View of the installation Can You Hear Me? by Nalini Malani at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, 2020. Animation chamber. © Nalini Malani / Photo Filipe Braga
View of the installation Can You Hear Me? by Nalini Malani at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, 2020. Animation chamber. © Nalini Malani / Photo Filipe Braga
Over the course of her career spanning five decades, Indian artist Nalini Malani has created a unique visual language that challenges reified notions of cultural hegemony, nationhood, the body and the image. Her work deals with pressing geopolitical concerns of our historical moment, including gender inequality, civil conflict and collective memory. It is also deeply rooted in history, philosophy and mythology.
An immersive, multisensory environment
The exhibition showcases some of Malani’s most important large-scale works of the past several years and marks the first time they are being exhibited in Canada:
The installation Can You Hear Me? (2018-2020), a nine-channel animation chamber with 88 hand-drawn iPad stop-motion animations that envelops the viewer in what the artist describes as a human brain full of turmoil and ideas.
A new in situ iteration of the artist’s ongoing Wall Drawing/Erasure Performance series City of Desires (1992 – present), which embodies the fragility and ephemerality of the images that shape our experience of the world. Anchoring the project in the Montreal community, Malani selected two local artists, Iuliana Irimia and Cassandra Dickie, to collaborate on the drawing of the mural.
Nalini Malani, City of Desires – Global Parasites, Castello di Rivoli, 1992-2018. Wall drawing/erasure performance; ephemeral wall drawing, charcoal, ink. © Nalini Malani / Photo Ranabir Das
About the artist
Recognized as the pioneer of video art in India, Nalini Malani (born in 1946) has been working in multimedia art since the 1960s. Her practice integrates animation, theatre arts, photography, painting, performance art, cinema and video. Winner of the 2019 Joan-Miró Prize, she has notably presented her work in thirty solo museum exhibitions worldwide, including most recently at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Whitechapel Gallery, London, M+, Hong Kong, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, and the National Gallery, London.
Nalini Malani, Castello di Rivoli, Italy, 2018. © Nalini Malani / Photo Johan Pijnappel
In the media
Une exposition forte, nécessaire et universelle.
Éric Clément
Les univers à la fois vibrants et denses des dessins animés de Malani reflètent l’état actuel du monde.
Le Devoir
After more than fifty years as a pioneering video and installation artist, Nalini Malani maintains a rigor, criticality, and joy that transcends her work’s challenging subject matter.
e-flux.com
Pertinent et percutant, son travail jette la lumière sur de nombreuses préoccupations actuelles allant des inégalités entre les sexes, aux conflits civils en passant par le devoir de mémoire.
silo57.ca
In captivating animations, Nalini Malani builds feminist visions of justice.
artsy.net
Nalini Malani (born in 1946), Ballad of a Woman, 2023, video projected on the facade of the MMFA’s Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion, single-channel stop motion animation hand-drawn on iPad, soundless, 4 min 58 s (looped). © Nalini Malani. Photo MMFA, Jean-François Brière
A work premiering in the MMFA’s Digital Canvas project
Until August 20, 2023, another work by Nalini Malani is lighting up the facade of the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion, on the north side of Sherbrooke Street, every night from dusk to 11 p.m. Drawing inspiration from the work of Nobel prize-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, Ballad of a Woman is an invitation – by turns nostalgic, comic and macabre – to question gender inequality and to confront injustices suffered by women around the world.
This hand-drawn animation gives visual form to the symbolic weight of Szymborska’s poem “Ballad,” in which a woman is murdered and, in her afterlife, cleans up the traces of her death, protecting her killer. For Malani, this act after death symbolizes the undue burden of self-sacrifice borne by women since time immemorial.
The MMFA’s Digital Canvas project has been made possible thanks to the financial support of Tourisme Montréal’s Fonds de maintien des actifs stratégiques en tourisme (FMAST) program, in collaboration with the Government of Quebec.
Credits and curatorial team
An exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It is curated by Mary-Dailey Desmarais, Chief Curator of the MMFA.
Official Sponsor
With support from
Media Partner
Public Partners
Nalini Malani, City of Desires – Global Parasites, Castello di Rivoli, 1992-2018. Wall drawing/erasure performance; ephemeral wall drawing, charcoal, ink. © Nalini Malani / Photo Ranabir Das
Nalini Malani, Castello di Rivoli, Italy, 2018. © Nalini Malani / Photo Johan Pijnappel
Nalini Malani (born in 1946), Ballad of a Woman, 2023, video projected on the facade of the MMFA’s Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion, single-channel stop motion animation hand-drawn on iPad, soundless, 4 min 58 s (looped). © Nalini Malani. Photo MMFA, Jean-François Brière
