50 years, in retrospect

Arushi Chaudhary

What would a retrospective on five decades of life look like? When it is a life lived in the thick of political consciousness, championing the cause of feminism and the ordeal of surviving Partition, it makes for a surreal, almost dramatic, depiction. That’s exactly what artist Nalini Malani’s works over the past 50 years, currently being displayed at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin, Italy, encompass.

The second part of the retrospective exhibition, Rebellion of the Dead: 1969-2019 — Part II, opened on September 17 and will run through January 6, 2019. The first curated retrospective collection was displayed at the Center Pompidou in Paris in October last year.

Born in February 1946 in Karachi, in pre-Partition India, Nalini’s family was forced to escape to Bombay via sea route, leaving behind all their life’s earnings. Starting over in a new city with unfamiliar language and culture and imposed poverty, made the transition extremely difficult. While Nalini was still a toddler then, the experience had a deep impact on her consciousness and her early works. Eventually, she would go on to use her artistic expressions to bring to life stories that have been forgotten, ignored or marginalised in the pages of history.

Starting out as a figurative painter who raised issues of gender, class and race through her work, Nalini eventually branched out to drawing, projected animation, video and other experimental forms using these mediums to explore the themes of femininity, time and life cycles, from political and emancipated perspectives. Commenting on this diversification of art forms she works with, Nalini says just the way a writer can write a novel, novella, short story and even a postcard, an artist too can experiment with a whole spectrum of formats.

Based on archetypes taken from different cultures and deliberately theatrical creations, the focus of her work is to engage the beholder in multisensory, dynamic environments. The retrospective exhibition is an assimilation of some such important installations created over the past five decades, apprehended from a non-chronological and thematic angle. The display includes some of her recent and most riveting works, The Tables Have Turned from 2008, and In Search of Vanished Blood from 2012, besides some new installations.

The explorations of female subjectivity and vehement denunciation of violence in Nalini’s works are a comment on the precariousness of human life. Her art is also reflective of the “inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure”. To bring out her unsparing condemnation of issues that she feels strongly about, Nalini has reached out and collaborated with theatre personalities, performers, thinkers to seek interdisciplinary depiction of art. Her work transcends between corporeal and temporal confrontations of the past, present and future, touching upon the elements of myth, fable, truth and resistance.

Describing her art as female-oriented from the very beginning, Nalini says, “Women’s relationship with their body is in stark contrast to that of men and so is their position in the society, no matter which part of the world they belong to. That is why female protagonists have been a strong recurring theme since my early works when I was working with experimental black-and-white films. Even as I moved on to explore other disciplines of art, female characters from history, literature or mythology continued to find a presence in my works, often as a means to reinterpret male-dominated history from a female perspective.”

As she reflects on her journey as an artist over the past five decades, Nalini is certain that the feminist approach and her commitment to the causes that resonate with her will continue for the rest of her life. “Yes, women have acquired some degree of equality in selective societies but a lot is left wanting still. Understanding the world from a feminist point of view is essential for a hopeful future of human progress,” she says, adding that it is her objective to assert that this is the only way forward.

To bring these themes to life, Nalini relies on larger-than-life art with nuances such as shadow play, painting beyond the frame and stop-motion animations.

The stop-motion animations, for example, are created by projecting images on turning cylinders, which then cast their shadows. The coloured projected circles appear in the loop intermittently, weaving together the images on the cylinders, and thus, creating superimpositions of drawings and paintings through a play of shadows. The depictions in these drawings and paintings are often contrasting in their themes. In Exposing Broken Promises, for instance, you have young girls caught in the midst of violence and poverty on the one hand and an Alice-like character skipping rope, on the other. Imagery of execution and torture juxtaposed with that of a monster morphing its way into a woman, the narrative changes as the series progresses but the underlying oppression and repetition of violence remains a constant. The same is true of her expansive body of works.

Just days before the opening of the retrospective exhibition, the museum released a video of Nalini working on a colossal wall installation in complete solitude. In the present-day context, that image — just like the themes of Nalini’s works — fits in the social milieu. Back when she started, it was a different story altogether. Her ideas of feminism, battling social oppression and urban dystopia were way ahead of her time. The conflict is best summed up in writer and poet Adil Jussawalla’s observation of Nalini’s work in 1973: “What is new is that these women fight back. They will not watch and wait and endure with their large sad eyes as women have been shown to be doing ever since Amrita Sher-Gil.”