Nalini Malani Contemporary art is her forte

Indian artist Nalini Malani has pushed the frontiers of contemporary art. Known for her outspoken feminism, fascination with mythology and history that find resonance in her work, she is equally hailed as one of the pioneers of newer art forms like installations, video art and shadow play. The recently concluded India Art Fair, presented a sampler of Malani's ground breaking art.

Women -- wronged by their men, is a recurring subject in Malani's works.  She finds a common thread running through mythological characters like Sita, Medea and Cassandra. In her early path-breaking multimedia installation “Medeamaterial” (1993), she takes Medea, the tragic Greek mythological character, as her muse.  

The legend of Sita too never ceases to fascinate Malani. In her works “Sita/ Medea” (2006) and the recent multimedia reverse painting installation “Twice Upon a time”, Malani  draws upon the story of the wronged Sita,  heroine of epic “Ramayana” to show how a sacrificing wife is subjected to the severest trials by her supposedly righteous husband Rama.. “Like Medea, Sita has to suppress her maternal instincts and make an agonising sacrifice, leaving her two sons behind,” says Malani, who sees parallels between the two heroines and the contemporary woman. “Women are still not allowed to speak out. Their very thought processes are suppressed,” says Malani.

Malani's recent much-acclaimed work is “In Search of Vanished Blood”, a video and shadow play that made its debut in 2012 in Germany at Documenta 13. “In Search of Vanished Blood” is inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz' 1965 Urdu poem “Lahu Ka Surag” and influenced by the 1984 novel “Cassandra” by Christa Wolf.  The work was an outcome of Malani's personal experience of the India-Pakistan partition of 1947 and has echoes, she says, of the '60s and '70s when the subcontinent hurtled towards a bloody war for Bangladesh.

However, she points out, she does not work in a single medium. “I work with theatre, performances, films, paintings and do small books. I strive to put across what is of personal interest to me. In actual fact, it is the subject that chooses the medium.”