Nalini Malani is one of the earliest Indian contemporary artists to experiment with new media, where animation, short films and photographs are as much a part of her repertoire as paintings, all serving to aid her artistic comments on gender, identity, alienation, politics and history.
Malani was born in Karachi in 1946 and her family shifted to India—first to Calcutta and then to Bombay—after the partition of the subcontinent. Not surprisingly, that hoary remembrance of the Partition is an important leitmotif of her narrative as are stories of women in post-independent India dealing with common social struggles along with their personal identities.
Malani obtained a diploma in painting from Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, in 1969 and soon, created Dream Houses, a series of stop-motion films in colour. Later, she would study at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, on a French government scholarship. In the 1980s, she trained in reverse painting under self-taught master from Baroda, Bhupen Khakhar.
Though she resents the ghettoisation implied by the term ‘women artists’, in 1985, she organised the country’s first exhibition featuring only women artists—she had counted 17 practicing artists but the show featured works by four: Malani, Madhvi Parekh, Nilima Sheikh and Arpita Singh. She holds Amrita Sher-Gil and Frida Kahlo in great regard.
She also remains one of the earliest women artists of India to garner international acclaim. Her works are part of prestigious institutions abroad and have been showcased in exhibitions at important venues, such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem; Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, among others. In the year 2014, her three-part retrospective was held in New Delhi, Lausanne and Salem.
The artist is based in Mumbai and Amsterdam.