City of Desires

Nalini Malani’s recent exhibitions produce ways of re-examining history and culture, observes Pooja Savansukha.

- Pooja Savansukha

On Saturday, the 8th of February, thousands of people witnessed veteran artist Nalini Malani’s multi-panel paintings, Twice upon a time (2014) and All we imagine as light (2017), as well as her series of over fifty animations, Can You hear Me? (2017-2019), projected on a 250-foot façade of Mumbai’s iconic Taj Mahal Tower. The loop ended in a colourful extravaganza featuring a joyful girl jumping in the air, over the entire height of the façade. As the works transported viewers into Malani’s theatrical world layered with literary, mythological and personal referents, the community of individuals that gathered together was arrested in an upward gaze. Malani noted a poignant dialogue she heard between two viewers. One said, “Look how much the city has changed” to which he earned a response, “It is perhaps not the city that has changed, but our way of seeing.”

The historic public display at the Taj was an extension of Malani’s exhibition that celebrated the Goethe Institute/ Max Mueller Bhavan’s 50th anniversary, on view from the 19th of October 2019 to the 2nd of January 2020. There, she juxtaposed her earliest film Dream Houses (1969) with her new animations. These works, among others, also featured in Malani’s exhibition, The Witness curated by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta and Johan Pijnappel at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum from the 11th of January to the 31st of March. Exhibiting in Mumbai after over a decade, and for the first time since winning the prestigious Joan Miró Prize in 2019, Malani elicits considerations of spatial, historiographical and cultural dimensions of the city.