Nalini Malani: Can You Hear Me?

This show looks like something of a coup for Alerkal Avenue. Widely considered the pioneer of video art in India, and embodying the role of the artist as social activist, Malani has a 50-year multimedia practice that includes photography, painting, performance, and theatre as well as film, video and animation.; her visual stories tyically take the form of immersive, multi-layered installations that explore themes of feminism and politics, racial tensions and post-colonial legacies.

In Can You Hear Me?, which first impressed us at the Whitechapel Gallery a couple of years ago, a large-scale, nine-channel video installation of over 88 iPad-drawn animations made between 2018 and 2020 is projected on to the space’s walls; text and visual quotations, annotations and snippets of sound and music — what the artist calls ‘thought bubbles’— come together, intersect, and are taken apart in Malani’s ‘Animation Chamber’.

One of the starting points was the abduction, rape and brutal murder of an eight-year-old girl in India in 2018, but that launches a flow of images and ideas which transcend national trauma to address global issues of feminism and social injustice. In Malani’s universe the voiceless share the stage with mythic characters, intellectuals and poets; moral outrage combines with satire and absurdity.

It’s a powerful piece, and it should suit this space very well (“the work inhabits the architectural expanse of the OMA-designed Concrete with unprecedented theatrical impact,” says the blurb). The exhibition will be open 10am to midnight up to 3 March.

It will be accompanied by special outdoor screenings of an adapted version of the artist’s seminal work, Ballad of a Woman, a five-minute single channel stop-motion animation hand-drawn on an iPad. Screenings take place on 25 February at 7pm, 27 February at 7.45pm, and 2 March at 7pm.