Nalini Malani – Shadows from Myth, Mirror of Time

In the shimmering half-light of rotating shadows, echoes of forgotten voices, and archetypes speaking in hushed tones, unfolds the universe of Nalini Malani. Her art does not represent reality; it embodies the undercurrents that divide and connect our times. As a pioneer of video art in India – and, above all, as a storyteller – she restores myth to its roots: as a source of insight and resistance. The figures she gives voice to – Medea, Cassandra, Sita, Draupadi – are not ancient icons, but living spectres that challenge the very foundations of our present.

Source: Apollo Magazine

Malani was born in 1946 in Karachi, shortly before the Partition of British India. Her family fled to India, beginning her life in exile. This experience of uprootedness became deeply embedded in her art, where borders – geographical, political, emotional – are in constant flux. Her studies in Mumbai and Paris brought her into contact with the European avant-garde, postcolonial thought, and feminist theory. She became a crosser of boundaries: between continents, disciplines, and temporalities.

Her work defies categorization. It is as much painting as it is installation, as much performance as literature. Malani uses shadow play, video animations, voice recordings, and reverse glass paintings to transform spaces into chambers of living memory. The viewer does not stand before the work but is immersed within it. In her circular installations, images and voices revolve around the visitor like ritual spirals of history, guilt, oppression and hope.

Within these environments, mythological figures emerge as carriers of collective memory and suppressed truths. In In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), she lets Cassandra – the prophetess no one believes – speak. Through rotating cylinders, video, sound, and fragments of text (including from Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz), she creates a space where long-ignored female insight is finally heard. The images overlap, like memories that refuse to fade. Here, Cassandra is not a warning from the past, but a contemporary voice of knowledge in a world unwilling to listen.

In Remembering Mad Meg (2007), Malani pays tribute to Bruegel’s Dulle Griet, rewriting her as a symbol of female fury. Not hysterical, but historical. Medea, the archetype of the vengeful woman, resounds not as a monster, but as a wounded mother, shaped by structural injustice. The projections become a storm of images that do not suppress rage but give it a place in the museum: the temple of official history.

The Tables Have Turned (2008) also centres on a reversal of power and gaze. The figure of Draupadi, humiliated, disrobed, but never broken, takes centre stage. Against a backdrop of contemporary media violence and patriarchal structures, Malani constructs a space where mythology and present-day reality intertwine. Rotating shadow images compel the viewer to spin with them in a cycle of violence and resistance.

This confrontation reaches new intensity in Can You Hear Me? (2020), an installation at the Whitechapel Gallery where drawings, texts, and projected voices merge into a visual diary. Mythical figures emerge once more: Sita appears as a whispering presence – a woman caught between honour and humiliation, loyalty and autonomy. The installation becomes a room of inner voices: the political becomes intimate, the intimate political.

Finally, there is Gamepieces (2003–2022), where Malani envisions the world as a battlefield of opposing forces: violence and play, man and woman, memory and forgetting. Masks, soldiers, mythical women. They enact a visual chess game in which nothing is certain, except the necessity of continued watching, listening, questioning.

These works are not separate chapters, but episodes in a cyclical narrative where the female perspective – long marginalized – becomes the central axis. Malani rewrites myth not by modernizing it, but by revealing its urgency. Medea, Cassandra, Sita, and Draupadi are not relics of the past; they are voices of the present. They speak out against systems of power, nationalism, sexism, silence. They speak through images, through silence, through light and shadow.

What Nalini Malani offers the art world is more than an oeuvre. It is an alternative form of consciousness. She does not create art to be shown, but to be remembered. In an age of noisy opinion and rapid consumption, she offers a form of slow clarity. Her work demands patience, attentiveness, openness. Qualities as rare as they are essential. She is not a voice in the chorus of art history; she is the counter-song, the undertone, the lost refrain that is finally being heard.

In her chambers of shadow, Medea’s rage, Cassandra’s futile warning, Sita’s humiliation, and Draupadi’s struggle whisper on. They are mirrors in which the world might recognize itself. And perhaps, for a fleeting moment, see something anew.

Sources:

1. Whitechapel Gallery. Nalini Malani: Can You Hear Me?, exhibition catalogue, 2020. Apollo Magazine.

2. "Art without Borders: An Interview with Nalini Malani", 2020. Studio International.

3. "The Future is Female – Interview with Nalini Malani", 2019. The Guardian.

4. "Nalini Malani: Trump and Bolsonaro are Totally Phallic People", 2022. ArtReview.

5. "Gamepieces and Shadow Realities", 2022. e-flux.

6. Jayne Wilkinson, "Crossing Boundaries – On Nalini Malani", 2022.

7. AWARE: Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibitions, "Nalini Malani – Memory and Myth".