Edited by Bernhard Fibicher. Text by Doris von Drathen, Andreas Huyssen, Whitney Chadwick.
One of the most important contemporary artists working in India today, Nalini Malani (born 1946) employs painting, video installation, shadow play and theater-oriented works to envisage the rapidly changing political and economic situation of South Asia and the place of women within society. Mobilizing a cross-cultural and cross-epochal cast of female archetypes--from Hindu figures such Radha and Sita to such Western icons as Medea, Cassandra and Lewis Carroll's Alice--and addressing topics including war, fanaticism, economic development and environmental destruction, she melds the global with the local, the universal with the specific, narrativity with metanarrativity. Splitting the Other offers extensive documentation of Malani's memorable work in multiple media, in DVD as well as stills, as well as texts by feminist art historian Whitney Chadwick (Women, Art and Society), German art historian Doris von Drathen (Vortex of Silence) and scholar Andreas Huyssen (Other Cities, Other Worlds).
"Storytelling with painting, drawing, video installations, theatrical performances, and shadow plays male up this rich body of work. The shadow plays are not only aesthetically, but also conceptually, central to a critical understanding of Malani's trajectory. All memory is porously located between past and present. The shadow play as medium embodies the fragility of visual memory. It gives us shadows of time itself in its focus on discarded fragments of history, the detritus of culture and social life, the everyday of the subaltern. Rather than focusing on the sublime unrepresentability and irrecuperability of human trauma, Malani stays with storytelling and with image making. Only in visual and verbal storytelling is the continuity of life guaranteed. Storytelling is always both mythic and enlightened. There is no self-indulgent wallowing in the injuries of the past in Malani's aesthetic testimony about our world. Instead we have a subdued and aesthetically mediated protest with the goal of abandoning, or at least domesticating, rapacious fantasies of power and conquest, and making life more livable."
Andreas Huyssen, excerpted from Shadows and Memories in "Splitting the Other.
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 11.25 in. / 184 pgs / 212 color / DVD (NTSC & PAL). LIST PRICE: U.S. $55.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $65 ISBN: 9783775725804 PUBLISHER: Hatje Cantz AVAILABLE: 8/31/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Bernhard Fibicher. Text by Doris von Drathen, Andreas Huyssen, Whitney Chadwick.
One of the most important contemporary artists working in India today, Nalini Malani (born 1946) employs painting, video installation, shadow play and theater-oriented works to envisage the rapidly changing political and economic situation of South Asia and the place of women within society. Mobilizing a cross-cultural and cross-epochal cast of female archetypes--from Hindu figures such Radha and Sita to such Western icons as Medea, Cassandra and Lewis Carroll's Alice--and addressing topics including war, fanaticism, economic development and environmental destruction, she melds the global with the local, the universal with the specific, narrativity with metanarrativity. Splitting the Other offers extensive documentation of Malani's memorable work in multiple media, in DVD as well as stills, as well as texts by feminist art historian Whitney Chadwick (Women, Art and Society), German art historian Doris von Drathen (Vortex of Silence) and scholar Andreas Huyssen (Other Cities, Other Worlds).
