Encapsulating the vibrancy and vitality of Nalini Malani’s practice

The vibrancy and vitality of Nalini Malani’s practice is evident in select video installations, paintings, as well as theatrical collaboration projects on view at Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland. It’s a major retrospective of acclaimed Indian artist work of the past decade and a half.

Figures drawn from mythical tales of different cultural background (Alice in Wonderland, Cassandra, Akka etc.) form scenes that depict the consequences of capitalism, orthodox fanaticism, war, and the environmental destruction in an epical narrative outpour. In her new suite of works on display, a gallery stages an engaging conversation between female figures that stem from diverse myths, as they sometimes melt into one another.

The artist relates Cassandra’s tale through thirty painted panels. They are arranged like a large stained-glass window wherein Cassandra simultaneously appears both young and old - as a skipping girl and as a young lady, who imbibes her prophetic gifts through a blue umbilical cord connecting her ear to that of a sage. Yet it traverses the whole pictorial space, thus deftly linking up a realm of action to the next one.

Each of these settings is meticulously arranged on a round surface resembling a curious cell culture or Petri dish. An enormous smoke cloud billows out over one of these. These swathes of smoke that emanate from explosions are a frequent motif in her work. It is actually alluding to the nuclear tests India has conducted and to the blatant insanity of further nuclear escalation. On close examination, calamity and terror can be noticed issuing from it.

Some thirty tondi (circular formats) that fan out around the Cassandra polyptych form a planetary system of tableaux, to reiterate the deft juxtaposition of the stencil-like image of an aged woman and a young girl, thus uniting in the same compositions two recurring figures in her work: Alice in Wonderland and Mother Courage. The colors cannot mask the horror of these scenes. This chromatic exquisiteness prompts the viewer to inspect more closely, and registering the mutilations of human beings in a specific historical and global context.