Nalini Malani gets yearlong solo show
Malani's works may not command record prices in India, yet she has lately received international attention a scale few South Asians have.
Prophets are sometimes honoured more abroad than at home - as is the case with Indian artist Nalini Malani, whose solo year-long show opens Aug 23 at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) here.

Malani's works may not command record prices at auctions in India, yet she has lately received international attention on a scale few South Asians have.
"Malani's art, with its strong content, is becoming very important internationally," said Susan Bead, curator of Exposing the Source: The paintings of Nalini Malani show.
Malani, born in Karachi just a year before India's independence in 1947, seems to burn with anger at the trauma of the country's partition. Too strong perhaps for hanging in one's living room, Malani's work is developing towards public forms that disturb and challenge the viewer.
For example, in the 1988 painting "On Secularism", a nude figure carries another naked man away from what appears to be a Hindu-Muslim clash, with grim figures, presumably politicians, in the foreground - hardly the kind of painting to brighten up a living room.
Malani's will be no ordinary show, Bead pointed out. Considering the venue, the number of works and the show's sheer length - it will run from Aug 23, 2005 to Aug 22, 2006 - it will be a landmark exhibition by a contemporary Indian artist, Bead added.
An indefatigable experimenter with new materials and media, Malani has been featured in such path-breaking international exhibitions as Century City (Tate Modern, 2000) and Unpacking Europe (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 2001). One of her installations is at this year's Venice Biennale.
This will be Malani's second one-artist museum show in the US: her first such was over two years ago - a video display, Hamletmachine, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (November 13, 2002-January 12, 2003). The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin has also scheduled a one-artist exhibition of her works for 2007.
Malani is delighted with all this interest in her work, she told IANS on telephone from her studio in Mumbai. But she is not coming to the US for the opening.
She is ever seeking new forms of expression, using cylinders, mirrors, motors and lights to create artistic statements addressed to large audiences. For example, Hamletmachine, a reworking of a play by a German playwright, is a 20-minute video installation. So is Remembering Toba Tek Singh, based on a short story about the exchange of prisoners between asylums in India and Pakistan following partition.
The New Museum said on its website at that time that Malani's Hamletmachine was the first museum solo by a South Asian artist in this country.
Unlike the installation at the New Museum, PEM will have on view a lot of pure paintings stretching across two decades of Malani's work.
"I believe, despite all her interest in state-of-art media, she is primarily a painter, and we will have representative selection of them for the serious, thoughtful viewer," Bean said.