A design for life – Nalini Malani

About: Nalini Malani,secured a Diploma in Fine Arts from Sir JJ School of Arts, Bombay, 1969 and the French Government Scholarship for Fine Arts to study in Paris from 1970 to 1972. In 2010 she has conferred an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2013 she won the Fukuoka Prize for Art, In 2014 the St. Moritz Art Masters Lifetime Achievement Award, in 2016 the Asian Art Game Changers Award and in 2019 the Joan Miro Prize. Over five decades Malani has in her experimental art addressed social, political and societal issues surrounding the Indian subcontinent, the abuse and rape of women, the struggle for democracy and her own experiences of being born in a refugee family. Starting out as a painter, filmmaker and photographer in 1969 she is the pioneer of video art in India, she creates immersive installations, theatre, ephemeral wall drawings, erasure performances and video/shadow plays. Nalini Malani’s intense and committed art reveals a search for the profound certainties of life, of society, of experience persisting ‘evidence’, which is encountered and felt. In her art she places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. Nalini Malani had over 300 exhibitions including 200 internationals, including fifteen international solo museum exhibitions and 20 biennials. Her latest retrospective The Rebellion of the Dead, 1969- 2017 was shown at Centre Pompidou and Castello di Rivoli.