BARCELONA.- Nalini Malani (Karachi, now Pakistan, 1946) has devoted her artistic career to the defence of social, feminist and environmental justice. Malani’s work is built as a narrative that intertwines literary and mythological references with Asian and Western aesthetic forms to create a distinct multilayer language. Her bold output, based on a prodigious intellectual curiosity and committed to the values of radical imagination and socio-political awareness, earned the artist the 2019 Joan Miró Prize, one of the most prestigious and best-endowed contemporary art awards in the world, granted jointly by the Fundació Joan Miró and the ”la Caixa” Foundation.

The exhibition –Nalini Malani’s first solo museum show in Spain– is curated by Martina Millà, Head of Exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró, in close collaboration with the artist. It features fifty years of Malani’s career with works that illustrate prevailing concerns in her work, such as utopia and dystopia, recent and ancient history of abuse, as well as marginalized narratives, which result in a condemnation of inequality and structural violence that women and underprivileged groups suffer around the world.

You Don’t Hear Me offers visitors the opportunity to see Nalini Malani’s first films from the late 1960s, several painting series and immersive installations from the past fifteen years, as well as her most recent animations and wall drawings created specifically for this project. At the artist’s request, the show only includes works from museums and private collections in Western Europe, to honour her commitment starting in the 1990s to follow sustainable exhibition practices. Accordingly, this project has received generous support from the Burger Collection, Castello di Rivoli and Galerie Lelong.

Two types of work that are characteristic of Nalini Malani’s practice welcome visitors in the first room. The first is a shadow play titled The Tables Have Turned (2008), an installation with 32 reverse-painted cylinders standing on long-playing turntables that make the projected images rotate. The point of departure for this work is the myth of Cassandra and her gift of prophecy, which for Malani symbolizes the deep, intuitive knowledge that lurks within us, as well as the way that women feel and think, which is often silenced or ignored. The second piece is a mural drawing from the Can You Hear Me? (2020) series, made specifically for the Fundació Joan Miró. This ephemeral piece will be erased right before the show is taken down, in the course of a performance conceived by Malani whose content will not be revealed to the museum organizers nor to the public until a few moments before it begins.




The fateful story of Cassandra and its contemporary relevance are also the inspiration for Listening to the Shades (2007), a painting installation shown in the following gallery. Almost thirty metres in length, the series spans the entire perimeter of the room with forty-two reverse paintings on acrylic sheet which offer a non-sequential narrative.

In the late 1960s, Nalini Malani emerged as a pioneering figure in experimental film in India. Her works denounced the discrimination women suffered in her country, a topic the artist has continued to explore throughout her work since. The next space in the show features her films produced from 1969 to 1976: Still Life, Onanism, Taboo and the two-screen installation Utopia.

Next, the exhibition moves on to a room showing painted works based on ancient poems of India, followed by the panoramic installation All We Imagine as Light, from the early 2000s. This painting series is also made with a technique that involves reverse painting on acrylic sheet panels. In both rooms, Malani creates a ripple in time, leading archetypal, mythological images from the past to coexist with passages from India’s recent history in a dialogue between different temporalities that is very much the artist’s own.

The last room in the exhibition features a recent, large video installation titled Can You Hear Me?, which includes seven simultaneous projections of fifty-six digital animation shorts. In her constant search for new media, Malani has never ceased to experiment with new technologies. Since 2017 she has been creating animation pieces on her tablet and sharing them regularly on social media. This room offers a selection of this work, which recaptures literary references from her previous work to react to questions that concern and challenge her in real time.

To accompany the exhibition, a publication will be launched focusing on the important role literature has played as a source of inspiration for Malani. The project’s curator Martina Millà signs an essay on this aspect of Malani’s practice and presents the exhibition through the readings and literary references that have informed its creative process.

In conclusion, the pieces on display in You Don’t Hear Me are the result of an interdisciplinary exploration of female subjectivity and convey a firm condemnation of violence as a reminder of the vulnerability of human existence and of life in general. Malani’s interest in certain female characters from ancient mythology –both Greek and Indian– and in the symbols of the modern world have enabled her to develop a universalist iconographic mix with no qualms about condemning contemporary forms of abuse. The past, the present and the future; memory, myth and resistance are the elements of an extraordinary language of the imagination and form, of sensory phenomena and complex meanings that turn Nalini Malani’s exhibitions into transformative experiences for their visitors.