Nalini Malani — The Human Stain — Lelong & Co. Matignon Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 23, 2023 → January 13, 2024

Widely considered the pioneer of video art in India, Nalini Malani practises drawing, painting, and the extension of those forms into projected animation, video, and film. Her works in new media often take the form of monumental and immersive shadow play pieces that create mesmerizing layers of imagery and sound. Committed to the role of the artist as social activist, Malani focuses on creating dynamic visual stories about those who have been ignored, forgotten, or marginalized. Drawn from history, culture, and her direct experience as a refugee of the Independence and Partition of India and the legacy of colonialism and de-colonization, Malani’s work explores violence, the feminine, and the politics of national identity.

Nalini Malani, Life 3, Variation III, 2023 Impression numérique, peinture et crayon sur papier moab Entrada — 31,6 × 55,5 cm Courtesy de l’artiste et galerie Lelong & Co. Paris

Malani’s technique of reverse painting is inspired by the tradition of painting on the underside of glass, permitting her to create ghostly effects with apprehensive figures appearing in flowing, liquid forms. The artist borrows the title of the series “The Human Stain” from Philip Roth’s 2001 novel.

She writes : "In Roth’s novel, the main character tries to hide his race behind the fair colour of his skin, where it is advantageous to be taken as fully “white”. The human stain is both a mark on the skin and the mark of experience, too messy and convoluted to be sorted out by moral high mindedness.

Nalini Malani, The Human Stain I, 2021 Acrylique, émail sur Mylar — 4 parties : 90 × 52 cm / 82 × 57 cm / 2 × (116 × 51 cm) Courtesy de l’artiste et galerie Lelong & Co. Paris

Myths are our human stain, our oldest stories, which come to us without authors in a snowball effect through the centuries of time, gathering whatever is pertinent to those times.

In this series “The Human Stain”, I want to bring forth the characters from the myths, in this case the Greek myths, to resonate in our contemporary moment. Thus we can see stains of Phèdre, Medea and the characters from the Oresteia in our contemporary lives, which unravel relationships in dreams and associations through the archetypes of these universal truths."