Nalini Malani | Galerie Lelong

Gamepieces, 2003/2009. MoMA Collection, New York.

Widely considered the pioneer of video art in India, Nalini Malani explores drawing, painting, and the extension of those forms into projected animation, video, and film. Her works in new media often take the form of monumental and immersive shadow play pieces that create mesmerizing layers of imagery and sound. Committed to the role of the artist as social activist, Malani focuses on creating dynamic visual stories about those who have been ignored, forgotten, or marginalized by history. Drawn from history, culture, and her direct experience as a refugee of the Partition of India and the legacy of colonialism and de-colonization, Malani’s work explores violence, the feminine, and the politics of national identity.

Malani’s work is represented in numerous public collections worldwide including the Asia Society Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Modern Art Mumbai, India; National Gallery of Modern Art New Delhi, India; British Museum, England; and Stedelijk Museum, The Netherlands.
"I use myth because the artist’s endeavour is always to connect with the people who come to see one’s work and mythologies are link languages. They have come to us like universal truths, without authors. What I want to do is bring them into the contemporary arena."

—Nalini Malani
Ballad of a Woman, 2023, video projected on the facade of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’s Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion. Photo MMFA, Jean-François Brière.

Malani recently presented major solo exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Québec, Canada (2023); National Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2023); Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia (2022); M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2022), Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Netherlands (2021); Whitechapel Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2021); Serralves Museum, Portugal (2020); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain (2020); Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Massachusetts (2016); and Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, France (2010). Her solo exhibition The Rebellion of the Dead: Retrospective 1969-2018, was showed in two parts at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2017) and Castello di Revoli, Turin, Italy (2018). The artist was recently awarded the Joan Miró Prize and the National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship with Art Fund.

Malani was born in 1946 in Karachi, India. She currently lives and works in India and Europe.

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Installation view of City of Desires—Crossing Boundaries, 1992–2023 in Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada, Nalini Malani: Crossing Boundaries, 2023.
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Publications
Nalini Malani, In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012, at dOCUMENTA 13. 6 Channel Video/Shadow Play, with 5 rotating reverse painted Mylar cylinders, Sound, 11 minutes.
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