Artist-Led Exhibition Tour | Can You Hear Me? by Nalini Malani

Can You Hear Me?

Textual and visual quotations, annotations and snippets of sound and music — what the artist calls ‘thought bubbles’— come together, intersect, and are taken apart in this solo exhibition. Projecting a large-scale, nine-channel video installation of over 88 iPad-drawn animations, the exhibition is a powerful expression of outrage against the persistence of social violence and global injustice.

Nalini Malani (b.1946, Karachi, Undivided India; lives and works in Bombay*) completed a Diploma in Fine Arts from the Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay in 1969 and received a French Government Scholarship for Fine Arts to study in Paris from 1970 to 1972. In 2010 she was conferred an Honorary Doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute. Prizes include: Fukuoka Prize for Arts and Culture, 2013; St. Moritz Art Masters Lifetime Achievement Award, 2014; Asian Art Game Changers Award, Hong Kong, 2016; Joan Miró Prize, Barcelona, 2019; the first National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship, London, 2020 and in the Kyoto Prize in Arts & Philosophy in 2023.

As the pioneer of video art in India, Nalini Malani has a fifty-year multimedia practice that includes film, photography, painting, Wall Drawing/Erasure Performance, theatre, animation and Video/Shadow Play. Embodying the role of the artist as a social activist, Malani gives voice to the marginalised through her visual stories. She draws inspiration from history, culture and her direct experience of the Partition of India to look at themes of violence, feminism, politics, racial tension and social inequality, exploring in particular the repressive powers of the state.

Starting out as a filmmaker and photographer after graduating from the Sir J. J. School of Art, Malani broke again out of the classical painting frame in the late 1980s to reach a wider audience, as a protest against the rise of orthodoxy in politics. A leading experimental artist in India, Malani’s committed art practice reveals a search for the profound certainties in life, society and experience-persisting ‘evidence’. In her art she places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and inter nationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. As an ‘artist’s artist’ she has inspired the next generation of young artists in the sub-continent.

Malani’s work has been celebrated in more than 200 international museum presentations, under which five retrospectives, twenty solo exhibitions and 22 biennales around the world, and has been acquired by more than thirty international institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris; M+, Hong Kong; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

Time | 3:30 PM
Location | Concrete