Finding India in Amsterdam

An additional attraction this summer is an exhibition by Indian artist Nalini Malani

Not too many Indians take time off from Amsterdam’s more popular sights to go museum hopping, which is a pity. The Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn alone should be reason enough to expect visitors to spend a little time in the city’s several museums, including the Amsterdam Museum, Van Gogh Museum and FOAM Photography Museum, some of which house works by the Dutch masters. But an additional attraction this summer (March 18 to June 18) is an exhibition by Indian artist Nalini Malani, whose Transgressions, at Stedelijk Museum, explores her recent work including her reverse paintings and a “video/shadow play”.

The idea of Transgressions itself is not new for the artist who has used these mediums before, mixing up metaphors from mythology and reality to rewrite contemporary histories. In choosing to combine these new-age mediums alongside paintings, she recreates a theatrical tableau that is at once engrossing as well as thought-provoking. Shown earlier in New Delhi, the work combines Mylar paintings, tattoos, skin, languages on their way to extinction, Kalighat paintings and mythological face-offs that represent conflict, as occurs in the region to which she belongs and the twin countries of her birth: Pakistan and India.

Malani, who was born in 1946, emigrated as a refugee from a newly created Pakistan into a freshly carved India, that cleaved a deep impact on the family and left an indelible impression on the artist. There are also her own concerns honed in Bombay — where she obtained her diploma in fine art from Sir J J School of Art in 1969 — centred on its then radical intellectual explorations that emerged from the Marxist-inspired left movements, strikes and gheraos. But Malani’s reactions were less political, more social, though it would be difficult to separate the strands of one from the skeins of the other. Her work is rich in metaphor, therefore, and involves from migration to economic disparity, globalisation and gender-related issues — the last in particular being close to her. So you see Sita, Cassandra and Medea rubbing shoulders in her work, their togetherness creating a dialogue that questions the merit of what we see and refer to in our lives as “the other”. 

But Amsterdam isn’t the only European city feting this extraordinary artist. In October this year (and running till January 2018), the Centre Pompidou in Paris will host her retrospective. Malani’s has been an incredible journey in which she has traversed a creative chronology that has ranged from her issue-based paintings to her interest in social ills in her installations, and between them they have addressed issues of sexuality and gender, among others, concerns that have been at the centre of her artistic expressions. If the Centre Pompidou honours her unique perspective, it also pays homage to Indian art — the Malani retrospective is the first it is hosting for any Indian artist. In India, a retrospective of sorts took on the nature of three exhibitions arranged one after another at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi.

Nalini Malani’s Listening to the Shades 7, acrylic, ink and enamel reverse painting on acrylic sheet. Courtesy: nalinimalani.com

Malani’s work is never too obviously apparent, the artist preferring to use layers to suggest different ways of viewing, thus combining divergent strands to offer us fresh (and often also our own rather than just the artist’s) perspectives on the familiar. Yet, she has never been drawn to the extreme, preferring a pacifist middle position. Her ability to transgress the real and virtual worlds is an exemplary platform from which to simultaneously view and comment. And in recent years, global recognition has led to international awards — Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize for Contemporary Art in 2013, St Moritz Art Masters Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014, and Asia Arts Award in 2016. Hopefully, some more discourse around her work in India will follow. 

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated