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Born in 1946 in Karachi and raised amid the dislocations of Partition, Nalini Malani has shaped an artistic language rooted in exile, memory, and the fragile, persistent voices that history often pushes to the margins. After studying at Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai, and later in Paris on a French Government scholarship, she emerged in the 1980s as part of a generation of Indian artists who expanded the vocabulary of modernism, carrying painting... Born in 1946 in Karachi and raised amid the dislocations of Partition, Nalini Malani has shaped an artistic language rooted in exile, memory, and the fragile, persistent voices that history often pushes to the margins. After studying at Sir J J School of Art, Mumbai, and later in Paris on a French Government scholarship, she emerged in the 1980s as part of a generation of Indian artists who expanded the vocabulary of modernism, carrying painting into the realms of film, performance, animation, and immersive installation.

Across drawing, reverse painting, video, and her signature shadow plays, Malani constructs worlds where myth, literature, and lived experience overlap. Her figures, from Medea, Cassandra, and Sita, to countless unnamed women, act as witnesses, returning us to stories of displacement, gendered violence, nationalism and collective memory. Her installations feel like spaces where silence finally speaks; where the personal and political press against each other with unsettling clarity.

Recent years have seen her practice grow and reach new global heights. Her National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship (2022–23) resulted in My Reality is Different, a nine-channel animation that reimagines European masterpieces through a feminist, anti-colonial lens. Exhibitions such as The Fragility of Time (2024, JNAF, Mumbai), Crossing Boundaries (2023, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), and The Human Stain (2023, Galerie Lelong, Paris) reaffirm the urgency and global resonance of her concerns.

Her politically motivated works have been shown in major exhibitions in India, Japan, Australia, England, Cuba and South Africa and are represented in national museum collections worldwide. Malani’s work lives in major international collections, including MoMA and Asia Society Museum (New York); the Burger Collection (Hong Kong); Hauser & Wirth (London); the National Gallery of Modern Art (Mumbai and New Delhi); TIFR (Mumbai); the British Museum (London); Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane); Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney); Art Gallery of Western Australia (Perth); the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and Kawaguchi Museum (Japan); the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam); the Wilfredo Lam Center (Havana); and the Peabody Essex Museum (USA).

Her accolades trace the arc of a life committed to artistic and political enquiry: the Kyoto Prize (2023); the Joan Miró Prize (2019); an Honorary Doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute (2019); the Asian Art Game Changers Award (2016); the St. Moritz Art Masters Lifetime Achievement Award (2014); and the Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize (2013).

Nalini Malani lives and works between Mumbai and Amsterdam, continuing to expand what it means to create, remember, and resist.

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