Art alert: Check out an exhibition of work by Nalini Malani at the Bhau Daji Lad

Art, heritage, violence and beauty come together in an exhibition of 10 works by the experimental artist.

Art, heritage, violence and beauty come together in an exhibition of 10 works by experimental artist Nalini Malani at the city’s Bhau Daji Lad museum, curated by honorary museum director Tasneem Mehta and Malani’s husband, the independent curator Johan Pijnappel.

Nalini Malani at the Venice Biennale, 2007.

Titled The Witness, the exhibition opens on Saturday. It features immersive installations, ephemeral wall drawings, erasure performances, animation chambers, and Malani’s signature video/shadow plays.

An old lost-and-found film called Dream Houses, made in 1969, was inspired by Charles Correa’s social housing project of the time. Malani made this film as part of the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) run by Modern master Akbar Padamsee, who died on Monday. “It was an experiment to understand colour theory with light, as opposed to pigment,” says Malani.

The Witness - Composite. ‘The title alludes to the little girl who appears in my paintings often,’ Malani says.

“We found the footage from five films a couple of years ago, when we were clearing out boxes in her mother’s house, and I thought it was very significant, as there were no female artists experimenting with film in the late ’60s in India,” Pijnappel says.

Another installation, In Search of Vanished Blood, takes its name from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz and explores the futility of war and violence, through original footage of women working an assembly line in an ordnance factory, as well as battle sounds, and Malani’s hand-drawn animations.

Other works featured are two reverse painting triptychs called The Teller of Tales (2019) and The Witness (2019). “The latter alludes to the little girl who appears in my paintings often,” Malani says.

Also featured is City of Desires, an “erasure performance” of a charcoal and ink mural that Malani has drawn for this exhibition. “In the past, we have invited museum staffers or visitors to join in the erasure. Once we used roses that left reddened smudges of charcoal on the wall; another time, it was peacock feathers,” says Pijnappel. What will be used to erase City of Desires? Malani will only reveal that on the last day of the exhibition, March 31.