NALINI MALANI

Malani’s technique of reverse painting is inspired by the tradition of painting on the underside of glass, permitting her to create ghostly effects with apprehensive figures appearing in flowing, liquid forms. The artist borrows the title of the series The Human Stain from Philip Roth’s 2001 novel.

She writes : ‘In Roth’s novel, the main character tries to hide his race behind the fair colour of his skin, where it is advantageous to be taken as fully ‘white’. The human stain is both a mark on the skin and the mark of experience, too messy and convoluted to be sorted out by moral high mindedness.

Myths are our human stain, our oldest stories, which come to us without authors in a snowball effect through the centuries of time, gathering whatever is pertinent to those times.

In this series ‘The Human Stain’, I want to bring forth the characters from the myths, in this case the Greek myths, to resonate in our contemporary moment. Thus we can see stains of Phèdre, Medea and the characters from the Oresteia in our contemporary lives, which unravel relationships in dreams and associations through the archetypes of these universal truths.’

Born in 1946 in Karachi, Nalini Malani lives and works in Mumbai and in Amsterdam. In 2007, she was chosen by Robert Storr for the 52nd Venice Biennale. That same summer, the IMMA in Dublin dedicated a retrospective and a catalogue to the artist. Her work has also been exhibited at the Kiran Nadar Foundation in New Delhi and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2017). Two major retrospectives were organized in 2018 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Castello di Rivoli near Turin. MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Tate Gallery and the MNAM-Centre Pompidou have recently acquired key works by Nalini Malani. Winner of the Joan Miró prize in 2019, she had an exhibition at Fundación Miró in Barcelona the following year, then in Hong Kong at the newly opened M+ Museum in 2021-2022. In 2022 Nalini Malani was awarded a fellowship at the National Gallery in London which ultimately led to an exhibition entitled My Reality is Different. In 2023 she received the Kyoto prize, an outstanding distinction often referred to as the equivalent of Nobel prize in Asia.