Nalini Malani Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

‘Dream Houses’ was shown at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) (2014), the Goethe Institute, Mumbai, (2019) and the MoMa, New York,(2022), after being ‘lost’ for over 50 years.

In 2013, she became the first Asian woman to receive the Arts & Culture Fukuoka Prize for her “consistent focus on such daring contemporary and universal themes as religious conflict, war, oppression of women and environmental destruction.”

This installation which was first produced for the 13th edition of Documenta consists of five larger rotating Mylar cylinders (metaphorically referring to Buddhist prayer wheels) reverse painted with images of soldiers, animals, gods and guns. The shadow play caused by this rotation tells the story of senseless bloodshed especially narrating the story of India since the partition and highlighting the plight of the dispossessed/tribal communities whose lives are drastically affected by developmental decisions made by the government.

Malani’s 2003 video play, Unity in Diversity, is based on the renowned 19th century Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma’s Galaxy of Musicians, with the overt theme of nationalistic unity displayed through the garb of eleven musicians from different parts of India seemingly playing in harmony. Malani makes a statement on this idealized version of unity by incorporating later histories of violence into that image.

The video installation was inspired by an essay by the sociologist Veena Das titled “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain”. It is a synchronised five screen wall-to-wall projection combines archival footage with poetic and painterly image to tell the story of how Indian Nationalism was built using the bodies of women as metaphors for the nation. The work speaks of women as “mutant, de-gendered and violated beyond imagination.” The Partition of India and the Gujarat Riots of 2002 are the central events that are referenced in this installation, as there was a sharp increase in the violation of women in these periods.

The sectarian violence that hit India in the early 1990s after the demolition of the Babri Masjid triggered a sudden shift in her artwork. The renewed religious conflict that had proven to be recurring (bringing back memories of the Partition) pushed her artistic endeavours past the boundaries of the surface and into space. Her earlier foray into performance art and her keen interest in Literature brought new dimensions to her art. She is often counted amongst the earliest to transition from traditional painting to new media work.

From 1987 – 89, Malani organised ‘Through The Looking Glass’ with her contemporaries, the women artists Madhvi Parekh, Nilima Sheikh, and Arpita Singh. The exhibition, featuring works by all four artists, travelled to five non-commercial venues across India. Inspired by a meeting in 1979 with Nancy Spero, May Stevens and Ana Mendieta at the AIR Gallery in New York (the first all-female artists’ cooperative gallery in the US), Malani had planned to organise an exhibition entirely of works by women artists, which failed to materialise due to lack of interest and support.

After her graduation, she spent a few years working with photography and film. The themes she explored during this period dealt with the turbulent time that India was experiencing politically and socially, as well the deepening literacy of moving image by its population. In the initial part of her career, Malani mostly focused on paintings – acrylic on canvas & watercolour on paper. She produced a realistic socially based portrayal of Contemporary India. She continued to explore techniques such as the reverse painting method (taught to her in the late-80s by Bhupen Khakhar), which she would recurrently use in her future work. She was disappointed with the lack of acknowledgement that women artists had to face in India and resolved to bring them together for a group show to promote the sense of solidarity. In 1985, she curated the first exhibition of Indian female artists, in Delhi. This led to a series of traveling exhibitions that were taken to public spaces as an attempt to go beyond the elitist atmosphere of the art gallery.

Malani made her first video work ‘Dream Houses’ (1969), as the youngest and only female participant of the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW), an experimental multi-disciplinary artist workshop in Bombay (Mumbai) by late artist Akbar Padamsee.

Malani studied Fine Arts in Mumbai and obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts from Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in 1969. From 1964-67, she had a studio at the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute, which used to be located at Breach Candy, Mumbai (then Bombay), where artists, musicians, dancers and theater persons worked individually and collectively. It was here that she had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with artists from allied forms of artistic practice like theatre. She received a scholarship from the French Government to study fine arts in Paris from 1970 to 1972. She was also a recipient of two scholarships from the Government of India, as well as a grant in 1989 for travel and work in the United States.

For two-dimensional works, she uses both oil paintings and watercolors. Her other inspirations are her visions from the realm of memory, myth and desire. The rapid brush style evokes dreams and fantasies. Malani’s video and installation work allowed her to shift from strictly real space to a combination of real space and virtual space, moving away from strictly object-based work. Her video work often references divisions, gender, and cyborgs. Malani roots her identity as female and as Indian, and her work might be understood as a way for her identity to confront the rest of the world. She often references Greek and Hindu mythology in her work. The characters of ‘destroyed women’ like Medea, Cassandra and Sita feature often in her narrative. Her multifaceted oeuvre can be broadly classified under two categories; Her experiments with visual media and the moving image like Utopia (1969-1976), Mother India (2005), In Search of Vanished Blood (2012); Her ephemeral and in-situ works such as City of Desires (1992), Medea as Mutant (1993/2014), The Tables have turned (2008). Although her work talks of violence and conflict, her main intent is collective catharsis.

Nalini Malani (born 19 February 1946) is a contemporary Indian artist widely acknowledged to be among the country’s first generation of video artists. She works with several mediums which include theater, videos, installations along with mixed media paintings and drawings. The subjects of her creations are deeply influenced by her experience of migration in the aftermath of the partition of India. Subsequently, pressing feminist issues have also become a part of her creative output. Malani has evolved a visual language that is iconic, moving from stop motion, erasure animations, reverse paintings and most recently to digital animations, where she draws directly with her finger onto a tablet.

Malani is the only child of Satni Advani (Sindhi Sikh) and Jairam Malani (Theosophist). Born in Karachi (Sindh) in what was then British India (now Pakistan) in 1946, Malani’s family sought refuge in India during the partition of India. They relocated to Kolkata (then Calcutta), where her father worked with Tata Airlines (later Air India) and relocated to Mumbai in 1954, where they lived in a colony built for displaced Sindhis. Her family’s experience of leaving behind their home and becoming refugees deeply informs Malani’s artworks.