In a unique collaboration the Centre Pompidou and Castello di Rivoli are staging Indian artist Nalini malani’s first retrospective in france and Italy. Presented in Paris in 2017-2018, then in Rivoli in 2018, this retrospective in two parts selectively covers fifty years of creativity. In the Centre Pompidou exhibition, the artist presents works from 1969-2018, including her latest painting series All We Imagine as Light and the site responsive Wall drawing/Erasure Performance Traces.
Apprehending Nalini malani’s work from both a non-chronological and a thematic angle, the exhibitions tackle the various concepts underlying her œuvre : utopia, dystopia, her vision of India and of the role of women in the world. The result of the Partition of India in 1947 has had a life long traumatic effect on malani’s family, whose experiences as refugees continue to inform her art practice.
Her explorative investigation of female subjectivity and her profound condemnation of violence – in its insidious and mass forms – is a constant reminder of the vulnerabilities and precariousness of life and human existence. In her art she places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses.
Malani’s collaborations in performance, theatre and publishing with thinkers such as social-cultural anthropologist Dr. Arjun Appadurai, actress Alaknanda Samarth, Butoh dancer Harada Nobuo and theatre director Dr. Anuradha Kapur are testament to her constant seeking of interdisciplinary forms to best investigate and communicate personal and political issues. Her work exists as a