VIDEO INSTALLATION IN NEW MEDIA ART OF NALINI MALANI: REFLECTION OF MYTHICAL PERSONA AND CULTURAL NARRATIVES

Abstract

Nalini Malani is regarded as one of the most influential contemporary artists from India in the arena of New Media Art. Video Installation of New Media Art in Malani’s work is constructed as a narrative that interweaves Eastern and Western mythologies and aesthetics forms to address interreligious violence in India, especially on women. Malani was born in the region of Karachi in 1946, a year before the partition between India and Pakistan that followed the independence from the British Empire what is now Pakistan.  The subject matters of Malani’s works are characterised by the artist’s mental expressions of visual surroundings such as Malani’s experiences as a refuge of the Partition of India. In her Video Installation practices in New Media Art executions, Nalini Malani reveals inherited iconographies and valued cultural stereotypes. Since the 1970s, Malani has reflected her emphatically feminine stance through her Video Installations, in a country uncertain between the possessions of colonialism and the idealism of a Third World social democracy and as well as being apprehended by the political and economic changes brought about by rapid globalisation. Engaging figures from myths, fairy tales, and from the beliefs of diverse religious cultures, and reflecting on war, orthodox fanaticism, the effects of capitalism, and the destruction of the environment, Nalini Malani portrays the position of the female in scenes past and future. The artist’s emphasis on the feminine figure as a topos of violence both received and produced. As an ambivalent figure, both caring and destroying locates her art within feminist discourses. Yet she privileges to be beyond this linkage and to be using mythical images of Medea, Cassandra or Sita as images of conflicts and violence within the human psyche, both feminine and masculine.