Nalini Malani — La Rébellion des morts, rétrospective 1969-2018 — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 18, 2017 → January 8, 2018

In a unique collaboration the Centre Pompidou and Castello di Rivoli are staging Indian artist Nalini Malani’s first retrospective in France and Italy. Presented in Paris in 2017-2018, then in Rivoli in 2018, this retrospective in two parts selectively covers fifty years of creativity. In the Centre Pompidou exhibition, the artist presents works from 1969-2018, including her latest painting series All We Imagine as Light and the site responsive Wall drawing/Erasure Performance Traces.

Apprehending Nalini Malani’s work from both a non-chronological and a thematic angle, the exhibitions tackle the various concepts underlying her œuvre: utopia, dystopia, her vision of India and of the role of women in the world. The result of the Partition of India in 1947 has had a life long traumatic effect on Malani’s family, whose experiences as refugees continue to inform her art practice.

Her explorative investigation of female subjectivity and her profound condemnation of violence — in its insidious and mass forms — is a constant reminder of the vulnerabilities and precariousness of life and human existence. 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.

Malani’s collaborations in performance, theatre and publishing with thinkers such as social-cultural anthropologist Dr. Arjun Appadurai, actress Alaknanda Samarth, Butoh dancer Harada Nobuo and theatre director Dr. Anuradha Kapur are testament to her constant seeking of interdisciplinary forms to best investigate and communicate personal and political issues. Her work exists as a temporal and corporeal confrontation of the past, present and future; a dynamic synthesis of memory, fable, truth, myth, trauma and resistance. In this way the artist has constructed a remarkable new language of imagination and form, and of phenomena and meaning.

Unique in this retrospective are the recently discovered b/w 16 mm films of 1969-76 including Still Life, Onanism and Taboo that will have their world premiere in Paris. On this occasion, Malani reactivates a spectacular work from the Centre Pompidou collections : the “video/shadow play” Remembering Mad Meg (2007).

A symposium is scheduled for Thursday 19 October : «Memory : Record/Erase» that includes the speakers Mieke Bal, Claudia Benthien, Andreas Huyssen and Jyotsna Saksena. The second part of the exhibition will be presented at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, from March 27 to July 22, 2018.