Stepping inside artist Nalini Malani's ‘thought chamber’ at the upcoming Venice Biennale 2026

Starting 9 May, the heritage site of Magazzini del Sale, a 15th century salt warehouse in Venice, will transform into a ‘thought chamber’, with animated images, text, thought bubbles and soundscapes projected onto this darkened space. With 67 animations created from over 30,000 iPad drawings, Nalini Malani’s latest work, Of Woman Born, will feature a layering of ideas around themes of gender, myth and global conflict. This site-specific commission is being presented by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) as the official collateral event of the 61st La Biennale di Venezia and will be on view in the city till 22 November. Malani calls this large-scale multichannel installation an ‘animation chamber’, an extension of the multisensorial environment that she has been working on since 2017.

In her practice, the 80-year-old artist has repeatedly resurrected figures from Greek tragedies to dwell on the invisibilised suffering of women across the world, be it Cassandra in the 2012-work, In Search of Vanished Blood, about “the violent history of colonisation and then de-colonisation of the subcontinent”, or Medea in a long-term installation project spanning 1991 to 1996, featuring three robes made of Mylar and painted in acrylic to show the character’s three states of being. Of Woman Born too is inspired by the Greek myth of Orestes, who murdered his mother and her lover to avenge the slaying of his father. Malani situates this story in context of the present-day wars in which women continue to bear the brunt of patriarchal violence. “The drawings and the 20-minute soundscape of women’s voices become a layered, visceral, continually shifting environment in which viewers conjure up their own stories from the layered superimpositions,” states the note by the KNMA.

“Aggression makes aggression,” says Malani. “Borders are drawn and wars are fought to serve a political purpose. This needs to be seen from a female point of view. One doesn’t have to be a mother to feel the horror of children being killed or maimed. The experience of violence is embedded into our psyche. But we still don’t have the agency to voice these experiences—no one asks the women how they feel about this perpetration of violence.”

There has always been a certain ephemerality to Malani’s work. For instance, in 1992, as part of City of Desires, she covered the walls of Gallery Chemould with murals as a memorial to a faded and neglected fresco in Udaipur. That was a time when a set of medieval murals were destroyed in the lakes city as part of growing instances of fundamentalism in the country. Over a course of two weeks, Malani’s wall drawings changed their form and tone and were ultimately erased. She took the theme beyond neglected histories to also talk about suffering and injustice through her figures. Malani called these ‘erasure drawings’, which were gone at the end of the exhibition, but their memory lingered both within the viewer and the artist.

In Can You Hear Me?, an animation chamber shown at the Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, between 2019-2020, Malani channeled her anger and grief about the sexual assaults on minor girls through the 57 animations. There was something hardhitting about seeing the words ‘Watch out’ appear on the screen as the figure of a skipping girl gave way to a darkened face with haunted eyes. Roobina Karode, artistic director and chief curator, KNMA, remembers watching Can You Hear Me? in Mumbai in rapt attention. In her view, the animation chamber as a vortex of images, text, sounds and speed placed a demand on the viewer’s attention, endurance and the ability to absorb the appearance and disappearance of forms, all happening simultaneously. Viewers wanted to see it again and again to be completely engulfed by the soundscape and visuals.

According to Karode, who curated the artist’s retrospective, You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag, at the KNMA, disruptions are critical to Malani’s methodology. In her work, acceleration and prolonged engagement coexist. “On one hand, text and images move so quickly across the space, on the other hand, the ‘looking’ is prolonged as you experience her work. Same goes for the upcoming work at Venice,” she says. Though Malani has worked with the moving image since the 1960s, the artist draws on her fascination with theatre to create ensembles of sound, light and architecture. To her, the transformation of space is critical. So, at Venice, the animation chamber will inhabit a cave-like darkened space, with projections appearing as flickering impressions.

As one looks at these works, including the upcoming Of Woman Born, you can’t help but notice the duality in the artist’s work—while there is the inherent ephemerality and impermanence underlying the practice, there is also a repeated resurrection of memory. Malani brings together a personal history of hailing from a family impacted by the Partition with stories of daily violence experienced by women in the world. You can see the fury being channeled in the furious ways in which her finger moves on her iPad, creating figure after figure. Her animations act as reminders at times and warnings at others, calling out to us to learn from history, from our past mistakes. “I have learnt a lot from theatre. A performance remains in your memory chamber long after it was staged. In a capitalist world, visual artists are meant to create a ‘product’, and I am trying to combat that by finding new ways and means of looking and remembering,” says Malani.

Through the retelling of stories, she re-examines and asks the viewer to relook as well at the idea of aggression, displacement and gender through different storytelling methods. Born just a year before the Partition, Malani doesn’t have a lucid memory of the event as it was unfurling, but the experience never really left her family. They constantly grappled with the idea of home and a feeling of inadequacy. When the family moved to Kolkata and later Mumbai, her parents struggled with not being able to speak the languages of the city. “I grew up in an environment, where stories of ‘home’, its food and people, were constantly retold. So, it was not just about the trauma, but also about how to come to terms with it through these stories. It became a way of life for me—this need to tell a younger generation like yourself and my daughters so that we don’t repeat our mistakes,” she says.

There is an interesting layering in Of Woman Born, with Malani’s rendition of myths interacting with the legacy of the site itself. A medieval salt warehouse, the space once played a significant role in the city’s economy and position as a maritime power. “We know from our own history—of the Dandi March, and more—that salt was a very precious commodity. I draw on that and of course from the architecture itself,” she says. When Malani visited the site, she was fascinated with the texture of the weathered bricks, and the idea of projecting the animations directly on the bruised walls. “Her work shows how myths and history can be so relevant in the contemporary context. She is deeply aware of the unheard female voices, their lack of agency, and how they end up becoming victims of patriarchal practices and malpractices,” elaborates Karode. What she really finds impressive in Malani’s practice is that a concept starts with a small image but goes on to encompass a whole universe, with myriad concerns of the world getting reflected in it. “Of Woman Born, for instance, doesn’t remain restricted to feminism. It addresses concerns related to ecology, the politics of the times, contemporary literature—all of it comes together to reflect on where we stand today,” she adds.

The image of the skipping girl recurs in Malani’s works, becoming a metaphor for the woman as a witness and a survivor. “[In some way] her ability to move constantly and to coordinate her movements keeps her free from being controlled and from all coercion,” states the curatorial note. In Venice, visitors will be invited to follow the skipping girl on posters, banners and signages through the streets to the Magazzini del Sale. They could also download fragments of Malani’s animations by scanning a QR code. The skipping girl first emerged in the artist’s work as drawings in the 1990s and later as animations. “She has always stayed with me. I can view her through the lens of so many emotions—joy, exuberance, excitement, anxiety, hysteria, sadness and trauma. Right now, in the midst of wars, you can see little girls drawing out skipping ropes from slabs of rubble, or children creating temporary toys from pipes. This motif of the young girl stands for freedom to create a world of her own, which is different from the world of violence playing out in the background,” she says.

Though Malani’s practice inhabits the digital realm, the foundation of it lies in the hand-drawn. Be it video or animation, all her work starts with a drawing. “I have spent hours in her studio, watching her work. When she draws a figure with a single finger on the iPad, you can’t help but wonder how her hand matches the speed of thought,” says Karode. Malani brings together handmade and technology, as evident in the way she animates her own journal or draws upon earlier images, rephrasing them in the process. “I have always worked with my fingers. I feel like a child smudging away. There is a joy in drawing—I have done 30,000 drawings for these animations. You start with something and it grows and grows, taking on different dimensions en route. The big works, be it the video, shadow play or animation chamber, starts from a small drawing. The form follows function, so on and so forth, and all of it comes together over time,” adds Malani.