Nalini Malani draws with her finger on an iPad screen, using an animation app made for twelve-year-olds. The images that come out of it — rough, bright, childlike — travel back three thousand years in time to understand how we live today.
Of Woman Born, commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art for the 61st Venice Biennale, fills a fifteenth-century salt warehouse with nine simultaneous projections, sound and text. Salt still layers its brick walls, reflecting the projected images like a living membrane. Inside, a girl skips rope beneath the words I am tired. A woman is interrogated and answers with I don’t know. The Furies, goddesses of vengeance, stripped of their power at the close of Greek playwright Aeschylus’s Oresteia, refuse to be lulled into graciousness.
Borrowing its title from Adrienne Rich’s 1976 book, the work asks why the women who bring the world into being are so persistently silenced, punished and made to vanish. This catalogue documents the installation, with essays by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Roobina Karode, Emily Butler and the artist.

Edited by Roobina Karode, with essays by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Roobina Karode, Nalini Malani, and Emily Butler
Publisher: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Pages: 144
ISBN: 978-81-983821-3-9