Nalini Malani (b. 1946) is one of India’s most influential contemporary artists, known for a practice that moves between painting, drawing, video, installation, theatre, and immersive “shadow plays.” Born in Karachi in undivided India (now Pakistan) and raised in Calcutta and later Bombay, she studied at the Sir J. J. School of Art, graduating in 1969, and began developing a voice shaped by displacement, memory, and the aftereffects of partition.
Her early work emerged from painting and drawing, but she soon expanded into experimental film, photography, and multimedia installation. Malani’s art is often centered on women’s lives, historical violence, mythology, and political conflict, using recurring figures such as Cassandra, Medea, Sita, and other female protagonists to question power, exclusion, and the construction of history.
A pioneer of video art in India, Malani is especially known for projecting moving drawings and painted images in layered environments that blur the line between image, performance, and narrative. Her work has been widely exhibited in India and internationally, including major presentations at the Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, and the Venice Biennale, and she became the first Asian to receive the Joan Miro Prize in 2019.
Over more than five decades, Malani has built a body of work that is both politically alert and visually experimental, combining personal memory with broader cultural and feminist concerns. Based in Mumbai, she remains a defining figure in post-independence Indian art, admired for the intensity, scale, and moral urgency of her practice.