The walls of Max Mueller Bhavan Bombay, which carried the painted panels
for Malani’s Medea installation functioned as an enlarged accordion
book in an inversion of this relationship. For, here it was paintings
responding to the broken, organic auto-narrative of the colonized Medea
that were the ‘content’ of the book. From being a repository
of knowledge that serves the purpose of history from the dominant group
in society, the book here was made into the carrier of the experience
of the colonized and the subjugated, manifest in an inchoate rendering
of experience over space and time. And this rendering of experience
came from many directions. From a pair of panels that referred directly
to the riot-hit city, the images led on in associative relays over a
panorama that straddled the gamut of human conditions in a discontinuous
narrative that offered viewers the opportunity to construct their own
interpretations.
From the essay " Nalini Malani;The Medea Project and Beyond"
by Chaitanya Sambran
read
essay by Chaitanya Sambranii
|