Nalini Malani

In 2010 she was conferred an Honorary Doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute. Prizes include: Fukuoka Prize for Arts and Culture, 2013; St. Moritz Art Masters Lifetime Achievement Award, 2014; Asian Art Game Changers Award Hong Kong, 2016; Joan Miró Prize, Barcelona, 2019 and in 2020 she received the first Contemporary Fellowship from the National Gallery, London.

Widely considered the pioneer of video art in India, Nalini Malani has a fifty-year multi - media practice that includes film, photography, painting, Wall Drawing/Erasure Performance, theatre, animation and Video/Shadow Play. Embodying the role of the artist as a social activist, Malani gives voice to the marginalised through her visual stories. She draws inspiration from history, culture and her direct experience of the Partition of India to look at themes of violence, feminism, politics, racial tension and social inequality, exploring in particular the repressive powers of the state.

Starting out as a filmmaker and photographer after graduating from the Sir J. J. School of Art, Malani broke out of the classical painting frame in the late 1980s to reach a wider audience, as a protest against the rise of orthodoxy in politics. A leading experimental artist in India, Malani’s committed art practice reveals a search for the profound certainties in life, society and experience-persisting ‘evidence’. In her art she places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and inter na - tionalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. As an ‘artist’s artist’ she has inspired the next generation of young artists in the sub continent.

Malani’s work has been celebrated in museum surveys and biennales around the world, and has been acquired by more than thirty international institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris; M+, Hong Kong; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.