Since February 23, the public can see works by Indian artist Nalini Malani at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), a first in Canada. A look at an exhibition by Mary-Dailey Desmarais.
Pioneer of video art in India
Nalini Malani is known both in her home country and in the international community for her innovative work. His exhibitions in the great art venues of Western capitals, such as New York, London and Paris, and those of the East, such as New Delhi, Tokyo, Istanbul and Mumbai, have forged the business card of the artist born in 1946 in Karachi, who now has more than 50 years of practice.
While his international presence has shaped his career since 1980, his exhibition at the MMFA is his first on Canadian soil. The chief curator and curator of the exhibition, Mary-Dailey Desmarais, followed the artist’s work and had long thought of presenting his projects in Montreal. “Her practice is certainly relevant: she is committed, but also courageous. Nalini Malani deals with current socio-political topics. Imagining a presence of his works in the metropolis, where South Asian communities are numerous, but where there is also a strong culture of video, animation and digital media, was obviously necessary and relevant. . »
Malani, considered the pioneer of video art in India, explores new technologies and, in this way, constantly updates her approach. The idea of presenting his more recent works was part, for Desmarais, of a desire to show the multidisciplinary and major character of his work to a population at the intersection of various cultures.
Three resonant works
At the MMFA, Desmarais brings together three works by Malani, two of which were created especially for the Montreal metropolis.
The Carré d’art contemporain, a large room on the ground floor of the museum, presents an imposing videographic installation whose nine-channel projection covers three of its four walls. Can You Hear Me? (Can you hear me ?), the artist’s most recent video, is an animation made up of 88 drawings that were made on the iPad, a method hitherto unused in Malani’s work. Immersive, his work addresses the scourge of human violence – those experienced in India as well as others that are universal. The frenetic accumulation of drawings and creaking sounds diffused in space reveals a form of dystopia, where the exhaustion and anger of women are palpable.
The fresco City of Desires – Crossing Boundaries (VCity of Desires – Beyond Borders), which occupies a crossroads of the MMFA near the Carré, was created by the muralists Iuliana Irimia and Cassandra Dickie, approached by the artist to anchor the project in Montreal. This work, like the previous one, demonstrates a powerful visual language, its tangled lines involving the audience in a captivating reading of the image. The project will be, at the end of the exhibition, erased on the occasion of a performance directed by the artist, a means of reflecting on the politics and poetics of collective memory.
In these two projects, the figure ofAlice in Wonderland — this little girl who, surrounded by magic, loses her innocence over time — is frequent. Referring to it in his pictorial work is a way for Malani to talk about the systems of violence that are perpetuated and deprive human life of a certain candor. This childish representation is also, notably in Can You Hear Me?a tacit allusion to the collective rape of a young Indian woman, by eight men, whose death deeply troubled the artist.
Very inspired by literature, Malani also multiplies the quotations of historical, artistic and political narratives in her works. Lewis Carroll’s Alice thus finds an important place in the corpus presented at the MMFA, as do quotations from Martin Luther King, Langston Hughes and Samuel Beckett. These snippets trace various temporalities of struggles that are still current.
Final work of the exhibition, ballad of a woman will animate the digital canvas of the museum, an outdoor projection space occupying the facade of the Michal and Renata Hornstein pavilion. The artist, who had carte blanche for the realization of his multimedia proposal, brings back to life a murdered woman who strives to erase the traces of her death. Little by little, her pilgrimage contributes to the protection of her attacker, bringing out questions about the sometimes complex dynamics that arise between the victims and their executioners. Projected every day from dusk to dawn until next August, the five-minute animation takes a raw look at the precarious weight that rests on women’s shoulders.
Thus, the vibrant and dense universes of Malani’s cartoons reflect the current state of the world. The iconic artist becomes the voice of the struggles led by the marginalized, the ignored and the forgotten, and in particular those of women.