राष्ट्रीय (18/09/2014)
Nalini Malani: You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag’
September 18, 2014, New Delhi. Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) is pleased to announce the preview of the third and final chapter of Nalini Malani’s first ever Indian retrospective on 25th September 2014 at KNMA, Saket from 7:00 pm onwards. The evening will commence with a conversation between renowned writer and senior fellow at Centre for study of Culture and Society, Ashish Rajadhyaksha and the artist Nalini Malani at 6:00 pm. After a spectacular year of international exhibits and successes Nalini Malani is back in the country to open Chapter III of the seminal Indian exhibition ‘You Can’t Keep Acid In a Paper Bag’ - a retrospective in three chapters, at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. The retrospective has significantly brought home some of the artist’s major installations and international projects that have never been shown in India before along with important material from the artist’s archive spanning a period of fifty years.
Nalini Malani on her retrospective. “Retrospective exhibitions are a landmark in an artist's vocation as they bring together works made sometimes over many decades, and provide an invaluable historical survey for the artist. Memory is the scribe of history.I have been fortunate to have this retrospective in my lifetime and not when I am dead and gone. At KNMA looking at the span of my work from 1969 to 2014 what is revelatory has been the red line that has passed through these 50 years. My concerns in the 60s remain intact till today.”
Highlights of Chapter III include the video/shadow play ‘Transgressions III’ (2001/2014) and a multi-panel painting installation ‘Twice upon a Time‘ (2014), both of which will premiere exclusively at KNMA. This installation, taking up an entire room, is in the style of the reverse-painting for which Malani received international acclaim at the Venice Biennial in 2007. The video/shadow play that combines video projections with rotating reverse-painting have in last 15 years become a global trademark of Nalini Malani’s artistic practice. The international success of this medium helped secure places for her work in premium collections such as MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, as well as important exhibitions such as Documenta 13 (2012).
For more than four decades, Nalini Malani has addressed through her experimental art social, political and societal issues surrounding the Indian subcontinent, including the conflict between India and Pakistan, the abuse and rape of women, and the struggle for democracy. Starting out as a painter, Malani was one of the first Indian artists who broke out of the classical painting frame in the late eighties to reach a wider audience, with installations, theatre, ephemeral wall drawings, erasure performances and video/shadow plays. Malani’s intense and committed art reveals her search for the profound certainties of life, of society, of experience-persisting 'evidence', which is encountered and felt.
Nalini Malani’s largest public presentation took place on August 4th 2014 at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, where she was selected to make a special commemoration project for World War One. The artist projected ‘In Search of Vanished Blood’ in a new avatar, at the Western and Southern wing of the gallery. This large scale work by Malani covered over ten thousand square feet, and has since received significant national and international acclaim.
In addition to this accolade, Malani was also recently awarded St. Moritz Art Masters Lifetime Achievement Award created by Cartier (2014). Other past awardees include Ai Weiwei (2013, China), Oscar Niemeyer (2012, Brazil), William Klein (2011, USA), Ilya & Emilia Kabakov (2010, Russia), Richard Long (2009, England), Robert Indiana (2008, USA). In 2013 Nalini Malani won the Fukuoka Prize for Art and Culture.
Born in 1946 in Karachi, Undivided India, Nalini Malani secured a Diploma in Fine Arts from Sir JJ School of Arts, Bombay (1969) and the French Government Scholarship for Fine Arts to study in Paris from 1970 to 1972. In 2010 she was conferred an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. |
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