Nalini Malani: Hamletmachine

© Pat Hoffie, 2003 Nalini Malani: Hamletmachine. Pat Hoffie The very title of this work seems to pose a and weigh the costs that must be paid by both conundrum. For what might a Hamletmachine be sides if the grounds for equitable engagement are capable of producing? Surely Hamlet, that prince to be attempted. of vacillation, has throughout the ages offered an allegory warning of the perils of the irresolute. His In this work the value of procrastination takes on a inability to choose, his lack of direction, his twist – the refusal to play the game according to procrastination have been held up as the the rules set by those in power harbours a (in)action that leads to inevitable chaos, decline potential that may not yet be tainted by the same and destruction. The idea of a machine to sense of doom associated with Shakespeare's endlessly reproduce this inactivity is surely a original anti-hero. Instead, Malani's work seems to cynical proposition. And the contradictory nature suggest that we cannot begin to embark on of this work is compounded when we consider its processes of conciliation until we have taken the development: a contemporary female Indian artist time to imagine new grounds on which to come borrowing from the work of a German playwright. together. When Heiner Muller wrote his play Malani's interest in the procrastinator as hero was Hamletmachine in 1977, his candid portrayal of a evident in her 1999 project Remembering Toba Germany divided against itself shocked Tek Singh – a video installation based on a story audiences. Muller's refusal to turn from the ugly of the same name by Saadat Hasan Manto. In horror of everyday incidents of betrayal and Manto's story the inmate of a mental asylum in the hypocrisy charged the more generalised Punjab refuses to accept the directions to choose mythologies of border conflict with more sides at the time of Partition in 1947 and, instead, psychological and visceral nuances. elects to perpetually inhabit a no man's land of his In her appropriation of Muller's play, Malani moves own invention: the focus of the grand narrative again - this time to There, behind barbed wire, on one side, lay the Hindu-Muslim conflicts of the present. She India and behind more barbed wire, on the other does this through unpicking certain mythologies - side lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth those that describe the axis of tension in strictly which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.2 nationalistic and religious terms. In this work, as within previous work by Malani, the subject That strip of land with no name became, in the remains elusive – neither ethnically locatable nor tale, the burial site for a man who refused to play decipherable in terms of easy association with the choosing game set by those in power. And if 'other-ness', identity seems to fight for its the anti-hero came from a refuge for the insane, indeterminacy; seems to procrastinate for more then the world beyond was cast as the domain of time. Here identity makes no excuses for its true madness. mutability or lack of decisiveness in terms of form Malani's video installation of the same name shifts or articulacy. Instead, it claims a no-man's ground the grounds again – this time to the test-sites for for waiting until new grounds for communication Indian nuclear explosions. On the floor of a dark, might be established. cave-like space twelve uniform tin trunks, the kind Hamletmachine was produced with the Butoh used by migrants and travellers on the dancer Harada Nobuo in an installation that uses Subcontinent, are arranged in a rectangular grid the dancer's body as a screen onto which the on the floor, each containing a quilt and a TV flickering images of history are temporarily monitor whose contents flicker and blink. Across tattooed. Johan Pijnappel describes their surfaces run a gamut of screened images Hamletmachine as loosely connecting a range of issues – the effects of radiation, an interview, a child being born, the four videos, three projected onto the walls and puffs of mushroom clouds from nuclear tests. On one onto a layer of salt on the floor – a the left and right walls of the installation space are reference to Gandhi's salt march... The images images of women endlessly, futilely, attempting to spread like stains, seemingly soaking the walls; tie a sari. In the endless repetition of the filmed the huge projected faces are manipulated with images Malani casts a kind of stasis within that superimpositions to acquire the transparency of cave – one where the viewer is committed to 1 watercolours. forever witnesssing. To re-thinking. To re- In Malani's work, the pleas for reconciliation – considering the implications of certain actions. between East and West, between the Hindu world Within this collection of filmed images one in and the Islamic world, between the First World particular seems to epitomise the role of the and the Third World – are never uttered. Instead, procrastinator: the tiny brown child that eventually the possibilities for first-hand, first-time conciliation squeezes out from the body of the mother, helped are prepared. Each viewer is invited to examine by the hands of other women, arrives only to Nalini Malani, Hamletmachine, 1999-2000, installation view. Image courtesy the artist. remain for a moment, to hesitate and then to the audience into contact with the materiality of retreat, or seem to be sucked back in. As if it has the issues that were being addressed. She made the decision to wait – to not enter this describes her move into installation as having cacophony of confusion just yet. The image is emerged from her long involvement with the both amusing and horrifying – the tragi-comic practical and formal concerns of painting. Her point where the impossibility of action becomes need to more directly involve the viewer as a not absurd, but damning on those who are participant led to an urge to break through beyond privileged enough to play the role of audience. the frame – to include the audience as part of the work's meaning and of its materiality. Malani's choice of medium is always a conscious one. Her use of technology is, for her, fraught with Very soon after her first experimentations, other the kinds of contradictions that bind her role as a women artists, including Rummana Hussain and contemporary artist to one where witness must be Pushpamala N, picked up the challenge. During borne with a kind of complicity. In an interview with this time an upsurge in religious fundamentalism me she described her ambivalence about the way raised particular threats to both Hindu and Muslim in which technology is received in the West. She women; whatever the creed, fundamentalist said: rhetoric argued that women's place was in the home, and so it was in a spirit of the necessity to The term modernism implies an imagined utopia challenge that drove Indian women artists to be that would emerge after the industrial revolution. among the forerunners of those who Of course we're more aware than ever that it experimented with installation. was never ever going to happen - that someone, somewhere else always has to pay. Malani's concern with the rise of a gamut of And in places like India, it's possible to be even fundamentalist reactionary `regionalisms' more aware of the counterfeit qualities of such corresponds with her fears about the effects of claims. So the syntaxes (of modernism) as globalism on local, regional and national applied to US developments have very different communities. She responds to such concerns syntaxes here...3 through works that resound with energy and intelligence, and which are able to convey However, Malani's willingness to engage with something of her own sense of place and her own materials and subjects that are problematic is a perspectives on life. And yet, this artist whose long-established aspect of her practice. She was work conveys such a strong sense of a presence among the first Indian artists in Bombay to engage so firmly connected to a particular site wrote the with installation as a more direct way of bringing following words about that series of paintings and drawings critics have defined as seminal to her are dispossessed and live perpetually on the artistic production, and about a place she knows fringes of life, marginalised.5 so intimately: Lohar Chawl, where Malani has kept her a studio for years, and from which she In a gesture that evoked the erasure of her produced the series Hieroglyphs. She says: installation City of Desires in 1992, Malani also arranged that this work be partially erased at the Hieroglyphs is about my street, that is, the street end of the Second AsiaPacific Triennial in a where my studio is located. It is one of the small performance involving two Brisbane-based artists. streets in the area of Lohar Chawl (the market This emphasis on the necessity of being there – of for electrical goods in Bombay). ... I am an having borne witness to the work/event as a outsider, being neither a trader, nor a pavement viewer-participant – had by this stage been an dweller, nor a devotee of the Hanuman important part of much of the artist's work for Mandir... (A temple devoted to Hanuman, the some time. Her use of video, which had also Hindu god with the form of a monkey situated at become an increasingly important aspect of her one end of the street).4 installations, confirmed, rather than contradicted, this emphasis on presence.

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