Nalini Malani (born 19 February 1946) is an Indian artist, among the country’s first generation of video artists.
She works with several mediums which include theater, videos, installations along with mixed media paintings and drawings. The subjects of her creations are influenced by her experience of migration in the aftermath of the partition of India. Pressing feminist issues have become a part of her creative output. Malani uses a visual language that moves from stop motion, erasure animations, reverse paintings and to digital animations, where she draws directly with her finger onto a tablet.
Malani made her first video work ‘Dream Houses’ (1969), as the youngest and only female participant of the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW), an experimental multi-disciplinary artist workshop in Bombay (Mumbai) by late artist Akbar Padamsee.
Her works have been shown at various museums, including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the National Gallery in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
This informal conversation took place in March 2015 in Nalini Malani’s studio in Mumbai during a C-MAP trip to India. Gayatri Sinha and Stuart Comer talked to Malani about her practice, spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s. The discussion focused on Malani’s early lens-based experiments, her interest in psychoanalysis, her activities in the 1980s…
