Painting Beyond The Frame

Artist: Nalini Malani

February 17, 2006 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Nalini Malani is an eminent contemporary artist, based in Mumbai. She studied painting at the Sir J.J. School of Art, Bombay, and etching in 1970-72 in Paris on a scholarship, granted by the French government. Since the nineties, she has traversed a labyrinth of different media practices to make collaborative installations and theatre plays. Her works interrogate the political dynamics in the governance of the Indian nation state, the process of globalization and the victimization of women.

Mapping inter-connectivities between her recent painting Stories Retold series “Living in Alicetime”, showing from February 11 to March 3, 2006 at Sakshi Gallery, to the last decade of work till “The Job” (text by Bertolt Brecht) performance/installation, is the trajectory that the artist will trace. For Nalini Malani, the content and subject are larger than the medium and cannot be wholly contained by it. Hence, the artist works in series and with different materials and forms including collaborations with other artists in making theatre pieces and painted books. The urge to constantly note down life around her in drawing and painting through the discipline of memory\and recall is Nalini’s riyaz. In her opinion, in today’s dynamic flux of time it becomes important to keep retelling stories, keying in images in linkages that touch us in the very core of our existence.