April 01, 2026

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Witnessing Women

The one book that Nalini Malani carries during her peripatetic travels is Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by essayist Adrienne Rich. “It's literally under my pillow right now,” Malani tells me, speaking from her studio in Amsterdam, weeks before leaving for Venice. For her upcoming solo exhibition, which opens alongside the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Malani has borrowed Rich's title.Now 80, the artist has been instrumental in putting Indian contemporary art on the global map. Through the decades, she has been championed in earnest by some of the world's major galleries and museums, including Tate, MoMA, and Centre Pompidou. Watching her at work (often captured on video) feels almost mesmeric. At times, she's seen standing on a ladder before a wall, making ephemeral charcoal drawings in sweeping arcs—at once loose and controlled. Other times, she's seated on the ground, paintbrush in hand, pensively staining the canvas before her in colours of the sun.Her art returns, again and again, to tragic figures such as Sita, who chose to be taken back into the earth; Cassandra, the doomed Trojan prophetess; and Medea, the powerful enchantress. Drawn from Hindu and Greek mythology, these women reflect Malani's enduring preoccupation with classical literature. Through them, the artist examines the persistence of violence against women across time.To be unveiled at Venice, the myth of Orestes lies at the heart of her site-specific installation titled, Nalini Malani—Of Woman Born, commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. It comprises 67 animations featuring more than 30,000 drawings made on an iPad, underpinned by a haunting soundscape. “Orestes is a character in the Greek trilogy, Oresteia, who kills his mother, Clytemnestra and her lover,” Malani explains. Her eyes shine as she speaks with measured clarity. “He justies his actions by saying that his mother was responsible for murdering his father, King Agamemnon.” Yet, Clytemnestra's act was born out of grief—in retaliation for Agamemnon's sacrifice of their daughter.The play is complex and unsettling, as it places motherhood on trial. In the court of Athena, Orestes is exonerated, where Apollo dismisses the importance of a mother, reducing her to a mere vessel for the father's seed. As Malani observes, “It denigrates the very idea of motherhood.” According to Malani, this myth is alarmingly resonant today when violence is carried out under the guise of defence and justice, with its perpetrators rarely held accountable. “Everything that's happening around us is man-made, including the conicts and the border [issues],” she asserts, as our world implodes under the howls of war, anguish, disrupted energy supply, and melting icebergs. “We have three wars happening simultaneously, and I can't keep quiet.” Her own childhood experiences were singed by the aftermath of the Partition. Through Of Woman Born, Malani turns to Orestes as a way to read the present where women, more often than not, face the horrors of violence.Artists have long engaged with myths to make sense of their times. Pablo Picasso, for instance, reimagined the Greek Minotaur for his monochromatic masterpiece Guernica (1937), where a bull emerges as a symbol for war's bestiality. Closer home, Raja Ravi Varma gave mythological figures in Indian epics a distinctly human form, although often critiqued through the lens of the male gaze. Malani does something different. She unsettles the canonical narratives by foregrounding the experience of the women wronged, silenced, or erased.Of Woman Born belongs to Malani's animation series drawn on the iPad. She uses her ngers to 'paint' on screen. The sketches, often crude, aggressive scribbles are accompanied by a whirlwind of written gibberish, which give the work a raw, visceral energy. They have the ability to unhinge and discomfort the viewer. This multisensorial installation—a tableau of horror—is punctuated with excerpts from the Greek tragedy, including quotes from the Furies (Greek goddesses of vengeance and retribution) who relentlessly admonish Orestes for the crime against his mother.“There are a variety of references that are included in the

Matter & Meaning

Clay is one of humanity's oldest materials, yet it has long sat at the margins of serious artistic discourse, seen as utilitarian, as belonging to another kind of maker. To work with it is to negotiate constantly with a medium that captures every hesitation and yields nothing unearned.Yet the four artists--Aman Khanna, Rekha Goyal, Kausha Ghelani, and Adil Writer--embrace it with deliberate conviction. Through distinct paths and decades of practice, each has forged in clay's honest resistance a language wholly and irreducibly their own. THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE Aman Khanna arrived at clay two months deep into a sculpture that kept cracking, resisting, and demanding something more than he'd been asked to give in nearly a decade of graphic design. Khanna had gone to Pictoplasma Academy in Berlin in 2013 with a straightforward idea: translate one of his drawn characters into three dimensions. What he came back with was harder to articulate. A practice. A compulsion. The particular knowledge that some materials tell you the truth about yourself whether you asked for it or not."It clicked the rst time I put my hands in," he