Ashok Vajpeyi in conversation with Piyush Daiya
Editor’s Note
Poet and cultural cognoscenti Ashok Vajpeyi is turning 85 this 16th and is documenting his memoirs with writer Piyush Daiya. As part of the memory project, we publish his detailed impressions of four women artists. This is the third of the four-part series.
Courtesy – Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation
Nalini Malani’s Art Inspirations
Nalini Malani participated in an important art exhibition in Bhopal. She remembers it very well. At one time, Nalini was considered one of Akbar Padamsee’s disciples. Maybe she wasn’t exactly that. But she had learned by being in the vicinity of Akbar Padamsee. Perhaps it can be said that at that time in India, upcoming painters, considered neo-narrative—their innovation was defined in this way. Nalini Malani took this innovation in a completely different direction: where the image is no longer a recognizable replica of reality. It can be said that among the neo-narrative artists, Nalini Malani, in a way, became a deviant and moved towards abstraction. This is one aspect of her work. The second aspect is that, she developed a somewhat aggressive political awareness about the situation of women—in our and the global society—and that political awareness influenced her art. The third aspect is that, in a way, her basic tendency is towards innovation. She has always tried to do something new at every stage of her art. I had seen one of her art exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. New mediums—videos, installations and other techniques—were used in the exhibition. Her art also has a deep understanding of the violence of our time and the Partition of India. Her family was a Sindhi family that came from Karachi. After the partition, the situation of Sindhi families in independent India was such that they were not left with any city of their own. Various pressures have been exerted on their Sindhi language as well—their linguistic identity has become quite lax and hazy. Apart from these, Nalini Malani also has a very sharp sense of the displacement caused by the partition. Violence, the situation of women, and the suffering of partition and displacement etc., all combine to create distortions in her art. In this sense, or this context, Nalini Malani’s art is not reassuring or a kind of art that can give some relief. It is a disturbing, questioning and agitated art, the authentic experience of which will be resentment.
Courtesy – Payal Kapadia
A major achievement of modern art is a kind of immense multiplicity at the material level as a medium, a strong and intense innovation regarding what things can be used to create works of art. A tiny bit was in our tradition of what kinds of things we can make art from. But in modern art, it exploded. Many artists, rebelling against art limited to canvas, started working with such new materials that could create art, so that the horizon of art could be expanded.
Courtesy – Arario Gallery
Image Courtesy – The Economic Times
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