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Stepping into Nalini Malani’s Can You Hear Me? is uncomfortably like invading someone’s busy mind. Fast-moving images, flickering texts and a whispering soundtrack come at you from all sides. Around Whitechapel’s brick-walled gallery, nine projectors cycle through 88 short animations on disjointed loops. Texts evanesce before you can read them. Lines and planes of colour coalesce to form birds, dogs, demons, then just as quickly fragment.
Malani has worked with film since 1969. She was an early participant in the Vision Exchange Workshop, an experimental interdisciplinary space in Bombay. In her early 20s, recently graduated, her short films were criticised because they addressed female sexuality. She persevered and moved to Paris on a scholarship. There she found herself in step with the leftist student body of the early 70s, attending lectures by Noam Chomsky and Simone de Beauvoir, and crossing lenses with Jean-Luc Godard.
Recent exhibitions in the US and Europe have shown Malani’s paintings on grand and mythic themes brushed on to the reverse of sheets of transparent plastic and often arranged with dramatic lighting to create shadow theatres. Her work is less known in the UK, but that will change: in June, Malani received the inaugural Contemporary fellowship from the National Gallery in London.
Arresting theatricality is an established part of her arsenal, as is animation. They are appealing, accessible formats that allow the artist to explore big issues such as nationalism and violence against women. Malani describes Can You Hear Me? as an “animation chamber”. It is a sensory assault, though perhaps no more so than the infosphere beyond the gallery walls, the city with its torrent of images and information.
As with Malani’s shadow theatres, the animation chamber is like a dramatically illuminated cave. Image dances all around, projected at unsettling angles, like distorting shadows from a central fire. You can imagine them scratched on to a cave wall.
While Malani’s animations flicker at high speed, watch for a while and characters and themes emerge, like nagging preoccupations. Fascism, feminine energy, dada, a feeling of being overwhelmed and wanting to curl up and hide.
A girl in a knee-length dress skips and dances across the screens – Lewis Carroll’s Alice, passing through the dimensions. A screaming woman’s face flashes up, expressing overwhelming anger – she is Medea, though she could be any furious, horrified woman who has been pushed beyond her limits.
Snippets of crudely drawn action illustrate horrific acts of violence that have been reported (if insufficiently) in the Indian news: a young man beaten to death for sitting on a chair eating in view of guests at a society wedding; a girl blinded after being shot in the eye with a pellet gun. The title itself refers to an unthinkable episode: the kidnapping, drugging, gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl. Just as details from the day’s news flicker in and out of our conscious thought, we catch only fragments of these stories.
Drawn on an iPad, each short animation amounts to a kind of journal or stream of consciousness. The higher realms of thought appear as literary references: poems by Adrienne Rich, images and lines from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Waiting for Godot and lines from anthropologist Veena Das and poet Wisława Szymborska.
This gallery was once a library, and Malani imagines the ghosts of texts and ideas flooding out of the brickwork to haunt the darkened space. Lawrence Ferlinghetti laments: “Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.” Bertolt Brecht responds: “The worst illiterate is a political illiterate: he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events.”
Like an anxious mind, the animations cannot contemplate great literature for long. Worry intrudes: in the most recent animations, these include the threat of infection and claustrophobia of confined life. Just as our thoughts are invaded by rage and love, so Malani’s images skitter from delicately drawn figures and faces to brutish lumpy forms scratched in place with a few rapid lines.
Unlike the animations of the South African artist William Kentridge (with whom her work has been shown) Malani’s brutal dada does not allow us the prolonged comfort of beauty.
Consolation comes instead from a lifetime of reading and looking. Writers, artists and thinkers are summoned from deep in the artist’s memory to show us a route forward. Can You Hear Me? is like being immersed in another mind, and what a mind it is.
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