Nalini Malani’s Venice Biennale 2026 exhibition confronts violence, myth, and motherhood

The one book that Nalini Malani carries during her peripatetic travels is Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by essayist Adrienne Rich. “It’s literally under my pillow right now,” Malani tells me, speaking from her studio in Amsterdam, weeks before leaving for Venice. For her upcoming solo exhibition, which opens alongside the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Malani has borrowed Rich’s title.

Now 80, the artist has been instrumental in putting Indian contemporary art on the global map. Through the decades, she has been championed in earnest by some of the world’s major galleries and museums, including Tate, MoMA, and Centre Pompidou.

Watching her at work (often captured on video) feels almost mesmeric. At times, she’s seen standing on a ladder before a wall, making ephemeral charcoal drawings in sweeping arcs—at once loose and controlled. Other times, she’s seated on the ground, paintbrush in hand, pensively staining the canvas before her in colours of the sun.

Her art returns, again and again, to tragic figures such as Sita, who chose to be taken back into the earth; Cassandra, the doomed Trojan prophetess; and Medea, the powerful enchantress. Drawn from Hindu and Greek mythology, these women reflect Malani’s enduring preoccupation with classical literature. Through them, the artist examines the persistence of violence against women across time.

To be unveiled at Venice, the myth of Orestes lies at the heart of her site-specific installation titled, Nalini Malani—Of Woman Born, commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. It comprises 67 animations featuring more than 30,000 drawings made on an iPad, underpinned by a haunting soundscape. “Orestes is a character in the Greek trilogy, Oresteia, who kills his mother, Clytemnestra and her lover,” Malani explains. Her eyes shine as she speaks with measured clarity. “He justifies his actions by saying that his mother was responsible for murdering his father, King Agamemnon.” Yet, Clytemnestra’s act was born out of grief—in retaliation for Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter.

The play is complex and unsettling, as it places motherhood on trial. In the court of Athena, Orestes is exonerated, where Apollo dismisses the importance of a mother, reducing her to a mere vessel for the father’s seed. As Malani observes, “It denigrates the very idea of motherhood.”

According to Malani, this myth is alarmingly resonant today when violence is carried out under the guise of defence and justice, with its perpetrators rarely held accountable. “Everything that’s happening around us is man-made, including the conflicts and the border [issues],” she asserts, as our world implodes under the howls of war, anguish, disrupted energy supply, and melting icebergs. “We have three wars happening simultaneously, and I can’t keep quiet.” Her own childhood experiences were singed by the aftermath of the Partition. Through Of Woman Born, Malani turns to Orestes as a way to read the present where women, more often than not, face the horrors of violence.

“Most of my animations emerge from intense anger.”

Artists have long engaged with myths to make sense of their times. Pablo Picasso, for instance, reimagined the Greek Minotaur for his monochromatic masterpiece Guernica (1937), where a bull emerges as a symbol for war’s bestiality. Closer home, Raja Ravi Varma gave mythological figures in Indian epics a distinctly human form, although often critiqued through the lens of the male gaze. Malani does something different. She unsettles the canonical narratives by foregrounding the experience of the women wronged, silenced, or erased.

Of Woman Born belongs to Malani’s animation series drawn on the iPad. She uses her fingers to ‘paint’ on screen. The sketches, often crude, aggressive scribbles are accompanied by a whirlwind of written gibberish, which give the work a raw, visceral energy. They have the ability to unhinge and discomfort the viewer. This multisensorial installation—a tableau of horror—is punctuated with excerpts from the Greek tragedy, including quotes from the Furies (Greek goddesses of vengeance and retribution) who relentlessly admonish Orestes for the crime against his mother.

“There are a variety of references that are included in the animations,” explains KNMA’s chief curator Roobina Karode over email. “Some of them are mythical citations like the Furies, as well as historical ones like that of Goya. There is a complex layering process through which the figures appear in the installation. The background score, too, is a combination of spoken word and a lullaby that reflects the diverse emotional states of distress women experience in contemporary society.”

I attempt to infer the screen-grabs of the animations shared by the KNMA team for this interview. The Furies appear as nebulous, threatening forms—at times whispering, at times screaming. In fact, they could be symbolic for any woman seething with anger and rage for justice. There are other figures too that come alive against a black background— appearing and disappearing at will. Texts float and evanesce. The palette is deep crimson with jabs of white and grey, and smatterings of yellow.

“Most of my animations emerge from intense anger,” explains Malani. Her 2019 stop-motion animation, Can you hear me?, for instance, was a furious protest against the insidious rape culture in India. At its heart was the case of an eight-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in a temple by a group of men. Malani recalls immediately taking to the iPad to draw—a ritual she began in 2017, similar to documenting one’s thoughts into a digital journal. “I couldn’t go on the street and scream,” she tells me. “So, I made an animation to try and tell people, ‘Look what’s happening. Wake up! Wake up!’”

Malani’s Venice installation comes to life at the Magazzini del Sale, a 15th century salt warehouse complex belonging to the Renaissance. With its nine large arched doorways, discoloured terracotta bricks and a wooden trussed roof, Magazzini del Sale is brimming with character. This warehouse of yore overlooks the historical waters of the Giudecca Canal that once served as a passageway for boats carrying salt.

Malani, who is known to carefully consider the architectural anatomy of the sites where she exhibits, will project the animations onto Magazzini del Sale’s walls. “The history of the site is very important to me because I work with the space, not just a white cube,” she says, noting that she visited Magazzini twice last year for recce and rehearsals.

In Venice, as visitors move across the window-less warehouse, the animations (made in two separate loops, each 30-minute long), gradually reveal themselves. Brick buttresses partially hide what comes next. The moving images flicker, overlap, and bleed into one other, creating an overall enveloping experience. At the ‘end’ of the building, the viewers stand before a monumental central animation, which Malani likens to an “altarpiece in a church”.

In the course of our conversation, she reveals herself to be an avid reader of Greek mythology, sharing snippets from tragedy, and occasionally, offering nuggets of trivia: for instance, the word ‘salary’ comes from the word ‘salt’, she informs, once a precious monetary commodity.

The Skipping Girl, a recurring motif in Malani’s practice since the 1990s, makes an appearance too. Often read as a figure representing women and children caught in the throes of conflict, the Skipping Girl is described by Karode as “a witness, survivor, and a symbol of hope.” Her contorted body, always in motion, clutches to a hairlinethin rope, which can be interpreted as a lifeline. It’s reminiscent of the children in war zones making play structures out of rubble—like a seesaw fashioned from the remnants of destruction. “The girl is rendered through the emotional states of freedom, joy, hysteria, exhaustion, and trauma,” continues Karode.

In the universe Malani creates, complex myths and their narratives no longer remain distant or opaque—they are distilled through a lens to gauge what is happening now. Like a graffiti in motion, the Skipping Girl keeps moving, her fragile rope caught between the past and the present, play and peril. In Venice, the figures in Of Woman Born insist on being remembered—of violence unaccounted for, and of the women who continue to endure it.

Nalini Malani—Of Woman Born presented by KNMA is on view at Magazzini del Sale from May 9 through November 22, 2026.

Images: Courtesy Kiran Nadar Museum Of Art

This article first appeared in the April 2026 issue of Harper's Bazaar India  

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