BackKeeper of memories
The last chapter of a three-part retrospective on artist Nalini Malanirunning through 45 years of the artist's thoughts and ideas
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Artist Nalini Malani, 68, is drawn to the idea of preserving memories. “What are we without our memories?" she asks. “Without memory, we are bound to repeat history. Without memory, we are like someone with Alzheimer’s."
In the Capital ahead of the third and final chapter of her retrospective at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), Malani talks animatedly about her old studio at Lohar Chawl in Mumbai. “There were entire lanes with electrical shops and then hardware shops, places selling locks, then canvas or sailcloth and grain was last because it needed to be closest to the docks," recalls the Mumbai-based artist. Her studio opened out on to this bustle, sometimes affording a view into people’s homes.
“Some of the houses didn’t have walls. I had to avert my gaze. I would see these things from the corner of my eye, but how to draw them? I had to hone my memory. I would come back and quickly sketch into a notebook with a thick sable hair brush (in one go)—there was no chance of sitting there with a sketchbook to draw in time," says Malani.
The Lohar Chawl sketches are preserved in 30 notebooks and in video footage of an art experiment at Chemould gallery (then above the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda) in the 1990s, both of which will be on show at the Nalini Malani: You Can’t Keep Acid In A Paper Bag—Chapter III retrospective, which starts on 26 September.
A mid-career retrospective perhaps lends itself naturally to triggering memories. But Malani isn’t just interested in the memories that stay with us. She is also keenly interested in teasing out the memories we keep mothballed in the recesses of our minds and those which we lose over time.
The video footage of the Lohar Chawl series at Chemould, for example, is a documentation of how in 1992 she reproduced some of the drawings on the walls of the gallery. It took her 10 days to complete the works on surfaces which were whitewashed five days later.
Malani has made two large drawings on the walls of the KNMA for this exhibition, too. Both are recurring figures in Malani’s art—Medea from Greek mythology and a labourer holding the world up—and these too are meant to be “erased" when the show ends in November. “I did something like this in Mumbai, where we gave erasers to visitors and streetchildren. They could erase the works or they could even ‘draw’ something else with the erasers. It’s just charcoal, after all," she says.
The exhibition will show two new works as well. The first is a painting titled Twice Upon A Time, about how Sita refused to be tested by fire a second time and instead chose to go back into the earth, and the third part of Malani’s Transgression series of video/shadow play on mylar cylinders.
“Sita and Medea are always on my mind," says Malani. “In some senses they were both de-gendered—Medea killed her children, and Sita effectively left her two children when she went back into the earth."
The retrospective encompasses ideas like the politics of gender and caste that have occupied Malani’s mind and art over 45 years at least, dating back to the oldest work in this show from 1969. “The things that concerned me then have run through all these years—the red line remains intact till today," she says.
Nalini Malani: You Can’t Keep Acid In A Paper Bag—Chapter III is on from 26 September-30 November, 10.30am-6.30pm (Mondays closed), at the KNMA, 145, DLF South Court Mall, Saket, New Delhi (49160000).
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