Of Woman Born
May 2, 2026
Nalini Malani’s artistic practice has been one of the most compelling and inspiring parts of my curatorial journey. In the formative years of KNMA, Nalini was one of the artists’ works that set a tone for me — of what art could demand of its audience, and of what a museum could stand for. We had the privilege of working on Nalini’s three-part retrospective in 2014, the first-ever in India, and of supporting her large-scale retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, among others. This newly commissioned project in Venice feels like a natural extension of that long journey together. For KNMA, bringing Nalini’s imagination to the global stage of the Venice Biennale this year titled “In Minor Keys” is both a curatorial conviction and something close to a shared responsibility.
What moves me most, when I reflect on Nalini’s practice across more than five decades, is the consistency with which she has held space for what I can only describe as a paradoxical experience of trauma. Her artistic consciousness is structured around the persistence of a foundational wound, the partition of Undivided India, and the violent displacement that followed. It is a wound that refuses to be buried in history, making its brutal presence felt again in the communal violence of 1992, 2002, and 2018. Nalini’s journey from paintings and drawings to Mylar cylinders and iPad animations is not a linear development but a discontinuous unfolding of artistic forms, where each form interrupts the apparent naturalness of the previous ones, insisting that meaning erupts through rupture rather than through seamless evolution. Drawing, too, evolved for her into an intimate way of ordering an inner reality: its fears, anxieties, and uncertainties that constitute the lived experience of those who do not hold power.
9 channel iPad Animation Chamber,
sound, dimensions variable
Collection – Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
© Nalini Malani
Nalini’s Of Woman Born in Venice invites us to leave behind fixed ideas of geopolitical imagination. It prompts us to ask: For whom is history written? What would our maps, our myths, our futures look like if they were redrawn from the perspective of the vanquished who survived the horrors of war?
Conceptualised as an animation chamber, it draws on the Greek myth of Orestes, who kills his mother to avenge his father and is absolved by Athena, a goddess not born of a woman. Through this divine pardon, the maternal body is severed away from law and justice even as it remains the origin of life. For Nalini, this is no archaic story. It still haunts our present, when wars and occupations are justified as self-defence, and devastating violence unfolds with no true reckoning. Nalini summons the Furies of our time, not only as goddesses of vengeance, but along with the unseen and unheard, the displaced and mourning. She foregrounds this absent agency of women who bear the deepest wounds of conflict yet remain central to the possibility of another world.
9 channel iPad Animation Chamber,
sound, dimensions variable
Collection – Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
© Nalini Malani
Across nine channels of projection, Of Woman Born leads us into a deep, dark cave-like chamber with moving images. Mythic figures, drawings, silhouettes, drifting texts and apparitions refuse to settle down into a single coherent narrative. A haunting soundscape of twenty minutes courses through the space, superimposing the past and present, myth and memory, justice and impunity. We are invited into this unsettling space/chamber not to resolve the story of Orestes, but to live through its afterlives, and to listen to the dispossessed women whose muted histories return here with a demand to be heard.
The layering in Nalini’s work is also a reminder to us that memory operates in a form of superimposition wherein the past and present, personal and collective memory, individual trauma and historical violence become indistinguishable. The viewer’s body gets drawn to the site of political contestation in the acceleration and disorientation played out by the visual and spatial experience. of animation chambers. The exhibition space does not simply remain a meditative or contemplative space, but is transformed into a field of perceptual struggle, testing our ethical capacity to witness violence without mastery or resolution. This supersaturation of multiple projections, overlapping voices, and accelerating gestures latches onto the viewer’s body, making them co-witness to the acts of violence. In the animation chamber, looking afresh is not a choice, but a necessity of perpetual renewal demanded by the work’s refusal of closure.
On behalf of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, I welcome you to the experience of Nalini Malani – Of Woman Born, the official collateral of the Biennale Arte, Venice, 2026.
About the Artist
Nalini Malani (born in 1946 in Karachi, undivided India) is a pioneering Indian contemporary artist with an artistic practice that spans over six decades. Her work encompasses film, camera-less photography, reverse painting, wall drawing/erasure performance, theatre, animation, and video/shadow play.
Initially rooted in the disciplines of painting, filmmaking, and photography, Malani’s artistic practice took a radical turn in the late eighties. Confronted by the rising waves of orthodoxy, Malani extended beyond the possibilities of canvas, reaching a wider audience through the potent expression of theatre, ephemeral wall drawings, and the mesmerizing allure of video/shadow plays. In these works, she draws deeply from historical events and her personal experience of the Partition of British India, giving voice to the marginalized through her evocative visual stories. Her art investigates the questions of gender, race, social inequality, and cultural identity.
The protagonists in Malani’s art emerge from across Indian and European mythologies. She draws references from the underbellies of history and culture, crafting epic narratives that simultaneously emerge and dissolve before our eyes. For Malani, it’s crucial to reflect on how humanity is absorbing the impending sense of crisis and catastrophe. She does this by unsettling our ingrained ways of seeing both art and life. Her socially engaged work continues to illuminate and inspire several generations of creators from the Global South.
About the Curator
Roobina Karode, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA)
Curator, educator and art critic, Roobina Karode is the Artistic Director and Chief Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi, India, since it opened its doors in 2010. She has post-graduate
specializations in Art History and in Education.
About the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Established through the initiative of avid art collector Kiran Nadar, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) opened to the public in January 2010 as India’s first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art from the subcontinent. KNMA is a non-commercial, not-for-profit institution supported by the Shiv Nadar Foundation. It seeks to foster a dynamic relationship between art and culture through its exhibitions, publications, educational initiatives, and public programs. Committed to institutional collaborations and artist support networks, KNMA actively engages with diverse audiences through its wide-ranging programming. KNMA supports artists whose work engages with social and political questions while expanding global understanding of South Asian art. KNMA has presented major exhibitions by artists including Nalini Malani, Zarina, Nasreen Mohamedi, Raqs Media Collective, and regularly collaborates with leading international institutions.
