If there is an artist whose artwork lies between private fantasy and public concern to relay the larger social issues with an allegorized autobiography, then Nalini Malini would be on that list. Being the most prominent woman artist from Modern India, Nalini’s early artworks have never been displayed, which JNAF is making possible this August.
Jehangir Nicolson Art Foundation presents the exhibition Nalini Malini: The Fragility of Time from August 12 to November 5, 2024. According to the curator, Puja Vaish,
“The exhibition will explore the artist’s multi-media practice through her formative years, spanning drawing, photography, collage, etching, film, and painting. The majority of the show will feature works from the 1960s and 1970s that have never been exhibited before.”
The artworks of Nalani from the early 1970s introduce female trauma as their subject matter and have conventional expressionism in them. These works were part of social activism linked with politics. The early compositions that have barely been touched by any of the exhibitors show the dominance of patriarchial society, male transgression, and marginalized identity loss of females due to various factors. Gradually, she displayed the masochistic injunctions of the female body receptive to the violence that explains the experience of female as a survivor. It was only in the late 1970s that she added narrational drama to her compositions.
In addition, the 1970s and part of the 80s of Malani’s art examines the mundane realities of the everyday life of any female. Geeta Kapur writes,
“Nalani Malani is heir to Kahlo and Sher-gil in the way she relays larger social issues via an allegorical autobiography. It has to be remembered that autobiography, an obsession with female writers, is slow to develop as a genre in painting so that Sher-gil’s personalized representations and certainly Kahlo’s oeuvre are a real achievement.”
The exhibition holds a crucial part of Indian history, which has notable stories from the pain of partition and female experiences in the male-transgressive society through Nalini’s compositions. This makes it mandatory to visit the event to contemplate our pasts.
Resource.
- Featured Image: The Rebellion of the Dead by Nalini Malini; OdoBem, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation.
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