Nalini Malani’s Utopia

Lucy Gallun: Utopia (1969–76) is a diptych that consists of two film projections, made seven years apart. The first of these films, Dream Houses (1969), is an 8mm film stop-motion animation, for which you constructed a sculptural model and made multiple still photographs. What was your inspiration for this film, and can you describe the multi-step process you employed?

Nalini Malani: The subject of Dream Houses is the idealism and hope that modernism brought during the Nehruvian period, in which poverty and housing problems in modern India could be solved through a master plan for urban space. For me this topic was very vital due to close friends who were students at the J.J. College of Architecture and, especially, because of my encounters with India’s most famous architect, Charles Correa, who frequently visited his friend Akbar Padamsee at VIEW. Charles’s visionary plan for building New Bombay had a profound impact on me. The more artistic levels of inspiration came through my studies of Johannes Itten’s color theories and the reading of Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion and his experiments with the Light-Space Modulator.

The multi-step process of making the stop-motion animation Dream Houses was quite complex and elaborate. Even for museum media conservators, how this work was made still seems like a mystery. I want to leave it that way, and anyway to explain it in detail would be a dull technical story. What I do want to say is that, as with my other films from the VIEW period, I did everything myself: the making of the black cardboard architecture model, the shooting of the series of 21 120-film black-and-white slides, the turning of the grayscales from the projected slides into color with 8mm reverse-stock film and a set of color filter lenses. It was a painstaking, complicated process which took two months; the engagement with the different technologies fascinated me.

Serendipitously, Utopia is on view at MoMA concurrently with the exhibition The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985. In the words of the exhibition’s curators, it presents innovative work by local architects who “embraced the language of modernism as a means of proclaiming their autonomy, articulating their national identities, and enacting social progress.” One of the projects featured in that exhibition is Correa’s plan for New Bombay, which had a major impact on you at a moment when many of your close friends were studying architecture. I also understand that you had a memorable meeting with Buckminster Fuller at Correa’s home, during his trip to India at Correa’s invitation to deliver the Nehru lecture in Delhi in 1969. How did these conversations and ideas shape your work?

When I met Buckminster Fuller in 1969, he was 74 and I was 23. As you can imagine, sitting next to him that evening was most inspiring. He explained to me several of his theories, such as the geodesic dome, referring to a water drop that was hanging on a rose on the table. Besides his “search-and-research” attitude, which stayed with me for the rest of my life, it was his ideal of an “omni successful education and sustenance of all humanity” that moved me profoundly. I still have the copy of his Third Annual Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture that he gave me. Charles Correa was 39 at that time, but already the living embodiment of an alternative vision in decolonized India; he offered modern and humane solutions, deeply rooted in local cultures, for modern urban development. I knew his work firsthand because I used to watch these projects being built. It was the Nehruvian dream—a form of socialism based on a philosophy of humanism that tried to establish a modern India free from feudalism and the caste system—coming true: an inspiration that still forms the core of my work.

Alongside your other early films from the 1970s, Utopia seems to have laid the foundation for your moving image works over many decades, both in terms of formal characteristics (such as multiple screens and simultaneity) and also in the urgent sociopolitical issues they address.

The moving image attracts people from different strata. I knew that if I wanted the attention of a larger public, painting would no longer suffice. The 1990s and after became one long session of experimenting with the moving image and technology, based on my experiences with theater. This resulted in a series of sociopolitically engaged, time-based works. I wanted to “seduce” the viewer into my work, so that she would be engulfed in an all-encompassing environment. An example of this is my four-channel video play Remembering Toba Tek Singh. I made this work in 1998 as a reaction to India’s underground nuclear tests, which were soon followed by similar tests by our neighbor, Pakistan. When visitors walked into Remembering Toba Tek Singh, they were surrounded by four wall-covering projections. A woman from Pakistan on the left and a woman from India on the right are unable to fold a saree together. In between there were three rows of four metal trunks; inside each there’s a monitor showing archival and documentary film material about the results of the foolishness of humankind. These trunks stood on a Mylar mirrored floor, and the visitors’ reflections became part of this collective nuclear madness where no escape seemed possible. It was shown in March 1999 at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum) in Bombay, and had around 5,000 visitors per day. It gave rise to heated debates about India becoming a nuclear state.

Most recently, the formal characteristics and the sociopolitical issues (especially as seen from a woman’s perspective) that I explored of Utopia can be found in my ongoing series of iPad animations, which are presented on Instagram (@nalinimalani), or as a nine-channel animation chamber in a museum setting, or in a public urban environment. In 2020, 68 animations were projected on the 70-meter tower of the Taj Mahal Hotel, next to the Gateway of India in Mumbai. Thousands of people gathered to watch it. The series, which is called Can You Hear Me?, is based on the rape and death of a child in India and addresses the urgent and ongoing crises of violence against women not only here but around the world.