Nalini Malani Lets the Walls Speak with a New Installation in Venice

Entering Venice’s Magazzini del Sale museum, viewers will see Nalini Malani’s animations projected directly onto the uneven brick walls of the former salt warehouse. Her images flicker, dissolve and reappear in architecture shaped by centuries of trade. The installation feels both modern and ancient: the moving images look less like digital projections and more like paint placed on stone, reminiscent of dynamic cave paintings.
This tension between past and present runs throughout born of womanis Malani’s latest project, commissioned by the Kiran Nadal Art Museum and will be on display during the opening of the Venice Biennale next month. Utilizing tens of thousands of hand-drawn images transformed into animation, the installation fuses mythology, literature and sound in a layered environment that unfolds as the viewer moves through the space. In addition to the exhibition itself, Malani has extended one of her recurring characters – the “Jumping Rope Girl” – throughout Venice, where she appears on posters and public signage guiding viewers through the work. With a long history of working on issues of violence, displacement, and gender politics, Malani turns here to the myth of Orestes to explore the historical roots of power and its persistence in the present.
At 80 years old, Malani continues to expand a practice that has moved fluidly between painting, film and installation since the late 1960s. Before the opening of the exhibition, Malani and art news About working with architecture, transforming drawings into animation, and why the role of the artist is not to provide answers, but to ask questions.

ARTnews: You have been working with mythology in your work for decades, but born of woman It feels particularly relevant right now. Can you walk me through how this project started to take shape, especially before the Venice Commission?

Nalini Malani: I’ve always been interested in mythology, not just from my own world, but from other places. Greek mythology, in particular, has strong connections with South Asia. But the work didn’t begin in Venice. It all started with the things around me that make you want to clench your fists. People are angry because decisions are being made that do not give people the right to have their own lives. As an artist, I try to contain this anger in my work. The work had already begun when the invitation to the Venice exhibition was received. The space became a bonus.

The installation’s form is closely related to the architecture of Magazzini del Sale – the work combines things like animation, projection and spatial painting. What is important to you when shaping how audiences actually engage with the work?

Space is a gift and a challenge. This is a 15th-century salt warehouse, the bricks are crumbling and the salt is still bubbling out of it. This history is embedded in the architecture and I don’t want to overwrite it.

At the same time, it’s impossible to display physical works there—there’s no temperature or light control. So I turned to animation and projection. During rehearsals I began to understand how the images would work with the wall surface. In a way, the walls themselves begin to speak.

With nine animated passages across three walls, the space is long and deep – almost like a cave. Because of the buttresses, you can never see everything at once. You have to walk, and then something appears, and then something else appears – it’s like reading, page after page. The projection on the uneven surface makes the image feel like raw paint, almost like a cave painting in motion. So it’s a new medium, but it’s also reminiscent of something very old.

Central to the installation is the myth of Orestes, which hinges on the justification of matricide. What drew you to the narrative, and what did it allow you to explore in this work?

The story begins with a law in ancient Greece, in which Orestes kills his mother and gains freedom. The verdict declared that motherhood was not important to parenthood. To me, this marked an early moment in the denigration of women.

But no myth is important unless it becomes contemporary. And this is it. Today, we still see how women’s lives are devalued, how violence persists, and how women’s voices are not heard. This work connects ancient narratives to the present.

In your installations, you have long used shadow puppetry, rotation and repeating images to create immersive environments. How do you think about movement and duration in relation to space in this work?

I think of my work as more like a spiral. Things don’t exactly repeat themselves. There are always shifts, delays, new things coming in. Even shadows and drop shadows create juxtapositions that I have no complete control over.

Then there’s the audience. Without the audience, there is no art – the artist, the artwork and the audience work together to create the work; without the audience, there is no art. Only in that encounter did it come alive. Everyone has their own experiences and history, so the work will be different for every viewer. This freedom is important. I want to hear what the audience has to say.

The work includes tens of thousands of drawings. How does your process switch between painting and animation?

Painting is like a keyboard to me. Start with painting and everything else develops. I’ve been working in animation since 1969, starting with stop-motion films. Right now I’m using a very simple app on my iPad. I import my drawings, manipulate them, and animate them. I don’t use Apple Pencil. I prefer to use my fingers. I love the feeling of direct contact, like playing, almost like a child.

Sound plays a central role in the installation, which brings together different sonic, textual and musical elements. How did you build this sonic layer?

I created the sounds myself, starting with a very simple keyboard on my iPad. It brings together different voices – my own, the singer’s – as well as snippets of text, from OresteiaTS Eliot, Hannah Arendt and Adrienne Rich. Everything is layered together. There’s a loop of about 30 minutes, but you never know where it starts or ends.

The image of the “jumping rope girl” has been recurring in your work for some time. how she works internally born of womanespecially when she goes beyond the exhibition itself?

She’s like my signature, like a graffiti tag. Around 2012 I started animating her for Documenta 13. She looks like a young girl jumping rope, drawn with simple, smooth lines, always in motion. To me, she represents life – its excitement and energy, but also hope. In Venice, she transcends the exhibition itself: you will see her on posters and public signage throughout the city, appearing in animated transformations that guide you to the works via QR codes linked to animation and sound.

Throughout your six years of practice, what feels like a continuity in this work, particularly in terms of issues of displacement and memory?

There is a red thread that runs through everything: zoning. My family was displaced, and even though I was young, I grew up with the feeling of losing my home. Home is more than walls, it is culture, people and memories. That loss will stay with you. It reminds you of people who have been displaced and lost everything. This shaped the way I read, the way I thought, and the way I worked.

What do you think needs to be solved most urgently right now?

I guess I have no news. I have questions. As artists, we can understand the problem but not necessarily the solution. These must be done together. It’s like knitting: you drop a stitch and you have to go all the way back to pick it up. You go back into history, move it forward again, and ask: Does this still hold true?

You’ve been working with moving images and digital tools for decades, long before the current debate around artificial intelligence. How do you see your practice today in relation to these conversations?

Technology itself is not the problem. It has given us extraordinary possibilities – we are now speaking across continents. The question is how we use it. Every technology has consequences. Even mobile phones have an afterlife – what happens when it becomes obsolete? Where does it go? These are issues we need to face. Ultimately, the problem is not technology, but human decisions—politics, war, borders. That’s the problem.