Nalini Malani: National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship

by Mieke Bal (Contributor), Daniel Herrmann (Contributor), Zehra Jumabhoy (Contributor)

A unique and compelling view of the work of leading contemporary artist Nalini Malani through the lens of her most recent commission

This publication presents the latest work of Nalini Malani (b. 1946), recipient of the 2022 National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship with ArtFund. 

For over five decades, Malani’s art has focused on giving a voice to the stories of those marginalized by history⁠—particularly women. She is one of the most incisive artists of our time, and the acute analysis and poetic compassion of her experimental film, photography, painting, and drawing has influenced generations of others from the 1960s to the present day.  

For her first museum commission in the United Kingdom, Malani has created an immersive installation of large-scale, animated drawings inspired by the sites, histories, and collections of the National Gallery, London, and the Holburne Museum, Bath. With a floating palimpsest of digital images, Malani reveals, annotates, and shares new, underlying stories in some of Europe’s best-known paintings, offering a contemporary and critical dialogue between past and present. 

With leading articles based on new research, sumptuous illustrations, and artist-led design, this extensive study documents the Fellowship alongside the artist’s previous work.

Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale University Press

Exhibition Holburne Museum, Bath
October 7, 2022–January 8, 2023
 
The National Gallery, London
March 2–June 11, 2023
 

144 pages, Hardcover

Published May 30, 2023

About the author

Mieke Bal is a Dutch literary theorist, cultural and art historian.

Areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her many publications include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (4th edition 2017). Her view of interdisciplinary analysis in the Humanities and Social Sciences is expressed in the profile of what she has termed “cultural analysis”, the basis of ASCA. See the video clip on the right side of this page, where I explain the approach.

Mieke is also a video artist, her internationally exhibited documentaries on migration include Separations, State of Suspension, Becoming Vera and the installation Nothing is Missing and are part of the Cinema Suitcase collective. With Michelle Williams Gamaker she made the feature film A Long History of Madness, a theoretical fiction about madness, and related exhibitions (2012). Her following project Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism, also with Michelle, is exhibited worldwide. She just finished a feature film and 5-screen installation on René Descartes and his infelicitously ending friendship with Queen Kristina of Sweden.

Occasionally she acts as an independent curator. Her co-curated exhibition 2MOVE travelled to four countries. She is currently preparing an exhibition for the Munch museum in Oslo.