Interview with Nalini Malani

Recognized as a pioneer in her field since the 1960s, Malani has developed a unique multimedia practice that encompasses video, film, animation, painting, drawing and immersive installations. Her profound and powerfully engaging works have been addressing social inequalities and violence for more than 50 years, giving voice to the subjugated, marginalized and oppressed, especially women.

The exhibition Nalini Malani: Crossing Boundaries, which runs until August 20, 2023, consists of her critically acclaimed video installation Can You Hear Me? (2018-2020), the latest iteration of her Wall Drawing/Erasure Performance series City of Desires (1992-2023), executed on site at the MMFA, and a brand new video projection, Ballad of a Woman (2023), commissioned for the MMFA’s Digital Canvas project.

Below, Malani shares about her artistic beginnings, her sources of inspiration and the creative process behind the works on display in the exhibition.

Tell us how you first came to art

At school, at the age of 12, we had an excellent biology teacher. She taught us the systems of nature and how, inside the bodies of animals and insects, life worked. She drew extremely well, and said the drawing will communicate much more to students than simply speaking about it. That was my first encounter with the dynamics of drawing. I took biology for my Cambridge University O Levels, and I also took art, but the art teacher said, “You’re hopeless, forget it!”

It’s such an interesting lesson in perseverance, because there are so many great artists who were first told by a teacher that they couldn’t do it. It’s astonishing, though, especially as good as you are as a draftsperson, that you would be told that, of all people…

This was school-level drawing, and to tell you the truth, I preferred the biology teacher’s drawing to the art teacher’s. It was only because I wanted to get into art school and had to have drawing as a subject in my last year of high school that I took the class. I got the lowest grade in art but very high marks in biology, and then I applied to the J.J. School of Art. My father was extremely opposed to it at the time. He said to me that a drawing diploma was not going to get me anywhere. I would be like a cobbler on the streets. He meant well, and he had a point. I was their only child… But I was adamant that I wanted to do it. So, I said to him that I would do drawings for medical textbooks. Because in art school, they would teach you the human body by taking you to sessions in which cadavers were being dissected. It was like looking at the human body like a Leonardo drawing. Fortunately, when I began art school, I met two editors of magazines. One was a magazine that exclusively published short stories of new writers in Hindi, and the other was an equivalent of the Illustrated Weekly, which covered many issues but also ran serialized novels by young writers. Both editors expressed an interest in new kinds of illustration. So, that’s what I did, and they paid me 25 rupees a picture. I was able to produce quite a lot of work, and my earnings covered all my art material expenses. My father was very pleased that I was finally making some money!

What did you learn from working with these magazines?

I was very inspired by the writers, and I learned from them that what is well known in India are the Indian epics. The writers chose characters from these epics and created stories around them in a contemporary format. This prompted me to create characters from the epics as well, because, for me, connection with the public was of utmost importance. Otherwise, art becomes like a white cubic space that only the elite can partake in. To this day, I incorporate epic, mythological characters, including the Greek ones. Because, Greek mythology is known in India. The whole of Alexander the Great’s army remained along the borders, in Afghanistan, and the Bamiyan Buddhas are depicted in the Indo-Hellenic style.

This notion of connection and communication feels very present in your work, as does literature. Even beyond mythology, you cite so beautifully writers like Sartre and Orwell, among many others. Can you talk about the presence of literature in your work?

When I spoke with the famous artist Kitaj in 1979 in New York, he shared a precious insight with me when he said: “Some books have paintings, and some paintings have books.” You can see a painting in the snap of a finger, but how do you make a person go on looking at that painting? When it comes to paintings, you don’t have time. You only have space. So I aim to create those moments where a person is triggered by the layers of visuals and texts in the artwork, and will take the time to connect with it again and again, and question themselves and create narratives.

Would you say that it’s the creation of a kind of intimacy with the viewer, in the same way that a reader has an intimate relationship with a book?

Yes, indeed. And the viewer develops that intimate relationship by giving time to the artwork. In the MoMA, there used to hang, in a specific place, an absolutely fantastic triptych of Max Beckmann’s, called Departure. Every time I went to New York, I’d return to this painting, almost like a pilgrimage. And every time it gave me something more. I think people should understand that the more you look at a painting, the more it gives you. And the thing is, you must look at it when it’s not looking at you. You’ll get much more out of it.

You’re known as the pioneer of video art in India. How did you come to video?

Video became affordable to produce in India only in the late ’80s. This is in stark contrast to the West, where artists were already working with this medium in the ’60s and ’70s. My fascination with the moving image has to do with how much I wanted to engage with the public. Cinema is big here in India, so it was easy to get into montage and editing. I made my first 16 mm stop motion animation in 1969 at VIEW – the Vision Exchange Workshop. It was called Dream Houses and was inspired by the architect Charles Correa, who had brilliant ideas about how townships should be made for the working class. This was followed by works such as Still Life (1969), Onanism (1969) and Taboo (1973). Later, my first video work was a documentary on my ephemeral wall drawing City of Desires (1991). Several video works followed, including the first room-filling multi-channel video installation Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998). When it was shown in 1999 at the Prince of Wales Museum, now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, it attracted an average of 5,000 visitors per day. After this, I continued experimenting with new forms of video art, like the video/shadow plays, in which multiple projections go through rotating reverse-painted Mylar cylinders.

One of the works that will be presented in this show in Montreal is called Can You Hear Me? It was one of the first times that you worked directly on an iPad®, making drawings with your finger. What prompted that innovation?

I started doing painted stop motion animations in 1996 with a work called The Job. These animations were very elaborate, almost like a documentation of a painting performance. To carry them out, I needed a film crew, a large studio and fixed timings. When I was introduced to the iPad, I immediately realized the absolute freedom it gave me. I loved the idea that I could just carry my entire studio in a sack! Like a portable studio. I could be sitting waiting for an airplane and still be making my animations. I started to make them out of sheer anger, you know, because of things that were happening around me, and I thought: “How can I put this out there through my art? Maybe I can make people look at this in a more concentrated way if I make an animation.” So I started to make them directly with my fingers in a very simple app without the iPad pencil, as this felt too foreign to me. To this, I added a sound composition which I made on the software GarageBand. From time to time, I would post these works for free on my Instagram account, @nalinimalani.

And what was the inspiration for Can You Hear Me?

The Goethe-Institut commissioned me to create a new work for their celebrations marking their 50 years in Bombay. As I already had a series of Instagram animations, I thought I would work along these lines and present them as a large-scale installation. Using a high res export of the files, I was able to blow them up into all-encompassing projections without any pixilation. My idea for the title of “animation chamber,” as I call it, came from a particular animation based on a tragic incident involving an 8-year-old child born in a nomadic Muslim community in Kashmir. She was kidnapped by eight adult men and held captive in a Hindu temple, where she was raped over a week and then finally killed. Her family was living very close to that temple, but how could they have imagined that these people would take her into such a sacrosanct place? She was, like, 50 metres away, but she could not be heard because she was behind closed doors. Hence the title Can You Hear Me? There is an epidemic of rape all over the world, of which only a small sliver is reported in the papers.

A brand new work commissioned by the MMFA, called Ballad of a Woman, is being projected for six months on the facade of the Museum. Tell us about the inspiration for that piece.

It’s inspired by the work of Nobel prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. What I found very intriguing was her story of a woman who’d been murdered by a man but wants to tidy up after him so nobody finds out… I mean, how deeply must she have been indoctrinated about the male always being above her, in a higher position, that she feels he mustn’t be blamed for this, that she has to cover it up? It’s the baggage that women carry. No matter what, it is he who is privileged.

What do you hope that people feel when they watch Ballad of a Woman?

There are many layers to this. Initially, and you see this especially in children, there is a fascination with the movement of colours. There’s this festive feeling of joy. But when you go deeper into the work, you see the other parts of what I’m talking about. And that’s more the adult layer, where one realizes that everything is not as it appears. Ideally, all of these effects will be observed as well as an opening to an understanding that we do still need a more female vision of life.

You’ve been doing a wall drawing for us here, in Montreal. Can you tell us about it?

It’s part of a series, titled City of Desires, which I began in 1991 in Bombay. It’s a portrayal of a city or, rather, a symbolic world. The geometric planning as the underground gives it a blueprint of hope. But, what happens above ground is that it turns out to be, for too many people, a place where oppression and greed is the name of the game played by patriarchal societies. City of Desires is shown from the perspective of a girl, or young woman, who opens her eyes and can’t believe what is happening around her. In the case of the Montreal wall drawing, which is a collaborative work with the artists Iuliana Irimia and Cassandra Dickie, the girl is flying in the air, like the warplane to the left of her, and crying out, “Ma réalité est différente.” [My reality is different].

Erasure of the drawing at the end is integral to the work. How does it happen?

From its very start, each Erasure Performance is different. The instructions for the erasure in each instance, including in Montreal, is only revealed towards the end of the exhibition, and it’s a total surprise, even for the curator. The 1996 erasure in Brisbane was done by two dancers with a brush and a bucket of milk. The one in Lausanne in 2010 was carried out by all the visitors who came for the performance. In New Delhi in 2014, it was done by the guards themselves, and in Paris in 2017, it was the director of the Centre Pompidou and his exhibition team who erased the work with bouquets of roses. It’s often a very moving experience, because as one destroys an artwork, one realizes the vulnerability of art that goes on living in memory alone.

Why is this erasure part important to you?

I started doing it in 1991 as a protest against art being too often approached solely as a commodity. I was making the bold statement, “There’s nothing for sale here.” Each visitor could freely enjoy the artwork, but no one could become its owner through a financial transaction. So only the memory remains, like in a theatrical performance. Everything has to be remembered, as this is our only hope for a more humane society.