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Can You Hear Me?
‘The Animation Chamber contains the voices in my head and my heart, simulating how the mind works, as ordered chaos … As such, the Animation Chamber works like a stream of consciousness, one thing telescoping into the other, recreating the complexity of thought the way time works at any given moment.’
Can You Hear Me? is a panoramic tableau comprising 88 stop-motion iPad animations projected at scale across gallery walls to create a kaleidoscopic world of past and future.
Described by Malani as an ‘animation chamber’, the overlapping projections feature the artist’s finger-drawn micro-narratives. The triggering storyline is the violent death in 2018 of an eight-year-old girl at the hands of eight Indian men.
A constellation of characters appears, drawn from literary and art sources including Alice in Wonderland, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Klee, Samuel Beckett, Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin. The relentless pulsing flow of drawings and text becomes, in the words of the artist, a ‘memory membrane’ or ‘a whirlpool of consciousness’.
‘In the twenty-first century we should be thinking about how we have to work towards improving the situation and understanding it rather than perpetuating this violent history,’ said Malani.