For more than four decades, committed to the role of the artist as social activist, Malani is unsparing in her condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. She often bases her work on the stories of those that have been ignored, forgotten or marginalised by history.

One of the pioneers of new media art in the Indian context, Malani’s work has, given her idealism to reach a wider audience, expanded the dimensions of the pictorial surface into surrounding space through ephemeral wall drawings in combination with erasure performances, theatre, shadow play, multi projection works and video/shadow plays. Malani’s intense and committed art reveals her search for the profound certainties of life, of society, of experience-persisting 'evidence', which is encountered and felt.

Speaking on the exhibition, Malani says, “The contents of Cassandra’s Gift are concentrated on the possibility that humankind foresees the events of the future - that he/she really 'listens' to what is happening around. Often this listening is (self) blocked and our (over) communication goes in all directions but is not effective. Instead of experiencing the community, the political world and nature as one organism, we live by economic and military principles of divide and rule.”

Nalini Malani -