ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI

CAN YOU HEAR ME? | NALINI MALANI 1969-2018

About artist and exhibition

ARARIO GALLERY Shanghai is pleased to introduce Nalini Malani (b.1946-), an internationally

acclaimed female artist, for the November art season. Widely acknowledged for her masterful

refinement of a woman's historical vision concerning the global tensions around piercing

conflicts, Malani is regarded as one of the foremost contemporary artists from India. Her work

will be exhibited at the upcoming Shanghai Biennale 2018. Also she was invited to participate

in many grande International exhibitions, including Kassel Documenta in 2012, La Biennale di

Venezia in 2007 and others. Malani is one of few female artists from Asia to hold a

retrospective exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2017 and also at Castello di Rivoli, Italy

at present. As well as the first woman artist from Asia to get the honor of the Fukuoka Arts

and Culture Prize in the field of contemporary art in 2013.

Brought up in India, a melting pot of diverse ethnic groups, languages and religions, Nalini

Malani focuses on the trauma caused by endless conflicts between religions and ethnic groups.

The history of constant disunion and chaos, which dispersed to racial and religious disputes

even after they were liberated from long colonialism, has been the solid basis for her works.

Her artistic language, categorized into race, class and gender, is represented as a visual final

product mixing the wounds and suffering of India’s history with her own personal stories.

Their narratives, wherein past and present, true records and falsehoods, and history and myth

are linked like a Mobius strip, are dismantled and restructured in various methods within an

organic space where visual media, its creator, and its viewers join together. They are both

inscribers and creators of history at the same time.

ARARIO GALLERY Shanghai will launch Malani’s solo debut in China following the

retrospectives at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, 2005, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in

New Delhi, 2014, Centre Pompidou in France, 2017, and Castello di Rivoli in Italy, October

2018, which is selected as the best exhibition of last week. The exhibition title Can You Hear

Me?: Nalini Malani 1969-2018 comes from one of the artist’s stop-motion sketch

animation series, made entirely with iPad drawings in 2018, which urgently calls for the

public's attention toward numerous conflicts, clashes, and paradoxes in opposition with the

universal value of the mankind. Malani’s new stop motion animations made of iPad drawings

have been shared with public through her Instagram(www.instagram.com/nalinimalani) and

by exhibiting these brand new stop motion animation works with her very first stop motion

video created in 1969, Nalini Malani exhibition at Arario Gallery Shanghai will deliver the never

stop experimental spirit of this master female artist, Nalini Malani. The exhibition

encompasses Malani’s very early photography and video from 1960s, large-scale film

installations, stop-motion animations, reverse paintings and other works emblematic of the

artist’s rich career over the last fifty years

Nalini Malani’s work is represented in public collections at major institutions worldwide

including the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Asia Society Museum (New York, USA),

Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA), Fukuoka

Asian Art Museum (Fukuoka, Japan), Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), ARARIO MUSEUM

(Seoul, Korea), Auckland Art Gallery (Auckland, New Zealand), Castello di Rivoli Museum of

Contemporary Art (Turin, Italy), Art Gallery of Western Australia (Perth, Australia), Queensland

Art Gallery (Brisbane, Australia), Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), Kadist Art

Foundation (San Francisco, USA), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, USA), Kiran Nadar

Museum of Art (New Delhi, India), National Gallery of Modern Art (Bombay, New Delhi, India),

Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands) , Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean

(Mauritius), Google Collection (New Delhi, India), Anupam and Lekha Poddar Collection (New

Delhi, India) , Burger Collection (Hong Kong), Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne,

Switzerland) and many more.

Selected Work Images

1. Early stop motion animation from 1969

Nalini Malani| Dream Houses (version I) | 1969| Single channel digitalized stop motion film, sound | 2:07 min © Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

2. Early photography from 1970s

Nalini Malani| Untitled I,II,III | 1970 | 112 x 95 cm with border |Camera-less photography Digitally printed on

Photo Rag Pearl Hahnemühle paper © Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

3. Video installation_In Search of the Vanished Blood

Nalini Malani| In Search of Vanished Blood |2012 | Single channel video play, sound |11 min 35 sec

© Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

4. Reverse Painting series All We Imagine as Light

Nalini Malani| Desire/Rupture |2016 |152cm(d) |Reverse painting on acrylic © Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

Nalini Malani| The City from Where No News Can Come |2016 |122cm(d) |Reverse painting on acrylic

© Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

Nalini Malani| One Day the Streets of the World Will Be Empty |2016 |152cm(d) |Reverse painting on acrylic

© Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

5. New stop motion animation from 2018_ Instagram series

Nalini Malani| Can You Hear Me | 2018| Video sketch animation| 43 sec © Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

Nalini Malani| Megalomaniac | 2018 | Video sketch animation | 25 sec © Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

Nalini Malani| Mephisto | 2018| Video sketch animation | 53 sec © Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

Nalini Malani| George Orwell Once Said | 2018| Video sketch animation | 50 sec

© Artist and ARARIO GALLERY

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