Pertinent in Paris

An artist known to ask profound questions with her work, Nalini Malani will be the first Indian artist to have a Retrospective at the prestigious Centre Pompidou in Paris

Come October 2017 to January 2018, the Centre Pompidou in Paris will organise a retrospective of the Indian artist Nalini Malani, making her the first Indian artist to have a retrospective at the prestigious venue.

In a career spanning more than half a century, the prolific artist has constantly raised pertinent questions through her art.

Nalini was born in Karachi in 1946, and was raised in Mumbai. After completing her diploma at JJ School of Arts, where “intellectual life was quite meagre,” she left on a French government scholarship to Paris, which she calls, “a university in itself”.

“The scenario in Paris was just after 1968, and the massive student revolution was very open, so even to talking to any professor or lecturer was easy. I eagerly embraced what was offered in Paris at that time. I had a student card, which allowed me to go sit in on lectures at the Sorbonne and at the Sciences Po (political science department). So apart from listening to Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre and Michel Leiris, there were also people like Claude Levi Strauss. Naom Chomsky who used to come quite often. One person whom I took particular interest in was Charles Bettelheim who had written the book India Independent as well as on post colonial Sri Lanka, and he was very interested in the new India,” she recalls.

Apart from learning from some of the most influential minds of the 20th century, Paris taught Nalini to look back at her own roots and identity. “My first encounter with an erudite scholar anthropologist on caste was Louis Dumont, who wrote about the hierarchy of caste which was one of the best books at that time on the subject. The most detailed book on caste was written by a Frenchman,” she exclaims. It was to converse with intellectuals, artists and writers, that she started researching more and more about India. To sum up her experience in Paris, she states, “Paris got me involved in my own country.”

At the very inception of her career in 1960s, Malani started making experimental films and camera-less photographs, and the next few decades saw her move on to video and feminist art in India. In the 1990s, she became known for her multimedia projects featuring recurring themes around the subject of gender, memory, race, and transnational politics, especially with reference to India’s post-colonial history after Independence and partition. This developed into her all encompassing shadow plays of the 21st century, which found place in major collections such as the MoMA (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Talking more about her interdisciplinary work, she acknowledges her formative years in India. “I was very lucky that even in my first year in JJ, I was able to get a studio at the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute. Now, this was the place where artists from every discipline — musicians, dancers, theatre people, sculptors, poets, photographers and of course painters worked. For me, as an 18-year-old, it an eye-opener,” she says. Situated at Bhulabhai Desai Road (erstwhile Warden Road), Bhulabhai Memorial Institute would host some of the most important artists of the time, from MF Husain, to Tyeb Mehta to Ravi Shankar to Gaitonde to Vijay Tendulkar. “I met people like (Ebrahim) Alkazi, Satyadev Dubey (she went on to work with him as well). That’s also where I met Alaknanda Samarth, with whom I worked later. I would go to the studio at 6 am, and there would be Annapurna Devi doing her riyaaz, which was a magical experience. I can never forget those moments of listening to a morning raag and eventually I got very interested in Hindustani classical music. All of these factors embellished my work,” she adds.

One of her groundbreaking works, In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), which was also one of the highlights of dOCUMENTA(13), is a convergence of painting, installation, sound and projection. It takes its title from the 1965 Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Urdu poem Lahu Ka Surag. “I have the poem as a projection on an actor’s face, so you see it scrolling on her face over a veil. It has many things woven into it — it’s about exploitation of the subaltern, the kind of situations that we have lived through in India and of course the violence against women.” The six-channel video/shadow installation will be shown again this year from July 1 till October 16 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

On her creative process, Nalini says, “I learnt something from musicians — riyaaz, and this I learnt by listening to the dialogues between the students and teachers. I realised that things aren’t just spurted out, it is an effect of riyaaz, a constant working of a raag, where a spark comes out. So, it is the dogged work everyday that I would advocate for anyone who wants to do creative work. Just work. And I do that everyday.” An avid reader, she is currently reading Bisham Sahni’s Today’s Past – A Memoir.

In her prolific career, she has raised several pertinent questions, but that doesn’t keep her from asking more. In a conversation with her curator, Sophie Duplaix, when she was asked to comment on her age and her new work, she promises a lot more to come in the future — “Maybe 70 is the new 20” — echoing an anecdote on French American artist Louise Bourgeois, whose work only took off at the age at 70. There’s no dearth of vitality in the artist and that’s a benison for the Indian art world.