In collaboration with the Castello di Rivoli, the Centre Pompidou is to present the first ever retrospective – in either France or Italy – of the work of Nalini Malani, a pioneer of film, photography, video art and performance in India. Organised in two successive instalments, one in each of the two museums, the exhibition retraces the fifty-year career of this major artist.

Nalini Malani was born in Karachi in 1946, and her practice as an artist is informed by her childhood experience of the consequences of the partition of India the following year, which saw her family find refuge in Calcutta before moving to Bombay. Her work sets myth, popular imagery and cultural stereotypes in tension to denounce the exploitation of the populace through nationalist ideology. The investigation of female subjectivity and the condemnation of gender violence – in its most insidious as in its most blatant forms – is for her a constant reminder of the fragility of the human and the precarity of life. Malani’s collaborations with intellectuals and artists such as sociologist and anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, actress Alaknanda Samarth, Buto dancer Harada Nobuo and theatre director Anuradha Kapur testify to her quest for interdisciplinary forms suitable to the exploration of both political and more personal themes. Her work brings about confrontations of past, present and future, effecting a dynamic synthesis of memory, fable, myth, truth, trauma and resistance.

The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou presents Malani’s work from 1969 to 2018, including her most recent series of paintings, All We Imagine as Light, and an ephemeral mural, Traces. As part of the retrospective, a recently rediscovered set of black-and-white 16 mm films dating from 1969 to 1976 will be screened for the first time. The artist will also revive a spectacular work of hers that forms part of the Centre Pompidou collection, the shadow play and video piece Remembering Mad Meg (2007–17), a set of rotating transparent cylinders painted on the inside and suspended in an immersive space. It was through this type of installation that Malani became known to a more extensive international public in the early 2000s, and sealed her reputation at dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 and at MoMA in 2015–16.