The Brooklyn Rail

Of Woman Born, Nalini Malani’s multi-track projection installation in a Venetian salt warehouse, is a complex multi-layered work of genius, and one of her finest. Here, the world of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 BCE) merges with the present. The Agamemnon Trilogy steeped in infanticide, the horrors of war, and the annihilation of women feels contemporary. Our televised images of children in burial shrouds feel like sequels to the Oresteia’s infanticide, the slaughtered children of Thyestes, and the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia to ensure the Roman fleet’s passage to Troy. Taking in Malani’s images of carnage, we are left to ponder an eternal question: Is innate depravity the rule? Are endless war, blood vengeance, and violence our fate? Is there a feminine solution?

This is not the first time Malani has referenced the Classical world and Cassandra, whose profound insights were neither believed nor heeded for the salvation of humankind. Women are not only not believed but are also silenced or “curbed” in the words of Aeschylus. In the Oresteia, Cassandra is taken captive and meets her death; we hope women today will suffer a better fate. Malani is a wise priestess and an artist-philosopher. She asks us to consider a new way of being in which women think through the body and connect with “our great mental capacities, hardly used.” That most of these images are hand drawn on a children’s iPad adds to their impact and immediacy. In an age saturated and dulled by photographic reproduction, Malani’s images sink into our very being.

Nine cycling projections fill the windowless nave of the salt warehouse, the internal buttressing of which not only separates the projections but braces us against the outer world and drives us into the depths of the unconscious. The use of reverse perspective propels us further inward, and the viewer enters a world behind the projected image. Here, the end wall advances, ending in projections almost three stories high. All the projections are mounted in such a way that the viewer’s shadow never falls across an image. Malani is the first artist to project directly on the salt-encrusted bricks, and the stained-glass effect is magical. These salt warehouses were essential to the wealth of Venice and tie into the artist’s Indian background and Gandhi’s salt marches. Both the projections and the soundtrack cycle in such a way that a variation is never repeated. It is hard not to imagine the Baroque Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher’s Arca Musarithmica drum machine being used to program the sound and image cycles.

Faces, some twenty feet high, are central reoccurring elements appearing in all of the projections. Several are reminiscent of our surviving relic of Agamemnon, his flattened gold funeral mask. Others recall Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (ca. 1819–23), perhaps the most disturbing image of infanticide in art history. Flux is the key: the faces morph and twist, eyes bulging, often in tortured convulsions, as they were manipulated across the artist’s iPad. The faces of grieving mothers collapsed over dead children are particularly heart-wrenching. It was hard not to think of Emmanuel Levinas’s essay on the face, his rapport de face à face, direct confrontation face to face. Today, when death can be dispatched by the push of a button, looking into a face exposes its nudity and defenselessness; few assassins can look into the eyes of those they kill. In the presence of a face, an ethical relation occurs. In the words of Levinas, “The face is the most basic mode of responsibility.” We not only encounter the Other but are responsible for the Other. This is the leap Malani’s work takes: the dead children, grieving mothers, and dying soldiers become our responsibility. We can’t look away.

The looped soundtrack features the sounds of war, sonic keyboard repetitions, and violin passages, all suggesting an atmosphere of chaos and trauma. Voices emerge periodically like the Greek chorus, narrating out-of-frame events and filling in gaps. Intermittent narration by Malani bridges the space between images and guides our emotions. In perhaps the most moving sequence, a lullaby is sung to the words of T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” At times, it is as if we are hearing the Furies, later tamed as the Eumenides, unmuzzled and finally having their say. A variety of female voices offer a revised moral commentary, here from the perspective of long-suffering women. Listening to a moving passage from the Oresteia, we mourn the mothers’ sons killed in the senseless battle of Troy. “Those they sent forth they knew; now, in place of the young men urns and ashes are carried home to the houses of the fighters.”

The installation’s title comes from the 1976 feminist book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich. Malani’s work is about our maternal origins, the lived experience of motherhood, and the ways women and children have suffered under patriarchal institutions. The work looks for a new way forward to end the perpetual cycle of violence, repression, and carnage. Much in the same way Luce Irigaray reimagines Plato’s mythological cave as our womb of origin—where the darkness, not light, produces alternate insights—Malani’s darkened projection space also asks us to contemplate a world where feminine insights are honored. She calls for a new interpretation of the Oresteia in which women are no longer subject to male law, and Orestes would not have been acquitted of matricide by a male-serving Athena. Malani writes,

How can we act as if we have collectively forgotten that we are all born of woman? Could we as artists open ways of thinking that the first sex did not consider, so they could understand us and the world in a different way? Could we devise a new language that is more inclusive, across genders, generations, and man-made borders?

One of the first gigantic projections on the central end wall is of a child curled in a fetal position. In mythology, the birth of a child signifies new beginnings, new possibilities. Children are featured in many of the projections, both as casualties of war and at play on a maypole or skipping rope. It is hard not to think of the photographs of bombed playgrounds of Iraq, Gaza, or Ukraine still used by child survivors. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s essay in the exhibition catalogue presents a thorough analysis of the way ritualized childhood play can heal the trauma of war. The Skipping Girl has appeared Malani’s stop-motion drawings since 2011. Here, she becomes iconic, a symbol of resilience.

Some of the first gruesome portrayals of war’s real consequences, Francisco Goya’s “Disasters of War,” paved the way for artists like Otto Dix, George Grosz, Felix Nussbaum, Pablo Picasso’s 1937 Guernica, and later contemporary artists like Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. In Of Woman Born, Malani’s scanned images are pulled from Goya’s prints. All of the other images in the projections were drawn by the artist on an iPad, with the exception of a few watercolors. Like Golub, who pulls the curtain back, exposing the torture in the basements of power, Malani pulls the curtain back on horrors experienced by women and children. Her work becomes a protest, an unflinching stare onto the heart of darkness.

Yet, it is Malani’s extraordinary drawing techniques that make this a great work of art. The artist made over 30,000 images with her iPad, and I know few artists of such exceptional ability who can render images of such dynamic expression. The spontaneous, color-saturated, graphic images are arresting in every projection, and make this is a great work of art not to be missed!