Palette of the Profane

Nalini Malani enters the third and final chapter of her year-long retrospective in India, continuing to resist tags and seek out the invisible

The first time I encountered artist Nalini Malani was last year at an exhibition at Vadehra Gallery in New Delhi which included her The Tables Have Turned, a hypnotic, 20 minute-long giant prayer wheel of a shadow play installation using 30 turn tables with reverse painted cylinders and a parallel soundtrack which kept us there for an hour. She was making her way down the stairs, we were wondering aloud where her work was. She smiled, and kept walking, slipping away before we’d grasped who she was. A favourite trick of the woman who won’t be pinned down.

Four women, significant artists of their generation, began to send postcards to each other in the 70s, with an idea of a movement in their heads, and one of them was Malani, today one of India and indeed Asia’s leading contemporary artists. She who dreamt of a movement of 4,000 women. The others, Arpita Singh, Nilima Sheikh and Madhvi Parekh, laughed at her and asked her if they might try for four, at least. This kind of big, bad itch is particular to Malani. “I want to make the invisible visible,” she says. “My concern is with bringing back the profane.”

Creating warm, messy, abundant works of ‘spatial art’, Malani has quietly electrified viewers around the world for more than four decades. A small, elegant woman, hair cut short, neat black handbag crossed over her chest so it hangs practically in front, she looks like any of the people who might come to see her work as she stands by it. Then she speaks, and turns into the powerful artist who has authored titanic works and shows around the world; last month, her largest public presentation at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, where she had been selected to create a special commemoration project for World War One and used In Search of Vanished Blood in a new form, over 10,000 square feet; Cassandra at the Galerie Lelong in Paris (2009), Listening to the Shades at the Arario Gallery in New York City (2008) and major shows at the Walsh Gallery in Chicago and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Last month, she was awarded the St Moritz Art Masters Lifetime Achievement Award, and she has just had a show at the Engadin Museum in the Swiss Alps.

Now, the 68-year-old artist is launching the third chapter of her major retrospective, You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag, a year-long show at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) curated by Roobina Karode, which looks at her work from 1969 to 2014 for the first time in India (retrospectives have run in other countries).

“A red line goes through the work, from the age of 18 to 26 till today,” says Malani. “It’s important to have retrospectives while the artist is around. And it’s very important to me to show in India.The response here is crucial, this is a knowledgeable audience.” It is our reality, ultimately, that she is dealing with. More than four decades of practice have led to this moment, after which, she tells me, she will be resting for a few months and won’t be showing for a couple of years. (A project is in the works, hinted at but not to be talked about yet.)

How did it all begin? At school, Malani was influenced by her botany teachers to look at systems of nature; the circulation of blood for example, and organs, which are embellished in her work even today. She began to want to study art properly, and enrolled at the Sir Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy (or JJ) School of Art in Mumbai. “What was a woman artist in those days?” she asks. “You could do it before getting married. Women joined art schools only if the family allowed the girl to come out. ” Amrita Sher-Gil was mostly abroad, in those days, as was Nasreen Mohamedi. Malani was the only girl in her class, at her time. “Fun?” I ask. She laughs.

Malani’s family had come from Hyderabad, Sindh, where they were landed gentry, and lost a lot in the crossing. “What was important was what was between your ears,” says Malani. “Getting a diploma at art school was vocational training; in the same way a plumber got experience on the job. But my family was not convinced till Cowasji saw my work. He then took a bunch of books out and gave them to me. In the 60s, there weren’t many books like that available.” She lists other mentors like the JJ Dean Palsikar. Importantly, Malani had a studio at the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute, the heart of the Mumbai cultural scene, where, of an evening, Ravi Shankar might be seen doing his riyaz, the Jhaveri sisters might be dancing, Alkazi would be staging his plays on the lawns. A fertile crucible. “I’d been as a girl, and asked the trustees if I could have a studio,” Malani remembers. “I got mine because B Prabha and her husband had eloped. I shared it with an artist working with batik.”

Malani also got involved with the Alkazi theatre unit. “The language was very strongly Hindi, Satyadev Dube was involved.” Gaitonde, Tyabji, all of the greats would jump into taxis and go together to view cinema from Europe; films with links to the Eastern bloc, Cuba, the Czech Republic. “That was what I cut my teeth on,” says Malani.

At JJ, she won a scholarship to go to Paris, where she received her first sense of international perspective; being an Indian, and an Indian artist, in Europe was a difficult business. “It’s very fashionable now, but then, who was I, in France?”

Today, of course, Malani’s works are widely exhibited in those same spaces, often bought by museums; after starting out as a painter, she became a new media artist in the 90s, entering the scene with works like Remembering Toba Tek Singh, which speaks of Partition and is seen as one of the most significant Indian art works of the late 90s. How does she measure her success? “As long as I can get along,” she says. “I make whatever I need. More money ends up calling for more infrastructure, work and people involved with your work. I’m a loner, I can’t have people around me all the time.”

What has mesmerised viewers for so long? “She took risks. At one point, she abandoned oil paintings to do watercolours which she sold for Rs 700,” recalls Ashish Rajadhyaksha, senior fellow at the Centre for Study of Culture and Society and a fond admirer and friend. He still has one, he tells us, in a conversation with the artist organised for the launch of Acid’s third chapter. Therein, the two begin to talk of the old days, of the 90s, after the Wall came down in Germany and in India, in a different way; of 1992 in Bombay and how friends like Rajadhyaksha went missing for a day (“For one day, there was no Ashish,” says Malani); of the beginning of a presence for women in the world of art. “There were shows where women didn’t talk; where we went on the trains in Bombay with our babies on our hips. We could be our own audience,” says Malani. She remembers how she first struck out. “I had to avert my eyes to the hierarchy of the street. How to draw them without being voyeuristic, without a camera or sitting and sketching them? I used memory, I would put down the figure and get the fall of the figure in this way. When you are drawing something and looking at it, you don’t get that.”

“People said, ‘When are you going to stop experimenting, when are you going to make art?’”

In City of Desires, a film depicts the wall-drawing Malani created in 1992 for Mumbai’s Gallery Chemould, erased after 15 days as ‘ephemeral’ work created to protest the neglected and disappearing murals of the akhadas of Nathdwara. What was crucial was the memory of the work, says Malani; of course some of her strongest memories, of Partition’s ravages, are the most indelible, while the most invisible. Lying in a glass case which seems almost besides the point is a concurrent display of the Hieroglyph series (1991), 30 notebooks full of gorgeous Malani-esque swirls of form and colour around Mumbai’s Lonar Chawl, where she worked then; monoprints which were photocopied and then rendered in watercolour, charcoal. Malani kept a photocopy machine to ‘clone’ work on archive paper she tells me, and to reproduce it for parallel exhibitions.This reproducible beauty is a focal aspect of the contagion of her work. I tell her I love the way photocopies smell, redolent of chemical and ink. “You know that stuff gets you high,” she laughs.

In the adjoining room, reverse printed mylar cylinders are literal and metaphorical lanterns, whirling in a theatre of shadow on the wall as a narrative runs, for eight minutes. ‘Mamma take me to English school’ says a little girl’s voice on the loop in Transgressions II; the voice turns into a litany of ‘the best of times’ when ‘nimbu pani cost only 1 rupee, vada pav 1.49’, referring to an advertisement for international telecommunications company Orange, which compared talktime to nimbu pani in terms of purchasing power parity. The ridiculousness of choice against the backdrop of choicelessness echoes through the multi-sensory installation. Three videos projected onto the cylinders demonstrate a typically plural chorus of perspective.

A drawing of Medea and another one which will be erased in a performance, shortly, take up a spot on one of each of the walls that frame the room; these are part of a series of ‘global parasites’ which comment on the new kind of indentured labour that props up the global economy. Next door, in Twice Upon a Time, a reverse painted 11 panel series portrays a series of men, women, creatures and wombs, ending with a quote from feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva, from Experiencing the Phallus as Extraneous. Patriarchy and the need for a balance of male -female perspective is the obvious focus.

The three part structure of the show was intended to draw out attention to Malani’s work and bring viewers in at repeated instances. “This show is meant to be for the year. People will come back for each chapter, is the idea.” She recounts what she says is her most delightful experience; being recognised by two admirers while out at a mall.

How did one of her trademark techniques come about? Erotic paintings which were sold like naughty postcards captivated her, and this became the beginning of a huge mural. With Vivan Sundaram and Bhupen Khakar, she began to experiment with material. “Let’s do glass paintings, we decided. They will work like a mirror.” Thus came reverse painted mylar cylinders. The glass paintings were influenced by KG Subramanyan. “Using glass we could do acrylics as well. I started with these erotic pictures that were made sacred by the Tanjore painters; bringing back the profane.”

Do tags like these and that of ‘feminist’, often applied to her work, bother her? “Tags can mean that something is put away in a drawer,” says Malani. “There should be more male feminists. Patriarchy ties down men too, in many ways, so they are forced to conform to expectations of performance in everything including the sexual. Sufferance goes on. These are often the root of attacks at home, at the workplace. It’s about time concerns were voiced by men.”

As for erotica, the playing field seems level. “It can be erotic even to look at a landscape. Eroticism and sensuousness can be found there. Sculpture, the way forms are drawn—half man, half woman, lingams. We have to bring these principles together, to make a balance.”

Psychoanalysis has been an important influence as young Malani researched and began to weave her themes together. Stories, plays and Hindu myths combined to shape her narratives, in what she calls a “conduit”. This can be seen today, as she connects figures like Medea and Sita.

“One grows older and one grows wiser, one hopes. You start to research other work which enriches your own. I’m not a theoretician myself, but my interests are broad.” She laments genetically modified foods and speaks of the BT brinjal, which aims to homogenise the wonderfully various vegetable.

Meanwhile, she plans a retrospective for that original group of four. “Our daughters—we all have daughters—have been asking us to do one,” she says. Myth and morbidity; disappearing and new traditions; strange, disembodied voices against the visceral: enough to explode any box, any bag. n

Nalini Malani: You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag – Chapter III runs till 30 November at the KNMA, 145 DLF South Court Mall, Saket, New Delhi

Nalini MalaniThe Tables Have TurnedYou Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag