on women. Her emphasis on the feminine figure as a topos of violence, both received and produced, and as an ambivalent figure, both caring and destroying, locates her art within feminist discourses. Yet she claims to be beyond this linkage and to be using mythical images of Medea, Cassandra or Sita as images of conflicts and violence within human psyche, both feminine and masculine. This paper purports to present her work and the mechanisms of its reception in order to evaluate its potential cathartic role on collective consciousness regarding communal violence in India and elsewhere, both for and Indian and international audience, a function which she claims for her art. Keywords: Nalini Malani; contemporary Indian art; Partition; mythology and art; feminism and art; Collective Unconscious; catharsis; chora; Julia Kristeva; the abject. Nalini was born in Karachi in 1946, a year prior emphasis on the corporal and the local as vehicles to the partition between India and Pakistan that for memories of sensations and emotions. The followed the independence from the British Empire. second is her painting technique, on reverse acrylic She went into exile to Calcutta in 1947 with her paper with acrylic and enamel, combined into parents, and moved to Bombay in 1954. The Partition installations with moving pictures, videos, and has marked her personality and her work as she sound. “tried to make sense of the feelings of loss, exile and The third element is the content she uses, nostalgia” that have overshadowed her childhood.1 based on myths taken from both Indian and Western Yet it was not until 1992, after the destruction of the traditions, that address the mind through metaphors Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu extremists, that long established, playing with archaic patterns, to interreligious violence became weaved into her work, which she manages to give a contemporary indirectly through the performance Medea, after relevance. Heiner Muller’s play, and the works which derived therefrom; directly through a series of multimedia installations such as Remembering Toba Tek Singh of 1998, Hamlet Machine, 1999-2000, Stains 2000, Unity in Diversity, 2003, Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of pain, 2005, and the recent – and haunting – In Search of vanished blood, 2012 (fig. 1). The capacity of her works to woo audiences stems from three main elements. One is her 1 Nalini Malani, “Unity in diversity”, Nalini Malani, [exhibition catalogue, Irish Museum of Modern Art, July-October 2007], Fig. 1. In Search of vanished blood, 2012, six channel Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art et Milan: Charta, 2007, p. 99. video/shadow play with five rotating reverse painted Mylar See also Johan Pijnappel (ed.), “Nalini Malani”, Crossing Currents: cylinders, sound, 11 min., dimensions variable. © Malini Malani Video Art and Cultural Identity, [exh. cat. Lalit Kala Akademi New Delhi, 2004], Royal Netherlands Embassy publication, 2006, pp. Thus Malani convenes multiple universes, 81-87, p. 82. combining text and images, present and past, www.journalonarts.org 1 Christine Vial Kayser locality and globality into a kind of theatre in which Memory is what you are, past is in the present facts are mixed with affects – anger and sorrow, fear and in the future. Memory means the collective and disgust, love and sacrifice – that relate to Memory – Memory of the race, Memory of the individual and collective life story. We shall examine community.4 successively the role of these three elements in the This dual – individual and social – construction reception of Malani’s works and its power, asserted of one’s identity, although a priori universally by the artist, to assuage intercommunity hatred, by shared, 5 appears in this quote as related specifically performing a catharsis. to Hindu culture in which the real and the imaginary, the past, present and the future, the individual and The role of the corporal and the local in the collective are enmeshed, particularly through the Malani’s work concept of karma, according to which the body is the Nalini displays a constant desire to link her vehicle of successive lives, made of meetings, work to a place, to the physical and to psychic exchanges, dividers, accidents.6 sensations which inform peoples’ experience of a place. In 1980 she participated with five male artists – Vivan Sundaram, Bhupen Khakkar, Jogen Chowdhury, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Sudhir Patwardhan – in the exhibition conceived by the critic Geeta Kapur's Places for People, which focused on the indigenous and the local, in an anti-modernist gesture.2 It marked the first occurrence of Post- modern thought in India.3 Malani contributed His Life, a series of eight paintings started in 1978, recounting the life of an ordinary man, his personal and professional relationships, asserting the importance of the collective in the construction of Fig. 2. Remembering Toba Tek Singh, 1998, four channel, twelve individual identity and the fragmentary nature of it, monitor video installation, twelve in trunks. 20 min., sound, made of juxtapositions of distinct “me”, built by dimensions variable. © Malini Malani others. After years of painting, Malani will turn to At the time, she herself lived and worked in the installations in 1998, with Remembering Toba Tek commercial district of Lohar Chawl, located near the Singh, (fig. 2), that plays precisely with this bodily, docks, in South Mumbai. The vibrant location in communal and mnemonic dimension. The which commercial activity is mixed with religious installation consists of iron canteens containing temples and service industry, will later inspire a small video screens, placed at the centre of a room, series of monotypes, called Lohar Shawl, 1991, which, lined with large screens. On the small screens, like an emotional map, superimpose various archival images of the Partition show scenes of impressions from the bazaar, as if pressing on the domestic life of refugees on the road of exile, inner world of the artist visual, olfactory, auditory including childbirth. They are dubbed by a voice sensations received from the colourful and noisy telling the short story by the Pakistani writer Saadat alleys. Emphasizing the link between the individual Hasan Manto, of 1955, from which it borrows its title. and the collective, Malani hereby manifests the The story tells the forced exodus of a patient of importance of living communities, as well as of Lahore psychiatric hospital, a Sikh born in the town bodily sensations and emotions, in the construction of Toba Tek Singh which the authorities have decided of a particular memory. She says: to send to an Indian psychiatric hospital, three years 2 Place for People, exhibition Jehangir Art gallery, Bombay, 1980, 4 Nalini Malani cited in ibid., p. 63. She also says that up to now her Rabindra Bhavan, Delhi, 1981. Geeta Kapur presents the project on mother – who is 93 – recalls the sights, the smells, the food, and line http://www.afterall.org/online/geeta-kapur-on-the- her house in Karachi (Nalini Malani in conversation with the curatorial-in-india-part2. (All websites mentioned in this text are author, May 2015). st 5 active on 1 April 2015). Regarding the link between collective and individual memory in 3 See Parvez Kabir, cited in Jyoti Dhar, “Nalini Malani, in the heart the West, see Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective, Paris: of darkness,” Art Asia Pacific, N° 84, July-August 2013, pp. 57-63, PUF, 1950. p. 58. 6 Malani is not a Hindu though, her mother being a Sikh and her father a Theosophist (Malani in Johan Pijnappel, op. cit., p. 82). 2 Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: an international journal Nalini Malani, a Global Storyteller after the Partition. Brought by bus to the frontier who used play to enter into dialogue with the and asked to cross the no man’s land to the other unconscious of her young patients.10 side, he refuses to choose side and lets himself die in In 2005 Malani returns to the theme of the undisputed land. The domestic images in the intercommunity violence with the video installation canteens – an object associated to moving – oppose Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of the “big story,” told by the large screens distributed pain, which invites the viewer to confront the lie around the room, showing images of international behind the noble and lovable image of the nuclear conflict: The explosion of the atomic bomb in motherland, in view of recurrent interethnic attacks. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, US nuclear testing in the On five large screens images of the Partition, Pacific atolls, conflict in the Balkans. The work has followed by anti-Muslim attacks in Gujarat in 2002, been triggered by India’s announcement of its alternate with the quiet faces of women engaged in possessing the nuclear bomb, a claim that Pakistan domestic duties, archetypes of gentleness and will make a few days later. Malani use of unrelated compassion, combined with images of Hindu war archival images eschews a direct commentary, divinities – such as Durga on her tiger. These images underpinning the role of memories and rancour in remind the viewer of the ambivalence of Hindu new conflicts. Some images are blurred copies made female deities, which are both protective and with a VCR. destructive, an ambivalence that Hindu Between these displays, images shot by Malani fundamentalists, according to Malani, want erased, show two women facing each other, one supposedly postulating that Hinduism is all peace while Islam is Indian and the other Pakistani.

Load more