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...
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...
To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...
Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...
The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...
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...
Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
For the past two decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling....
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...
The three monkeys in Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak are a recurring motif in Gupta’s work and refer to the Japanese pictorial maxim of the “three wise monkeys” in which Mizaru covers his eyes to “see no evil,” Kikazaru covers his ears to “hear no evil,” and Iwazaru covers his mouth to “speak no evil.” For the various performative and photographic works that continue this investigation and critique of the political environment, Gupta stages children and adults holding their own or each other’s eyes, mouths and ears...