Precincts, Trajectory, Vestige, Flight

This series of photograms represents Malani’s earliest photographic experimentations. She made them when she was associated with the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW), a shared space established by artist Akbar Padamsee in Bombay (now Mumbai) to foster interdisciplinary experimentation and collaboration with new technologies.

Precincts, Trajectory, Vestige and Flight were created in 1969 and reprinted in 2018 after the artist and her collaborator Johan Pijnappel in 2011 rediscovered the photograms, which had once been housed in Malani’s former Bombay studio. Informed by the urban, utopian and modernist ideas in India in the late 1960s and influenced by the expermentations of Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, Malani’s abstract photograms are explorations in the play of light on geometric forms and archetectonic shapes. She created them by placing paper cut-outs for lengths of time under the enlarger as she exposed photosensitive bromide paper to light.