Three Indian galleries at the Hong Kong Art Fair, but it took foreign galleries to bring the best Indian names to the fair at HKArt10. It is the delightful brilliance of Nalini Malani in two stalls that must be recognised and reaffirmed for their ingenuity and artistic merit. Galerie Lelong brings two spectacular works of Malani which are large paperworks while Arario brings a set of six works in the smaller format. The painter and installationist Nalini Malani is indeed a modern-day Medea. Her paintings always have so much to say, they are a verbal and visual drama of colour and content.
The smaller works at Arario reflect a result of multicultural mélange of styles, myths and encounters that symbolise the all-too-human messiness of life — both psychic and physical, and especially where women are concerned — without seeming cliched and weary. In her paintings, this context of multiple narratives is enriched by overripe, light-filled colours that almost glow from within because they are executed on sheets of clear acrylic/paper.
In a text by Malani in one of her shows in the past, she more or less assumed the role of Cassandra, a figure from the archaic and early classical period (primarily known from Aeschylus’ Oresteia) who has second sight and freely declares what she sees but, apparently because she is a woman, is not believed. For Malani, Cassandra signified the unhappy fact that “profound insights that individuals have that can be good for the future of humankind are not paid heed to and we continue in the direction of death and destruction.” Yet Malani, a kind of Cassandra of postmodern art, found a way to get her message across through her frames.
Malani’s paintings have always been marked by the critical impress of newspaper caricature; arthistorically speaking, they quietly subvert the Gauguinesque figure-in-an-exotic-landscape type of artistic representation. Malani consciously plays with the genre, common in the 19th-century European and American painting, of the exotic Other. Of course, Malani and Gauguin belong to very different historical periods. Gauguin embodies the imperialist time-frame, during which painters romantically drifted to the South Seas in search of pristine landscapes, noble savages and available women. Contrasted yet related to Gauguin’s art, Malani’s work turns the narrative into an adventure story with an intellectual twist. Malani critiques the operations of globalisation, showing it up as a renewed imperialism, a colonialism by other means.
Malani’s works have always grown from a rootedness to Indian culture while also addressing the rest of the world — perhaps the quaint ,yet quietly introspective characteristic postmodern position. An important part of postmodernism is the global cry of women to each other, and in one sense that is what engages her paintings. In previous work, she also addressed such topical issues as the ethnic and ideological violence that occurred in Bombay in the early 90s.
Intriguing how she uses references to antiquity and gives us a recollection of a standard neolithic icons. Lelong has two large works on paper entitled Look/Listen 1 and 2. Interestingly, they are monochromatic renditions that suggest the relationship of people to certain sensory evocations. While the central figure in one work is dark, the idea of leaving the white space of the paper becomes a lingua franca of weaving in a mood of transcendent illumination. Of course, one recalls her most emotive context in the Alice-in-Wonderland th-eme, but never is her work light-hearted or whimsical; it has wry wit and rumination reeling through the smallest of images.
At the Arario Gallery, her smaller works are coloured and contextual, and the texture and tonality of Malani’s pictorial surfaces reflective of a lyrical as well as deeply layered, dreamlike mannerism. Perhaps compared to the paperworks at Lelong these works are somewhat shifty, yet moody terrain, wherein her signature archetypes not only appear out of history, but seemingly compose it, as signposts and directional signals.
In a sense, her signature remains a series of floating archetypal images which are the “shades” of her own sensibility. Titles in her works have always been borne out of reflective realisations and it seems that for Malani, the title of her works also endeavour to describe something that happens while she is engaged in making — or finding — the work. Malani’s work goes beyond mere seeing; you have to stand quietly and listen to the shades and shadows, almost as if you were paying attention to the inner womanly voices, even as they drift upward from the darkness of an unconscious as well as collective consciousness.
Malani stands out for her absolute simplicity and centrality of iconicity, where antiquity becomes the most vital part of an elective sensitivity, where history and art merge to creative a confluence. No woman artist in India has had as many solo exhibitions on the global front as Nalini Malani, and here at HKART10 she must be revered if not recognised as one of the finest. Of course, you can either listen to the shades of context or unravel stories of the past that have been retold.