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NALINI MALANI
CROSSING BOUNDARIES
March 23 – August 20, 2023
Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion – Level S2
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) presents works of Nalini Malani, one of India’s most important contemporary artists. This is her the first-ever Canadian solo exhibition. It showcases her powerfully engaged works that address social inequalities and violence, the subject matter she has dealt with for more than 50 years. Through her art, she gives voice to the subjugated, marginalized, and oppressed, especially women.
Malani has developed a unique multi-media practice that encompasses video, film, animation, painting, drawing and immersive installations.
The exhibition consists of Malani's three works:
Can You Hear Me? (2018-2020).
An acclaimed video installation, an immersive nine-channel animation chamber consisting of eighty-eight animations hand-drawn with the artist’s index finger on an iPad. Marking her first use of digital technology to make drawings, this work is described by Malani as the human mind full of turmoil, fantasies and ideas. Literary characters and mythological figures, accompanied by curious sounds, overlap with allusions to political events, personal thoughts and fragments of text by leading writers from diverse cultural backgrounds that together address global issues of social injustice, including gender inequality, civil conflict and cultural hegemony.
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City of Desires—Crossing Boundaries (1992-2023)
It is a new and latest situ iteration of the artist’s ongoing Wall Drawing/Erasure Performance series, which uses drawing and erasure to explore the politics and poetics of memory. Materializing processes of remembrance and forgetting, this performative drawing prompts powerful reflection on the fragility of our shared traditions and experiences. Anchoring the project in the Montreal community, Malani has selected two Montreal-based artists, Iuliana Irimia and Cassandra Dickie, to collaborate on the drawing of the mural. The artwork will be on view at a busy junction in the Museum located close to the Contemporary Art Square. When the exhibition closes, the drawings will be erased in a performance directed by Malani.
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Notice further personages-faces in this mural that are not immediately noticeable. Search for more...
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Ballad of a Woman (2023)
It is a major work created specially for the exhibition. It will be projected on the facade of the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion, as part of the MMFA’s Digital Canvas project. The projection starts each day at sunset and ends at 23:00.
This hand-drawn animation tells the story of a woman who is murdered and, in her afterlife, cleans up the traces of her death, protecting her killer. For Malani, this act after death symbolizes the undue burden of self-sacrifice borne by women since time immemorial. In this major new work, the bold colours, dramatic movement and dynamic lines of the film camouflage its darker message, like so many of life’s distractions that make suffering harder to discern.
Nalini Malani
Recognized as the pioneer of video art in India, Nalini Malani (born in 1946) has been working in a variety of artistic media since the 1960s. Her practice integrates animation, theatre arts, photography, reverse painting on glass, performance art, cinema and video. Winner of the 2019 Joan-Miró Prize, she has notably presented her work in thirty solo museum exhibitions worldwide, including most recently at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, M+, Hong Kong and the National Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, and the National Gallery, London.
https://www.instagram.com/nalinimalani/
Visit the the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts website to check on the opening hours and to purchase your ticket online.
Click on images to enlarge them.
All photos of City of Desires—Crossing Boundaries mural © Nadia Slejskova
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