In Medias Res: Visiting Nalini Malani’s Retrospective Exhibition, New Delhi, 2014

Entering

It was 2:50 p.m. on Sunday, December 21, 2014, the last day of the last chapter of a tripartite retrospective exhibition of Nalini Malani in the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. Eager to spend as much as possible of the mere three hours I had remaining to me with the works, which I knew to demand durational looking, I first did a quick reconnoitering walk-through. In the middle gallery—one of three—a uniformed guard stood next to an enormous charcoal wall drawing. He diligently supervised the public, ensuring that they would not come too close and smudge the drawing; charcoal smudges easily, and this would ruin the work. The drawing was a larger-than-life nude woman, her height combined with her low position compelling a kind of crotch-shot look that invariably makes one uneasily complicit in the culture of exploitative, or even abusive, “looking” familiar to pornography. The figure returns a fiery look, as if preempting our lack of modesty, confronting the visitor with her fury that, before she became a drawn figure, she directed at her treacherous husband, Jason. The title, Medea as Mutant, explained enough, or so I thought. I approached to examine the white dots that covered the image, there as if to protect the figure somewhat from indiscreet gazes. Were they added or erased? The guard coughed, then smiled, warning me off in a friendly tone.¹

I moved on to the third gallery. Thinking I would spend a few minutes there, then start again at the first gallery, I got caught up in fascination, or what Griselda Pollock would call fascinance, and couldn’t let go of the eleven painted acrylic panels, of about two meters high—turbulent, rich with figures tumbling over one another, which sometimes overlapped.² This work is titled Twice Upon a Time, a title both witty and ominous, and I promised myself to return to it to determine how many meanings it has.³ When I finally moved to restart my tour by reentering the middle gallery half an hour later, I was stopped in my tracks. The floor plan (see fig. 1) shows how the exhibition was structured.

If visiting an exhibition is, as I have argued many times, a narrative experience, this visit was characterized by the structure of in medias res, or “entering in the middle of things.” As the floor plan clarifies, this kind of experience was nearly inevitable. The entrance door, on the far right of the first gallery, invited one to rush to the second gallery. This is frequent in exhibition visits; starting at the beginning only makes sense when the itinerary is compulsory and the exhibition chronological, as is standard in classical monographic shows. As soon as the space is not linear, one rarely arrives at the start, obeying the itinerary, or entering video installations at the moment the loop begins again. But if this visit was the construction of a narrative, then I seemed to have arrived at the climax of its plot: the commission of the crime, or the capture of the perpetrator. What happened? The guard was now busy rubbing the drawing! He had something white in his hand. It was an eraser, normally sized, like the ones I use to erase pencil marks in books.

Shocked, I inquired. No one answered; I got only smiles. The uniformed guard was now a performance artist, erasing the drawing under the supervising eyes of the artist. Slowly it dawned on me that this had to be an act of activism. Erasing what he had so carefully guarded must mean something beyond the act itself; a response of sorts. But what for, and how was that political act conceptualized? What’s the story?⁴

Fig. 1.

Floor plan for third chapter of the exhibition Nalini Malani: You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag

The story is of drawing and of erasure; and of Medea, and Malani’s work with Medea...