Blood, Salt, and Fury: Nalini Malani on her latest “Animation Chamber”
By Thomas Patier
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Nalini Malani’s “Of Woman Born” is a collateral event of the Venice Biennale curated by Roobina Karode, Artistic Director of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. The veteran artist’s immersive video installation of sound, text, and sixty-nine animations occupies the salt-encrusted firmaments of a fifteenth-century brick warehouse in Venice’s famous Magazzini del Sale. The walls of Malani’s “animation chamber” enclose us in a tomb-like (or womb-like) space teeming with blood-hued projections of a familiar cast of characters from Malani’s oeuvre, mythology, and art history. Greek goddesses, Lewis Carroll’s Alice (on crutches or integrated with the motif of a “Skipping Girl”), Käthe Kollwitz’s ghostly self-portrait, and figures from Francisco de Goya’s “Disasters of War” surround us like emanations from a fever dream. “Of Woman Born” revolves around the matricidal Greek myth of Orestes, who kills his mother, Clytemnestra, in revenge for her murder of his father, Agamemnon. Ahead of her retrospective at the Tate Modern next year, I spoke to Malani about her artwork, which draws on antiquity to stage a critique of the violence against women that remains a leitmotif of contemporary conflicts.— Zehra Jumabhoy
IN 2024, WHEN THE KIRAN NADAR MUSEUM OF ART INVITED ME to make a new artwork for the Magazzini del Sale in Venice, I was in a state of acute anger and deep grief. Daily tales of war and violence around the world made one want to clench one’s fists, grit one’s teeth, and to shout out in a paean of outraged hysteria. The Museum had rented one of the nine salt warehouses in Venice that once stored up to 4,500 tons of salt (‘white gold’) to be sold—profits from which funded the city’s shipbuilding, naval power, and the expansion of its maritime empire through trade routes and ports across the Mediterranean. Entering the daunting space on my first research trip, it was as if I could feel the history of raw capitalism and how it shaped the world. I touched the dust of the crumbling bricks and licked my fingers. I could still taste the salt.
“Of Woman Born” includes my narration of Euripides’ play Orestes, accompanied by video graffiti on the building’s existing bare brick partitions, resulting in a womb-like “animation chamber”. The work reflects on the Greek myth of Orestes—the son who murdered his mother, Clytemnestra, to avenge the death of his father, Agamemnon. Though initially pursued by the Furies, Orestes was not ultimately punished for his crime. He was rescued by the goddess of war, Athena (who is, of course, not of “woman born,” having emerged fully formed from the head of Zeus). By layering ancient mythology with images of contemporary conflicts, I meditate on themes of male accountability and the burden of patriarchal violence that women bear. Have we understood what it really means to be “Of Woman Born”? As such, the work ruminates on the gendered impact of the violence of war and the absence of the voices of women and children, ironically the most affected groups, in global strife.
My iPad drawings operate like a visual notebook through which, by posting them on my Instagram account, @nalinimalani, I can reach the world without being dependent on galleries and museums. I draw directly on an iPad with my index finger. Working with the fingertip has a sensuosity which is erotic and raw; there is something very direct about this process of drawing, rubbing, scratching and erasing. In a way, it’s like messing around in one’s mind, thoughts and fantasies shooting from one’s head. The visual narrative in my animation chambers works like a stream of consciousness, recreating the complexity of thought and the way time operates at any given moment. They contain a sort of memory-membrane of quotes from people who have addressed the issues that concern me now, generating a sense of direct agency. In this animation chamber—a format I first developed in 2016—multi-channel projections pour out on to the walls of the Magazzini like visual thoughts. In this way, I am able to create a kind of agora, a gathering space in ancient Greece vital for the functioning of democracy where citizens met for political discussions.
For me, the purpose of art is to come to grips with the demons of the past, present, and future; to give form to chaos; to enable us to process fear; and to conceive of a different, more humane future. In the 90s, I broke out of the frame of painting. As sectarian tensions in India grew, I had to devise a completely different method of reaching out to a wider public. I believed theater combined with the moving image would provide the perfect format. I termed this fusion a “videoplay.” My first videoplay was Remembering Toba Tek Singh, 1999, inspired by a short story on the 1947 partition of the subcontinent by Sa’adat Hassan Manto. Exhibited at the former Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai, it attracted nearly five thousand visitors a day. It was suggested that the videoplay should travel along the Pakistan-India border, exhibited on both sides to open up discussions about Partition. The ‘man-made border’ was forced upon us by the British as their final act.
Salt as a demon of the past has appeared in my art since 2000, when I referred to it in my four-channel video installation Hamletmachine, inspired by Heiner Müller’s 1977 play. In colonial India, the British monopolized the sale of salt, making this basic necessity unaffordable for many. To enforce their control in the nineteenth century, they created the Great Hedge of India, a vast, living customs barrier of impenetrable, spiked shrubbery, stretching more than 2,500 miles, to prevent the smuggling of salt from the coastal regions into the mainland and ensure the collection of a substantial salt tax. It is impossible to know how many people died from salt deprivation in India as a result, since salt deficiency was not recorded as a cause of death, though it no doubt worsened the effects of other diseases. In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi led the Salt March, a nonviolent protest against the tax, which had become a symbol of colonial oppression.It will be interesting to see how I, a post-Partition artist in the aftermath of Empire, will map the six decades of my artistic practice at my upcoming survey show at London’s Tate Modern, opening in the summer of 2027. How to transform these artworks into an exhibition nurturing a feminist and humane society? At the age of eighty, I am still convinced that the future is female. There is no other way.
This article was originally published by Artforum.