Nalini Malani


Nalini Malani was born in 1946 in Karachi, Pakistan. She studied painting at the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, and etching in 1971-72 in Paris on a scholarship for fine arts granted by the French government. Her paintings in India over the next two decades focussed on the vulnerable position of women and the nature of violence. In the 1990s, she traversed a labyrinth of different media practices including video, to make collaborative installations and theatre plays. In her large-scale video installations of the recent years she devises various complex propositions where moving images and objects create hallucinatory perceptions of the real. In these works, she interrogates the political dynamics in the governance of the Indian nation state, the process of globalisation and the ongoing victimisation of women. She has been a guest lecturer at various international art academies and universities and is at present, a professor at the Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam. Nalini Malani lives and works in Mumbai.