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’.”
