HAVE I EVER OPPOSED YOU? NEW ART FROM INDIA AND PAKISTAN
18 March – 22 May 2010
Nalini Malani (India, b. 1946)
Nalini Malani’s work has been influenced by her direct and personal experience as a refugee after Partition – her family fled from their home in Karachi, now in Pakistan, to Mumbai in India.
Feelings of loss, exile and nostalgia are evident throughout Malani’s work. Movement and transparency, together with a layering of cultures and histories, are inherent in Malani’s exploration of disintegrating subjectivity. Ambivalent female figures reference cultural sources as diverse as Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Medea from Greek myth, and the Indian Goddess Sita. Her figures may be victims of individual psychic horrors and read at the same time as allegories for political and ecological danger.
Political references incorporate Malani’s personal experiences with images from Palestine, Bosnia, and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Memory, myth, desire and fantasy are mixed with specific references to local and global politics, and to gender and identity issues. Simplified dualist ideas of opposition such as male v. female in terms of gender, and of India v. Pakistan in terms of politics, are undermined; there is no clear opposition, we are presented with messy complication mixing universal concepts with specific historical and personal ones.
Malani has been included the 51st Venice Biennial 2007, Sydney Biennale 2008, and group exhibitions at the National Museum of Tokyo (2008), Serpentine Gallery, London (2009), Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin (2009), and had solo shows at the IMMA, Dublin, internationally recognised and will have a solo exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne simultaneous with this exhibition.
