Nalini Malani

1946, Karachi (present-day Pakistan)

Nalini Malani is one of the most powerful voices in international contemporary art, a pioneer of video art in India and an artist deeply engaged with themes of identity, memory and the feminine. After the Partition of India, her family took refuge in Calcutta and then in Mumbai, experiences that profoundly shaped her artistic and human sensibility.
Trained at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai and later at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Malani has moved through different artistic seasons while maintaining a deep consistency in denouncing injustices and contradictions. Her work blends theatre, literature, mythology and politics, exploring the expressive possibilities of languages such as animation, mural painting, installation and performance.
A militant artist and poet of the image, Nalini Malani is today among the most recognised figures on the global art scene, winner of the Joan Miró Prize and present in the collections of the world's leading museums.

Nalini Malani

Identities f, 2009
Mixed media on ceramic plate
Diameter: 30 cm

Identities f is a small, self-contained world, compact yet extremely dense. On the surface of a circular plate, Nalini Malani builds a layered, surreal narrative. The work blends Eastern and Western imagery, anatomy and myth, in a visual and symbolic vortex that questions the body and identity, in particular female identity.

At its centre stands an organic, pulsing form, resembling an intestine or a heart, around which human figures and iconographic fragments orbit. The bold colours - blue, red, pink, orange - are never merely decorative: they are emotional charges, states of mind, historical and social tensions.

The plate's curved surface, far removed from the tradition of the painted canvas, becomes a device of rupture: identity is neither linear nor unified, but fragmented, cyclical, in constant flux. The images seem to tell of an internal battle, between individual and collective, between personal memory and collective memory.

With Identities f, Nalini Malani offers us a powerful, visionary reflection on contemporary art as a form of resistance and identity reworking. This work forcefully asserts the right to exist of complex, fractured subjectivities.