Indian artist Nalini Malani had been looking forward to flying to Adelaide to see her first Australian survey open at the Art Gallery of South Australia – but she wasn’t be able to. Just as she was leaving India for the opening of an exhibition in the UK – one of five major international projects she is opening over a five-month period – the Australian High Commission informed her that she had applied for the wrong visa.
“I said, ‘I’m not going for business; I’m going for a cultural purpose. I’m not going for a job or anything’,” the 76-year-old artist says, from her second home in Amsterdam that she shares with her husband, Dutch art historian Johan Pijnappel. “They refused to shift it. They said, ‘Now you have to apply all over again’.”
But she had no time to do so. So Malani has missed the opening of Gamepieces, which features film, video, installations, animations, painting and photography drawn from more than 50 years of practice, with many works ruminating on her family’s refugee experience after the 1947 partition of her homeland into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, as well as sectarian violence.
The exhibition opens with a room devoted to Malani’s latest work, Can You Hear Me? which comprises 88 stop-motion animations she created with her fingers on an iPad app, “like dipping your hands in paint”, and projected across a series of large walls like chambers.
Referencing lines from philosopher Hannah Arendt and dramatists Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, the animations were first exhibited in Mumbai, and represent the artist’s response to several rapes of women and children in India, most notoriously, the case of an eight-year-old girl who was kidnapped, drugged and held captive by a group of men in a temple, where she was repeatedly raped then beaten to death. Among those convicted of the rape and murder were a Hindu priest and police officers.
“She was a girl from a nomadic Kashmiri community, and she used to graze her little ponies in the jungle in the valley,” says Malani. “She was from a Muslim community, and it was part of a kind of ethnic cleansing, because these men were Hindus and the child was Muslim. The horrific nature of it – I couldn’t get it out of my head, and I had to make this animation about her.”
Born in 1946 in Karachi in Sindh, a province that became part of Pakistan the following year, Malani was not yet one year old when her theosophist father and Sikh mother sought refuge with their only child in Bombay (now Mumbai), then Calcutta (now Kolkata).
“We had no state,” says Malani. “My parents didn’t know the language and food, and the Sindh culture was very syncretic [combining cultural practice]. They were considered half Muslim, because their language was like Urdu writing, from right to left, and the language had a lot of Persian in it … [they had] a terrible sense of displacement.”
The centrepiece is a four-channel video installation, Gamepieces 2003-2020, which incorporates projections and six rotating plastic cylinders hung from above. An initial version of the work was inspired by slowly rotating Buddhist prayer wheels, as a calming response to riots and sectarian violence in Bombay and northern India in 1992-93. The video elements are a response to the “madness” Malani saw in the “jubilation” over India and Pakistan’s nuclear testing in 1998.
In her 2003 video work Unity of Diversity, 11 women dressed in different Indian costumes and playing musical instruments are animated to come alive, eventually reaching for guns. Surgical camera film of an abortion is superimposed over the tableau.
“Science and technology have given us so much, we’re talking to each other over oceans but somehow the human mind, the human psyche, hasn’t kept abreast,” says Malani. “How much do we really communicate so that we talk about peace? How come we still have to do the crudest thing possible and take guns and shoot at each other?
“Look at the way the vaccines were produced in one year. I mean, that’s a miracle. No vaccine has been produced like that. We were saved by the scientists … why aren’t our minds and hearts moving along with the technology?”
Malani says “the future is female”, and the world needs leaders in touch with the “instinctual knowledge” of the feminine side of their brains, “otherwise we’re doomed”.
“The idea of the female and male does not belong to a particular gender. It belongs to us all, and it depends on the balance that you have in yourself,” she says. “You have a Trump or a Bolsonaro – they are totally phallic people. But you also have men who are inclined to feminist thought. We really have to activate the feminist in us, whatever you may be.”
Malani still hopes to come to Australia to see her exhibition, before it closes in January. “My husband and I, we both wanted to come – but let’s see, maybe towards the end of the show we might be able to manage something.”
Nalini Malani: Gamepieces is at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 22 January 2023. Steve Dow travelled to Adelaide as a guest of AGSA.
