The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Nalini The Mutants Lives and works in Bombay, India Top Mutant (from 'B' series, no.1) 1995-96 Fabric dye, chalk and charcoal on milk carton paper; wall drawing in synthetic polymer paint, chalk and charcoal Nalini Malani's recent work has spanned theatre, installation, video, paintings on paper and on glass. She also paints directly onto walls-abandoned then painted over. Most of it quotes a formal discourse of history, including art history. This is often juxtaposed with the familiar and the everyday, usually against the grain, no longer to carve out the space of a personal, but increasingly as a response to a larger imaginary-of those who cannot evade history and therefore evoke it tangentially, as it were. Superficially, this is a well-known post-modern strategy; however, the crux here is the unprecedented role that articulated history itself plays in places like today's India. On the one side it operates as a kind of referee for what is legitimate and what is not, and on the other, as a site for playing 124.5x180.5cm Collection Gheeta Mehra Bottom Dreamings and defilings 1991 Reverse painting on mylar monoprint and watercolour 29.2x304.8cm Collection: The artist out the utopias and anxieties of all that is seen as being 'outside' the given agendas, programs and reassurances that shape our present. The 'Mutants' series emerged, in part, from Nalini Malani's concern with the unarticulated events in history, such as what occurred at Bikini Atoll, Micronesia in 1954. In March that year, the United States Government exploded a hydrogen bomb there and for the next thirty years scientifically examined the results of dangerously high radiation on the human body. Among the consequences were the hundreds of 'jellyfish babies' born to Micronesian mothers in the 1980s: children with no heads, looking like blobs of jelly; children with life– spans of only a few hours. This event, and hundreds of others involving the violence that European and American colonialism has wreaked on two-thirds of the world, are described in a book entitled Global Parasites, published in Bombay, with Nalini Malani's painting of the same title on the cover. The book's subtitle is Five Hundred Years of Western Culture. 1 Events such as this can (and their description is often intended to) seriously unsettle the 'given' nature of history and its production of a benevolent state apparatus, which ought to protect us from such violence but now emerges as perhaps our greatest oppressor. In the case of an artist like Nalini Malani, that given history-the history of 90 I ART I s T s : s O u T H AND s O u T H- EA s T A s I A political nationalism and artistic internationalism– underpins a great deal of her artistic apparatus. This 'apparatus' includes the tradition of figurative art to which she has adhered, the concept of the family (her 'His life' series), neighbourhood (the Lohar Chawl works) and community ('City of desires') that she has invoked; to say nothing of the art gallery, the art audience and the individual and state sponsors that sustain it. Her work now moves into a new area, of finding a form for the anxiety, the dystopia that surrounds a new era, where we simply disbelieve the promises of rationalism and where the whole human figure is now replaced by strange, distorted mutant figures. The large works on paper, interspersed by figures on the wall and bandaged together in precarious unity, are not any longer the objects of history, but its unintended consequences-incapable of being contained any longer by rational public discourse. In this exhibition (and somewhat as an aside), Nalini Malani also has a book: a set of zigzag pages on which she reproduces xeroxed parts of classic paintings. We see idealised figures from the work of Rembrandt, Goya and Ravi Varma-and upon those, the artist's own work, filling out what public knowledge history would never admit: the zones of desire and prohibition, the undersides of socialised discourse. Its undersides now include science fiction and mythology. In Nalini Malani's production of Heiner Muller's play, Medeamaterial, shown in this Triennial as a video that she made; the Medea legend-itself interpreted as a text about colonialism-ends with a 'sci-fi' epilogue, Landscape with Argonauts, concerning a bombed– out land, cratered with the debris of twentieth– century mass culture. She is fascinated by the image, with which Global Parasites opens, of certain kinds of wasp larvae which feed on the non– vital parts of living creatures but leave their hearts and nerves alive, so as to keep their food fresh. The throbbing nerve centre of a decaying system is not for her the erstwhile colony, but history itself, surviving in its remains for all those who feed off it and all the languages that artists must now draw upon to keep the 'outside' expressible. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Writer, Bombay, India 1 Winin Pereira and Jeremy Seabrook, Global Parasites: Five Hundred Years of Western Culture, Earthcare Books, Bombay,1994