Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel. The video is largely silent until violent crashes and female voices overwhelm the viewer, portraying the inner voice of a woman who is brutally gang raped. Malani addresses the fatal place of women in Indian society and the geo-politics of national identity. She brings the poetry of Pakistani revolutionary Faiz Ahmed Faiz into conversation with Samuel Beckett, Heiner Muller and Mahashweta Devi.
Nalini Malani is a leading contemporary artist from India whose work looks critically at issues of gender, race, geopolitics, and the impact of consumer culture amidst rampant globalization. Working across painting, drawing, installation, animation, video and theater, Malani’s practice is characterized by its political bite, and, as described by the artist, for having an ‘internationalist’ perspective of global issues. Malani came to prominence in the 1980s through pioneering work that brought Feminist issues to the fore, courageously addressing the fatal place of women in Indian society. Highlight the violent legacy of colonialism has been a central concern, especially due to how she experienced it firsthand as a child and refugee during the partition of India. Formally, her work has borrowed imagery from Hindu as well as Greek mythology, and is characterized by a distinct combination of abstraction and figuration. From the 90s onwards her focus shifted towards theater and immersive installation pieces that incorporate video or hand-drawn animation while dealing with similar subject matter.
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht...
These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
In her masterpiece 8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America , Walker unravels just that, the story of struggle, oppression, escape and the complexities of power dynamics in the history following slave trade in America...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969...
In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
In Untitled (Sword) , addressing histories of colonialism with abstraction, a large steel blade extends from the gallery wall...