NALINI MALANI

Malani’s key projects such as Utopia (1969–76), Mother India: Videoplays (2005), In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), and the later series The Human Stain (from 2021) have been presented at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), The National Gallery, London, and M+ Museum, Hong Kong.

In 2026, Malani will present Nalini Malani – Of Woman Born as an official Collateral Event of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, a large-scale commission by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art at Magazzini del Sale in Venice.

Early life in Karachi, Kolkata and Bombay

Nalini Malani was born in 1946 in Karachi, in what was then undivided British India, and became a child refugee when her family left the city in the wake of Partition in 1947. The family moved first to Kolkata and then to Bombay (now Mumbai), experiences of dislocation and resettlement that would later inform her sustained focus on exile, memory, and communal violence. Growing up in Bombay, she encountered both the cosmopolitan promise of the post-independence metropolis and its underlying tensions, which would become an implicit backdrop to many of her later works. In her Ocula conversation she reflected, “I use the Partition of 1947 as a warning signal. You have to remember history, or you repeat it,” underlining how the trauma of displacement shapes her work’s continual return to histories of violence and erasure.

Education in Mumbai and early experiments

Between 1964 and 1969, Malani studied at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Bombay, one of India’s most influential art schools. During this period, she also worked from a studio at the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute, an experimental cultural centre where painters, theatre-makers, musicians, and dancers shared space. Exposure to experimental theatre and “new writing” in India helped shape the narrative, performative dimension of her practice, encouraging her to think of images as part of staged situations rather than isolated objects.

Soon after graduating, Malani joined the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW), founded by Akbar Padamsee in Bombay. As the youngest and only female participant, she gained access to film and photographic equipment that was otherwise difficult to obtain in India at the time. There she produced camera-less photographs, 8mm and 16mm films, and stop-motion animations, including early works such as Dream Houses and Utopia (1969–76), which established the “filmic” way of seeing that would extend into her painting and installations. She also adopted and transformed reverse painting on acrylic and glass—a technique she learned from Bhupen Khakhar, a key figure in the Baroda narrative painting movement whose use of popular and devotional imagery demonstrated how everyday stories could enter modern Indian art. Malani adapted this reverse-painting approach to her own interest in myth and politics, using double-sided images as the basis for later rotating-cylinder works in which painting, light, and moving shadows merge.

Expanding practice: from painting to video plays

From the late 1960s into the 1980s, Malani developed a practice that moved fluidly between drawing, painting, photography, and film, steadily building a vocabulary of layered images and fragmented narratives. In the late 1980s her work took a radical turn. Confronted by the rise of religious orthodoxy and Hindu nationalist politics in India—intensifying through events that culminated in the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and subsequent communal riots—she sought forms that could address this charged atmosphere directly. Malani expanded her practice into large-scale video and shadow plays involving multi-channel projection, in which animated drawings, text, and sound unfold in time like experimental theatre and reach audiences beyond the confines of traditional painting exhibitions.

In these works, images are often repeatedly drawn, erased, and redrawn, their partial visibility standing in for fragile or contested memories. Soundtracks combine voices, music, and ambient recordings, creating dense atmospheres that place viewers inside situations rather than in front of them. This shift toward immersive, time-based installation allowed Malani to address complex historical and political subjects—Partition, communal riots, war, gendered violence—in a way that matched their layered and unstable character.

A seminal example from this period is Transgressions (1998–), a video/shadow-play installation that projects animations and painted imagery from rotating cylinders onto the surrounding walls. First shown in the late 1990s and later featured at institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the work juxtaposes commercial logos, colonial maps, and hybrid mythological figures to critique globalisation, religious nationalism, and caste and gender hierarchies in India. Transgressions’ combination of painting, moving image, and sound anticipated many of the strategies that would define Malani’s later large-scale installations.

International recognition and key works and projects in the 2000s

By the early 2000s Malani had become a major figure in Indian and international contemporary art, with solo exhibitions and large-scale projects at leading museums. Works such as Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of Pain (often shown within the broader Mother India: Videoplays cycle, 2005) critically reworked the image of “Mother India” familiar from cinema and nationalist iconography, juxtaposing it with scenes of protest, conflict, and everyday survival. The multi-channel installation In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), first presented at dOCUMENTA (13) and subsequently at institutions including Tate and MoMA, combines rotating painted cylinders, projection, and sound to evoke the persistence of violence and the invisibility of its victims, especially women.

These projects helped secure Malani’s position within major international exhibitions and collections, including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou, Tate, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. At the same time, her work featured in important thematic shows and biennials that framed her practice within wider discourses on postcolonialism, feminism, and experimental media.

In the 2010s and 2020s, Malani continued to evolve her language of animated drawing and immersive installation. The series The Human Stain (from 2021) extends her interest in contamination and vulnerability, using densely layered imagery to address ecological crisis and the precarious status of human and non-human life.

From 2020 she served as the first recipient of the National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship with Art Fund in London, culminating in Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different – National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship with Art Fund, an exhibition at the Holburne Museum, Bath (7 October 2022–8 January 2023) and at The National Gallery, London (2 March–11 June 2023). Comprising a 40-metre animation panorama made up of 25 projected hand-drawn animations, My Reality is Different reimagines canonical European paintings through an animated, feminist lens.

Venice 2026 with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

In 2026, Malani will present Nalini Malani – Of Woman Born at Magazzini del Sale in Venice as an official Collateral Event of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, the project unfolds as an “Animation Chamber” centred on the recurring figure of a skipping girl, expanding her long-standing focus on women’s stories, inherited narratives, and resistance into the specific urban and cultural context of Venice.

Institutional solo exhibitions

Malani has presented numerous institutional solo exhibitions across Asia, Europe, and North America. Key institutional and museum solo shows include:

• Nalini Malani – Of Woman Born, Magazzini del Sale no. 5, Venice, official Collateral Event of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2026.
• Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different – National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship with Art Fund, The National Gallery, London, 2 March–11 June 2023.
• Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different – National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship with Art Fund, Holburne Museum, Bath, 7 October 2022–8 January 2023.
• Vision in Motion, M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 2021–22.
• Nalini Malani: Gamepieces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2022.
• Can You Hear Me?, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2020–21.
• Major retrospective, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, 2018.
• The Rebellion of the Dead: Retrospective 1969–2018, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2017.
• Transgressions, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2017.
• Solo exhibition, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2007 (her first museum solo in Europe).
• Mother India: Videoplays by Nalini Malani, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2012.
• Major solo presentations at Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2019), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020–21), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka (early 2000s), and the New Museum, New York (2002).

These museum shows, often built around large-scale installations and multi-room environments, have been crucial in establishing her reputation as a leading figure in moving-image installation and politically engaged contemporary art.

Major group exhibitions, biennials and triennials (selected)

Malani has participated in many influential group exhibitions, biennials, and triennials that have helped situate her practice within global discourses on postcolonialism, feminism, and experimental media. Select highlights include:

• Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (1993; 2012).
• Havana Biennial, Havana (1997).
• Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, London (2001).
• Unpacking Europe, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and partner venues (2002).
• Scenes from a New Heritage and From the Collection 1960–1969, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007–10).
• Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah Art Foundation (Sharjah Biennial 7, 2005).
• dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012).
• The Collection Stedelijk Base, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2018).
• Awakenings: Art and Society in Asia 1960s–1990s, Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2018).

In the last three years, notable group projects have included displays of In Search of Vanished Blood and related works at Tate Modern, London, as part of collection and moving-image presentations, and inclusion in thematic exhibitions on feminist and decolonial practices at institutions such as the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and M+ Hong Kong. These appearances underscore the continuing relevance of her work for discussions of gender, migration, and global politics.

Collections, honours and ongoing significance

Malani’s work is held in numerous international public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Tate, Centre Pompidou, M+ Museum Hong Kong, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.

She has received numerous honours, among them an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010, the Arts & Culture Fukuoka Prize in 2013, the St. Moritz Art Masters Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014, the Asian Art Game Changer Award in 2016, the Joan Miró Prize in 2019, and the Kyoto Prize for Arts and Philosophy in 2023. Her National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship (2020–23) enabled her to re-interpret canonical European paintings through a critical, feminist lens, resulting in the ambitious animation cycle My Reality is Different.

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Ocula | 2026