Nalini MALANI: 1969-2018 Can You Hear Me?: A1, A2

ARARIO GALLERY Shanghai is pleased to introduce Nalini Malani (b.1946-), an internationally acclaimed female artist, for the November art season. Widely acknowledged for her masterful refinement of a woman's historical vision concerning the global tensions around piercing conflicts, Malani is regarded as one of the foremost contemporary artists from India. Her work will be exhibited at the upcoming Shanghai Biennale 2018. Also she was invited to participate in many grande International exhibitions, including Kassel Documenta in 2012, La Biennale di Venezia in 2007 and others. Malani is one of few female artists from Asia to hold a retrospective exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2017 and also at Castello di Rivoli, Italy at present. As well as the first woman artist from Asia to get the honor of the Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize in the field of contemporary art in 2013.

Brought up in India, a melting pot of diverse ethnic groups, languages and religions, Nalini Malani focuses on the trauma caused by endless conflicts between religions and ethnic groups. The history of constant disunion and chaos, which dispersed to racial and religious disputes even after they were liberated from long colonialism, has been the solid basis for her works. Her artistic language, categorized into race, class and gender, is represented as a visual final product mixing the wounds and suffering of India’s history with her own personal stories. Their narratives, wherein past and present, true records and falsehoods, and history and myth are linked like a Mobius strip, are dismantled and restructured in various methods within an organic space where visual media, its creator, and its viewers join together. They are both inscribers and creators of history at the same time.

ARARIO GALLERY Shanghai will launch Malani’s solo debut in China following the retrospectives at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, 2005, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, 2014, Centre Pompidou in France, 2017, and Castello di Rivoli in Italy, October 2018, which is selected as the best exhibition of last week. The exhibition title Can You Hear Me?: Nalini Malani 1969-2018 comes from one of the artist’s stop-motion sketch animation series, made entirely with iPad drawings in 2018, which urgently calls for the public's attention toward numerous conflicts, clashes, and paradoxes in opposition with the universal value of the mankind. Malani’s new stop motion animations made of iPad drawings have been shared with public through her Instagram and by exhibiting these brand new stop motion animation works with her very first stop motion video created in 1969, Nalini Malani exhibition at Arario Gallery Shanghai will deliver the never stop experimental spirit of this master female artist, Nalini Malani. The exhibition encompasses Malani’s very early photography and video from 1960s, large-scale film installations, stop-motion animations, reverse paintings and other works emblematic of the artist’s rich career over the last fifty years

Nalini Malani’s work is represented in public collections at major institutions worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Asia Society Museum (New York, USA), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Fukuoka, Japan), Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), ARARIO MUSEUM (Seoul, Korea), Auckland Art Gallery (Auckland, New Zealand), Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art (Turin, Italy), Art Gallery of Western Australia (Perth, Australia), Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane, Australia), Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), Kadist Art Foundation (San Francisco, USA), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, USA), Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (New Delhi, India), National Gallery of Modern Art (Bombay, New Delhi, India), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands) , Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean (Mauritius), Google Collection (New Delhi, India), Anupam and Lekha Poddar Collection (New Delhi, India) , Burger Collection (Hong Kong), Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne, Switzerland) and many more.