Nalini Malani Lets the Walls Speak with a New Installation in Venice

Entering the cavernous Magazzini del Sale in Venice, viewers encounter Nalini Malani’s animations, which are projected directly onto the uneven brick walls of the former salt warehouse. Her images flicker, dissolve, and reappear as they are cast across architecture shaped by centuries of trade. The installation feels both contemporary and archaic: moving images that seem less like digital projections than pigment placed on stone, recalling cave paintings set in motion.
 
This tension between past and present runs throughout Of Woman Born, Malani’s latest project, which was commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and is being presented during the opening of the Venice Biennale next month. Drawing on tens of thousands of hand-drawn images translated into animation, the installation brings together mythology, literature, and sound in a layered environment that unfolds as the viewer moves through the space. Beyond the exhibition itself, Malani has also extended one of her recurring figures—the “Skipping Girl”—across Venice, where she appears on posters and public signage, guiding viewers to the work. Long engaged with questions of violence, displacement, and the politics of gender, Malani here turns to the myth of Orestes to probe the historical roots of power and its persistence in the present.
 
At 80, Malani continues to expand a practice that has moved fluidly between drawing, film, and installation since the late 1960s. Ahead of the exhibition’s opening, Malani spoke with ARTnews about working with architecture, translating drawing into animation, and why the role of the artist is not to provide answers, but to pose questions.

ARTnews: You’ve worked with mythology across your practice for decades, but Of Woman Born feels especially tied to the present. Could you walk me through how this project first began to take shape, particularly before the Venice commission?

Nalini Malani: I’ve always been interested in mythologies, not only from my own part of the world, but from elsewhere. Greek mythology, in particular, has strong connections with South Asia. But this work didn’t begin with Venice. It began with things around me that make you want to clench your fist. There is anger, because decisions are being made that don’t give people the right to their own lives. As an artist, I try to contain that anger in the work. When the invitation came to show in Venice, the work had already begun. The space became a kind of bonus.

The installation is closely shaped by the architecture of the Magazzini del Sale—the work brings together animation, projection, and something like painting in space. What was important for you in shaping how the viewer physically encounters the work?

The space is a gift, but also a challenge. It’s a 15th-century salt warehouse—the bricks are crumbling, and salt is still coming out of them. That history is already embedded in the architecture, and I didn’t want to cover it.

At the same time, it’s not possible to show physical works there—there’s no temperature or light control. So I turned to animation and projection. During the rehearsals, I began to see how the images could work with the surface of the walls. In a way, the walls themselves begin to speak.

There are nine channels of animation across three walls, and the space is very long and deep—almost like a cave. Because of the buttresses, you never see everything at once. You have to walk, and then something appears, and then something else—it becomes like reading, page after page. The projections on the uneven surfaces make the images feel like raw pigment, almost like cave paintings in motion. So it is a new medium, but it also recalls something very ancient.

At the center of the installation is the myth of Orestes, which hinges on the justification of matricide. What drew you to that narrative, and what does it allow you to explore in this work?

The story begins with a law from ancient Greece, in which Orestes kills his mother and is set free. The judgment declares that the mother is not essential to parenthood. For me, this marks an early moment in the denigration of women.

But no myth is important unless it becomes contemporary. And this one is. Today, we still see how women’s lives are devalued, how violence continues, and how rarely women’s voices are heard. The work connects that ancient narrative to the present.

Across your installations, you’ve long worked with shadow play, rotation, and recurring images to create immersive environments. In this work, how do you think about movement and duration in relation to the space?

I think of my work more like a spiral. Things don’t repeat exactly. There is always a shift, a delay, something new entering. Even the shadows and projections create juxtapositions I cannot fully control.

And then there is the viewer. Without the viewer, there is no art—the artist, the artwork, and the viewer together make the work; it only comes alive in that encounter. Each person comes with their own experience and history, so the work becomes something different for each viewer. That freedom is important. I want to hear what the viewer says.

The work includes tens of thousands of drawings. How does your process move between drawing and animation?

Drawing is like a keyboard for me. From drawing, everything else develops. I’ve been working with animation since 1969, starting with stop-motion film. Now I use a very simple app on the iPad. I import my drawings, work over them, and animate them. I don’t use the Apple Pencil. I prefer to use my fingers. I like that sense of direct contact, like messing around, almost like a child.

Sound plays a central role in the installation, bringing together different voices, texts, and musical elements. How did you approach building this sonic layer?

I composed the sound myself, beginning with a very simple keyboard on the iPad. It brings together different voices—my own, a singer’s voice—as well as fragments of texts, from the Oresteia, T. S. Eliot, Hannah Arendt, and Adrienne Rich. Everything is layered together. There is a loop about 30 minutes, but you never quite know where it begins or ends.

The figure of the “Skipping Girl” has recurred across your work for some time. How does she function within Of Woman Born, particularly as she extends beyond the exhibition itself?

She is like my signature, like a graffiti tag. I began animating her around 2012, for Documenta 13. She appears as a young girl skipping rope, drawn in a simple, fluid line, always in motion. For me, she represents life—the excitement and energy of it, but also hope. In Venice, she moves beyond the exhibition itself: you will see her throughout the city, on posters and public signage, where she appears in shifting variations drawn from the animations, guiding you to the work with QR codes linking to the animation with sound.

Looking across your six-decade practice, what feels continuous in this work, particularly in relation to questions of displacement and memory?

There is one red line that runs through everything: Partition. My family was displaced, and even though I was very young, I grew up with that feeling of losing home. Home is not just walls—it is culture, people, memory. That loss stays with you. It makes you think about others who are displaced, who lose everything. That has shaped how I read, how I think, and how I work.

Right now, what feels most urgent for you to address?

I don’t think I have a message. I have questions. As artists, we can understand the problems, but we don’t necessarily have solutions. Those have to come collectively. It’s like knitting: you drop a stitch, and you have to go all the way back to pick it up. You return to history, bring it forward again, and ask: does this still hold?

You’ve worked with moving image and digital tools for decades, well before current debates around AI. How do you think about your practice in relation to these conversations today?

Technology itself is not the problem. It has given us extraordinary possibilities—we are speaking across continents right now. The question is how we use it. Every technology has consequences. Even a phone has an afterlife—what happens to it when it becomes obsolete? Where does it go? These are the questions we need to face. Ultimately, the issue is not technology, but human decisions—politics, war, borders. That is where the problem lies.