Sketchy red figures tumble across fragments of great paintings: they slip down the frets of the lute in Holbein’s The Ambassadors; where Wright of Derby’s lecturer experiments on a cockatoo with an air pump, threatening to suffocate it, they blow the breath of life into the instrument.
The drawings take on a life of their own – they give new limbs to Susannah in Guido Reni’s painting, so that she is ready to fight back against her molesters, the Elders. They draw our attention to the mourners around the Deposition by the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece, echoing in scarlet lines the fringe of blood that pours from Christ’s head.
These busy drawings are everywhere in Nalini Malani’s vast “animation chamber” at the heart of the National Gallery, frenetically engaging with dozens of paintings in the collection and that of the Holburne Museum in Bath. As part of her new exhibition My Reality is Different, they conjure fragments of the pictures, before wrangling with them, pulling them this way and that. Malani, the gallery’s first Contemporary Fellow, calls them her “Greek chorus”, through whom the Mumbai-based artist can “weaponise subtlety and enjoyment” and invite us to explore masterpieces from the two collections with her as a critical guide.
The animations stem from her Instagram animations, made since 2018, in which she uses an iPad to create what she calls “thought bubbles” that try to make sense of our bewildering age. In taking on the National Gallery’s Contemporary Fellowship, in collaboration with the charity Art Fund and – in this first commission – the Holburne, Malani manages brilliantly to preserve this sense of art-making as a record of thinking. It’s as if we enter her brain, as she aptly describes it, as she takes on 22 paintings from the National and three from the Holburne – their iconography, narrative sources and the cultures from which they emerged.
Nine projections overlap to create an enveloping experience around the four high walls of the chamber. Amid the constantly shifting imagery, you feel Malani grappling with the injustice and inequalities at the heart of the societies that supported the artists and gave many of the patrons that commissioned them their wealth. She also addresses the ways in which this is captured in the images, with women endlessly objectified and people of colour mostly represented as servants, little more than objects. Yet she also acknowledges the contrast between this and the humanity that artists imbued in the works.
Having chosen her source material, she used an animation app that begins with a black veil over the image, so that the paintings are revealed through the movements of her fingers over the surface of the iPad. It’s a wonderfully poetic effect – that the images emerge and are erased through Malani’s touch only adds to the sense that we are seeing through her eyes, that it is, as the title says, her reality that engulfs us.
Accompanying the ebb and flow of fragments of the paintings and the animated figures are occasional portraits of anonymous, fictionalised South Asian people. Malani, quoting the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, calls them “subaltern” characters – those denied a voice or excluded from the hierarchies of colonial power. They’re the emotional anchors of Malani’s animations, stiller than much of the other material, often solemnly meeting our gaze. Stock market charts and infographics overlay the portraits, reflecting the global economic systems that continue to “devour their labour and their lives” even now, as she puts it.
Accompanying the visuals is a thunderous (perhaps too thunderous when I saw it), queasily oceanic soundtrack, with snatches of Rule Britannia and booming drums underpinning a voiceover from the actress Alaknanda Samarth. A regular collaborator of Malani’s, Samarth died in 2021. So, Malani revisited an earlier recording in which she reads a stirring text adapted by the duo from Christa Wolf’s Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. Laced with the violence, hellfire and brimstone of classical myth, it’s a bloody, rollicking, seething soundscape, perfectly matched to Malani’s animations.
My Reality is Different is undoubtedly a searing critique of the European imperial societies that were the context for much of the National and Holburne collections, a spotlight on past injustices and their ongoing legacies. But Malani’s ambition has long been to create what she calls a “link language”, where cross-cultural imagery creates universal meanings.
Like all the best contemporary interventions in historic museums, it made me seek out the pieces it references in the National’s collection. I spent a good half hour exploring them, and even though I knew some of them well, I felt I was seeing them all afresh, with the benefit of someone else’s perspective enriching mine. Malani’s reality is different and, now, so is mine.
