New Delhi, In her latest body of mixed media work, titled “Of Woman Born”, noted artist Nalini Malani will reflect on the Greek myth of Orestes and its resonance in present-day wars at the upcoming 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
The site-specific artwork, an extension of Malani’s pioneering “Animation Chamber” series from 2017, will be presented by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art as the official collateral event of the biennale at the heritage site of Magazzini del Sale in Venice, Italy, from May 9.
According to KNMA, “Of Woman Born” is inspired by the myth of Orestes, who murdered his mother and her lover to avenge their slaying of his father. She meditates on this myth and its resonance in present-day wars, “where accountability is an anomaly and women continue to bear the brunt of patriarchal violence”.
The thought is translated by the artist into 67 animations with more than 30,000 iPad drawings that are projections of nine video channels.
The drawings and a 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.
The continually appearing and disappearing images transform Magazzini del Sale into a “thought chamber” reverberating with sounds, texts and images on women, myth, and global conflict.
“The daily experiences that are happening in the world make you want to clench your fists, grit your teeth, to shout out – in a moment of hysteria – standing with your back against the wall when the tragedy of life takes the upper hand.
“Politically engaged, cross-cultural and historical dialogues have been the basis of my art making for sixty years. All the more today I feel it is a pressing necessity as our stories have to be retold, to give us a chance to become a more humane society,” Malani said in a statement.
Curated by Roobina Karode, artistic director and chief curator of KNMA, the presentation is “not a sentimental invocation, but a political demand”.
“…a demand that we recognise ‘Janani’, the generative mother, is not just a figure to worship in abstraction but as the one whose labour, suffering, resistance, and premonition must be foregrounded, centred, and honoured,” Karode said.
She added that Malani’s “repetition, exhaustion, and refusal of closure finally find their proper frame” in the curatorial vision of the late Cameroonian-Swiss artist Koyo Kouoh “of attunement to subtle frequencies and quiet signals”.
“To listen to women, to hear the voices of the silenced, to witness the violence that patriarchy enacts against the nurturer, requires precisely this willingness to remain in exhaustion,” Karode said.
Malani’s presentation will run through the length of the biennale and will come to an end on November 22.
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