Nalini Malani Lets The Walls Speak With A New Installation In Venice

At Venice's Magazzini del Sale, Indian artist Nalini Malani (b. 1946) has transformed a 15th-century salt warehouse into an immersive field of animation, projection, and sound. Her new installation, Of Woman Born, commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, will be presented during the opening of the Venice Biennale next month.

The work unfolds across three walls in nine channels of animation, with tens of thousands of hand-drawn images translated into motion. Rather than treating the building as a neutral container, Malani lets its rough brick surfaces remain visible. The walls are crumbling, salt still seeps through them, and the projections catch on those irregularities so that the images seem to hover between painting and apparition.

That architectural friction is central to the piece. As viewers move through the long, deep space, they never take in the installation all at once. Instead, the work reveals itself in fragments, almost like reading a sequence of pages. Malani has said the effect recalls cave paintings in motion, a comparison that captures the work's unusual blend of antiquity and digital technique.

Of Woman Born also extends one of Malani's recurring figures, the“Skipping Girl,” across Venice through posters and public signage, turning the city itself into part of the installation's visual field. The gesture gives the project a public reach beyond the warehouse and underscores Malani's long interest in how images circulate through civic space.

At the conceptual center of the work is the myth of Orestes, which Malani uses to examine the historical logic that has justified violence against women and the persistence of power across time. The artist, who has worked fluidly between drawing, film, and installation since 1969, has long returned to questions of displacement, gender, and political violence. Here, those concerns are sharpened by the Venice setting, where the old trade architecture becomes a charged surface for contemporary anxieties.

In an interview ahead of the opening, Malani said the project did not begin with Venice. It began, she said, with the anger of living through decisions that deny people control over their own lives. Venice, in that sense, became an added dimension rather than the origin point. The result is a work that does not offer resolution so much as sustained attention - to myth, to memory, and to the structures that continue to shape the present.

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