Gamepieces (hoop mounting frames)

A pioneering Indian artist, Nalini Malani has a multimedia practice that encompasses film, photography, painting, performance, theatre, animation and video. Malani was born in 1946 in Karachi, British India (now Pakistan). As a result of the Partition of British India in 1947, her family was forced to move, first to Kolkata and then to Mumbai. Informed by this experience of displacement, her multimedia work negotiates themes of the legacies of colonialism, violence, social injustice, racism and feminism through her complex forms of storytelling and activism.

A cinematic installation, Gamepieces comprises six painted rotating cylinders and a room of video projections to create a dramatic shadow play, in which history and mythology are interlaced. Malani conceived this work in direct response to the devastating nuclear testing in India and Pakistan in 1998. Upon each cylinder the artist has painted a menagerie of mythical creatures, each attempting to erase the disaster, while the video projections on the surrounding walls depict footage of the explosions from the earlier Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear tests. She says of this installation, ‘I work with memory and the stress of recall, I want the viewer to see a fleeting image, try to grapple with it, and remember it before the image changes and disappears’.

Leigh Robb, Curator of Contemporary Art