Nalini Malani's work has a teeming vitality, but also deals with fundamentalism and the caste system, writes Aidan Dunne
The Indian artist Nalini Malani could be described as one of Midnight's Children. She was born in Karachi in 1946, on the eve of independence, and the partition of the country along lines of religious affiliation the following year. With partition, the family suddenly found themselves living in another country, and took the huge and difficult step of relocating to Calcutta (now Kolkata). She is fiercely critical of the rationale and effects of partition and has addressed some of its consequences in her work, specifically the horrific experiences endured by numerous women at the time, a suppressed piece of history that is still coming to light. You can see her treatment of the subject in a five-channel video installation that forms part of her current exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma).
In person, Malani is mild-mannered and unaffectedly charming, but she speaks her mind with passionate intelligence and doesn't suffer fools. When it comes to issues that she cares about, she'll happily ruffle feathers. One of her concerns is the way religious fundamentalism and the caste system colour cultural and political discourse in India and, closely related to that, the position of women in Indian society. This may make her sound like one of those overly didactic artists who use their work as a way of editorialising about identity and other issues, but, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
As her Imma exhibition makes clear, Malani's work is remarkable for its range and inventiveness, and its wonderful technical fluency.
It engages us on a number of levels and is readily accessible. She has been at the cutting edge of Indian art more or less since the beginning of the 1970s and, while her work is still rooted in the traditional practices of drawing and painting, from the early 1990s she has also moved very convincingly into multimedia installation and performance events. One striking example is her use of what she terms the "shadow play", involving rotating cylinders, projected imagery and other elements. Essentially, the shadow plays extend and animate the language of her painting rather than superseding it.
Following partition, after 10 years in Calcutta, her family moved on to Bombay, where she is still based. She prefers Bombay to Mumbai, the city's official name since 1995, because the renaming had more to do with religious appropriation than anything else. She attended the Sir Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art - the JJ School - there. While the focus of the school was on a European tradition, she took miniature painting as her main subject. There had been a thriving school of miniature painting based around Karachi.
But she was aware from the first that to adopt such an idiom in a contemporary context was to risk exoticising it. "More than that, even, it has to have cogency, it has to emerge naturally from the context," she says. Then, at the end of the 1960s, a French government scholarship took her to Paris. "Being away was very useful," she recalls. "Not least because you have to look at a country from outside to really see it." She arrived during the rather sour aftermath to 1968, as disillusionment set in, but all the same she found it a fantastically stimulating time. Paris was a hugely energetic centre of critical and political theory and creative activity. It was in Paris, she recalls, that she first read in detail about the caste system. Her mother was a Sikh and her father a theosophist, which meant that they did not recognise or espouse the caste system.
She felt it was important to go back to India. "I thought I could understand things a lot better." Back home, she became involved in several progressive artists' collectives and landmark group exhibitions. In the 1970s she made paintings based on a wounded, scarred female body, and she was one of several artists who implicitly argued for the contemporary relevance of figuration as an alternative to the abstraction of international formalism. Her own work vigorously addressed the problem of how to deal with the complexity of the world around her in a figurative idiom.
There is a teeming vitality to her work, then and now, that stems from this novelistic ambition to encompass the whole world. One can see why video installation and shadow plays are a logical extension of her paintings, allowing her to envelop the viewer in complete sensory environments. Not that there is anything lacking in the paintings. They are distinctive: reverse paintings made on glass or, more usually, Mylar. We look through the transparent support and see the painting from the back, so to speak, in the reverse order to which the paint was applied. Malani is a virtuoso of the technique, which allows her a range of effects that recall both stained glass and Indian miniature painting in terms of chromatic intensity.
Her paintings could be described as open-ended, free-flowing narratives, though each is not a single, sequential narrative. Rather, she draws on an extensive range of narrative references to engender a narrative space with which we can engage at will. From the beginning of the 1990s she has built up an eclectic cast of characters. They have in common the fact that they are emblematically strong, female protagonists. She has consistently felt free to draw on global traditions in myth and literature, not to be exclusively or purely "Indian" in her iconography. "It's important that we have a global view of India," she says succinctly.
Hence the appearance of Alice from Through the Looking Glass, and the Greek Medea. The latter she links to Sita who, rather than killing her sons, abandons them. Central too is the extraordinary 12th-century heroine Akkamahadevi who, at huge risk to herself, rebelled against the custom of child marriage, spurned her would-be husband and defied her parents. "She said she was already given to Shiva. Walking naked, she was covered only by her tresses and said: 'I go pure, any impurity must be in your eyes.'" Akkamahadevi died an early death, she notes. "It is as if these characters who are rebellious finally hurt even themselves." One is tempted to use the term magic realism to describe the atmosphere that she generates. Imma's Enrique Juncosa cites the "neo-Baroque literature written in Latin America in the 1970s" as an equivalent.
And there is a literally visceral intensity to her descriptive drawing and painting that can be disconcerting. It's as if objective, external space becomes inextricably enmeshed with the inner space of the body and with a limitless imaginative space.
In a fine, illuminating essay on her work, Chaitanya Sambrani points out the way she takes "the inherited flesh of the stories and personae" that she draws on, renders them into "a kind of elemental muck of life" and refashions them into "an essentially new set of narratives". But beyond that there is still something "bizarre" about her imagery, he observes, in which the fast-paced mutations, transformations and alterations have something in common with the language of science fiction or horror stories. All of which makes for great visual excitement, it must be said.
One of the highlights of this year's Venice Biennale is a room given over to a set of Malani's paintings. She was already immersed in several projects, including preparations for the Imma show, when the Biennale curator, Robert Storr, called her to invite her to participate. What excited her was that he wanted to show her paintings, which had, remarkably, not been seen in the West, whereas she had participated in many shows, including Venice, with video installations and other works. The sheer level of work involved was, she admits, daunting, but she didn't hesitate. The Imma show, which provides a comprehensive survey of the range of her activity, is her first solo show in Europe. The museum deserves great credit for the initiative but more than that, Malani has delivered a brilliant, unmissable exhibition.
Nalini Malani is at Imma until Oct 14
