Nalini Malani

Nalini Malani was born in Karachi in February 1946. Her family moved to India after Partition, a subject she has returned to again and again. She took her diploma at the Sir J J School of Art in Bombay in 1969, then spent 1970 to 1972 in Paris on a French government scholarship.

Dream Houses (1969), her first film, came out of Akbar Padamsee’s Vision Exchange Workshop in Bombay, where she was the youngest participant and the only woman. By 1981 she was one of the six painters in Place for People, alongside Bhupen Khakhar and Sudhir Patwardhan.

In the late 1980s Bhupen Khakhar taught her reverse painting. After the violence of the early 1990s the work left the canvas: working with theatre people, she moved into video, wall drawings and shadow plays, in which reverse-painted cylinders turn and throw their images across a dark room. Unity in Diversity (2003), a video play, restages Raja Ravi Varma’s Galaxy of Musicians; Mother India (2005) runs across five screens. In Search of Vanished Blood, five turning painted cylinders, was made for Documenta 13 in Kassel in 2012. Since 2016 she has drawn on an iPad and animated the drawings, often by erasing them.

The subjects stay constant: Partition, communal violence, and the women of myth and history who go unheard. The Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Castello di Rivoli near Turin gave her major solo shows, and in 2020 the Whitechapel Gallery in London filled a room with 88 of her animations as Can You Hear Me?. She won the Joan Miró Prize in 2019 and the Kyoto Prize in 2023.