As an artist, curator, and the Director of the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Mumbai, Puja Vaish’s work has highlighted the agency and influence of museums and Indian art in interdisciplinary dialogue. Having engaged in both practice and pedagogy in her career, her unique approach often emphasizes the interaction between various narratives in Indian art, and how its lineages guide artistic institutions and individuals in the contemporary context.
She speaks to Critical Collective about her ongoing exhibition, Nalini Malani: The Fragility of Time (on at JNAF from August 12 to November 5, 2024), which presents a number of so far unseen works by Malani from the 1960s and ’70s, and traces her journey as a profound artist and thinker of independent India.
Radhika Sharma (RS): What kind of connections do you see between the different phases of Nalini Malani’s practice? Where would you locate her within the current landscape of contemporary Indian art?
Puja Vaish (PV): The exhibition focuses on Malani’s early works from the mid-1960s to early 1980s, featuring drawing, painting, collage, etching, photography and film. The 103 artworks on display, 81 of which are being shown for the first time, provide a fresh opportunity for new readings of Malani’s practice and legacy in the context of Indian art history. Created within a span of just about 15 years, there is a diversity in the works that reflect the artist’s trials and experiments with varied aesthetic concepts. One can trace the beginnings of artistic leanings that have defined Malani’s oeuvre. Her rigour of experimentation with media, that was new for its time, such as photography and film in art, makes the show look contemporary, even though the works are from 40-50 years ago.
RS: Tell us more about the process behind curating the show, especially in capturing the diversity of the artist’s works across mediums, genres and themes from the chosen decades?
PV: This exhibition investigates the origins of Malani’s enduring themes through her early works, while illuminating the cultural dynamics of the time. In the process of selecting the works and hearing the stories behind them from the artist, pertinent trajectories emerged, which form the curatorial vantages in the exhibition.
The show highlights the regional aesthetics found in 1960s and 1970s Indian art, and the impact of abstraction among artists in Bombay. It foregrounds the informal cultural spaces and artist collectives that sprouted from the Indian avant-garde and vice versa. It examines Malani’s initial experiments with photography, theatre and film, which resonate in her current practice. Changing cities and ideas of modernity and urbanism are reflected in the artist’s representations of Bombay (now, Mumbai). Malani’s practice illustrates bold and difficult realities in the representation of women, in comparison to their depictions in Indian art history.
The exhibition opens with works from Malani’s time at the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute -- an informal multidisciplinary space where Malani had her studio right from her first year as a student at the J.J. School of Art. This section includes her ‘watercolour diary’ from 1965-1967, and abstract paintings and collages. With titles such as “Junkyard,” her abstract works bring in the street, in contrast with the tranquility of nature and Zen philosophy explored by Gaitonde and others. Malani’s paper collages evoke caricature and humour, with characterizations of “a man spitting,” “a man giving a speech” and “a lady wearing a fancy hat.”
The next section features Malani’s innovative work with photograms, stop-motion animation, and film from the Vision Exchange Workshop, set up by Akbar Padamsee from 1969 to 1972 at his Napean Sea Road apartment.
Malani travelled to Paris on a French Government scholarship between 1970 and 1972. Etchings created at the Atelier Freidlander, superimposed photography, vintage silver gelatin photographs and photograms created during these years feature in this section, alongside the artist’s personal collection of books on philosophy, art and film that influenced her.
In the last section, we have footage from the unfinished film project Malani worked on after her return from France in 1972. There is also her oil paintings from the early ’70s, and her His Life series, influenced by Lohar Chawl where she had her studio.
RS: The exhibition travels back to when the artist was a young woman in an equally young nation. How have Malani’s works responded to the socio-political fabric of independent India?
PV: “‘The Fragility of Time’ paints a portrait of the artist as a young woman in an equally young Nation.” I wrote this line as a spin on a literary reference to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce’s book is about identity and conflict through a young man’s experiences with society, religion, aesthetics and national identity. Malani’s works reflect her evolving understanding of the city and society as a young woman in her 20s in a rapidly developing country.
Malani’s early work was influenced by the modernist aspirations of Indian cities, such as the plan for New Bombay by Charles Correa, as seen in her stop-motion animation Dream Houses (1969). Malani then lived at Warden Road, Bombay, in a community housing complex for Sindhi families displaced by Partition.
In one of our conversations, Malani said to me, “You get to know about your own country when you are in another country”. She was referring to her time in Paris, where she witnessed the fervour of social reform in the aftermath of the 1968 revolution, through protests and as reflected in the intellectual life and work of international scholars. It was what made her return to explore Indian society from a renewed perspective.
She worked on a film project with women in a slum in Bandra -- the slum was razed overnight, and the project remained unfinished. Later, Malani had her studio at Lohar Chawl which influenced her depictions of social stratification, as seen in the His Life series.
Letters, photographs, references, exhibition catalogues, slides, negatives and newspaper clippings set the background for these works. Further, articles on Malani, from women’s magazines such as Eve’s Weekly, that discussed art as a new career option for women, contextualize the broader cultural landscape of the time.
RS: How do the artist’s exhibited works address individual and collective histories and realities of women in the South Asian context?
PV: “South Asian” is too much of a generalization to cover the diversity of social and cultural experience. Each work needs to be viewed within its own specific context. In the ’70s, Malani had a studio in the busy Lohar Chawl area, where she began the His Life series. She observed the rolesofhouse-helpsand girl children there -- individuals largely ignored, yet witnesses to the family dynamics in middle-class neighbourhoods in a cosmopolis like Bombay. Ideas of modernity related to changing social expectations around women’s dressing, morality and work are keenly observed by Malani. We see Malani’s playful subversion through abstraction in her photographs from 1978, where she drapes velvet to resemble female genitalia, portraying taboo subjects of female sexuality. In the film rushes of the unfinished Bandra slum project, there is an effort to understand the role of women in the labour classes. The film Taboo (1969) is Malani’s response to witnessing weavers’ communities where women were forbidden from operating looms.
RS: What was the intent behind revisiting the historic Place for People exhibition (1981)? How does it mark a major shift in Malani’s practice?
PV: Malani belongs to a league of post-independence Indian thinkers, who departed from Western modernist ideals that privileged style and universality in art, to focus on subjects that reflected the socio-political realities of their nation. The Fragility of Time encapsulates this shift within Malani’s own practice, bookended by some of her earliest works to those included in the historic Place for People exhibition in 1981.
Malani’s concerns around Indian cities and society take on different forms in her abstract and figurative works. By the mid-70s, these portrayals become more textured and specific to reveal class, caste and religious identities, as seen in her His Life series. Malani exhibited some of the works from this series in the Place for People exhibition, which marked a paradigm shift in Indian art as a call towards figuration in the portrayal of everyday life. Place for People was a significant milestone to feature in our exhibition, as I was interested in exploring how ideas link through Malani’s abstract and figurative works, which bridge the oppositional binaries of aesthetics in art history.