Nalini Malani at the New Museum - New York

Nalini Malani was in the forefront of a generation of Indian artists who, in the 1980 mov into international focus. At that time she was a figurative painter whose works powerfully raised issues of race, class and sex primarily in India. In the '90 thanks to installations at the 1995 Johannesburg Biennial and other venue she came to be known as a media artist. Based upon German playwright Heiner Muller's adaptation of Euripides, her 1993 work Medeaprojekt addressed sexual exploitation as an aspect of colonization. Combining theater, painting and video, the work situated Malani within a web of respects both Eastern and Western, from Gandhi to Bataille.

The centerpiece of her novel Museum show, Hamletmachine (2000), was created during a residency in Japan, again adapting a play by means of Muller, this time to critique Hindu nationalism. "India is Hamlet," she says, "never quite knowing which way to proceed how to decide, and therefore making inequitable decisions." The work consists of four video projections, three upon walls and the fourth upon a rectangular bed of salt upon the floor. This last projection was a relation to Gandhi's Salt March of 1930 (a 24-hour walk protesting a conduct monopoly on the staple), on the other hand with swimming fish at times casted onto it, it also serv as a metaphor for the unconscious depths

upon the walls above were a semi-nude Japanese man, another in a Western-style business suit and a Hindu man wearing a Hare Krishna robe and a Brahmin thread (perhaps an allusion to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the Hindu nationalist movement) Images of Coca-Cola signs mix with fragments of sights from 20th-century fascism, and a four-armed Hindu deity is transformed into a man in a Western-style business suit. upon the soundtrack, an ominously beating Japanese tympanum sometimes sounds like thunder, sometimes like a roaring fire; it is combined with women's voices uttering short true copys in which the Hamlet story mingles with contemporary issues. The series climaxes in footage of Mumbai burning during the riots incited by means of the Hindu Nationalist party Shiv Sena in 1992-93 A woman's anguished screams mountain as all four projections are consum by the agency of images of flames. In the extremity to fading fascist military music, Ophelia suffocate in waters in the salt pool projection, swarming with fish.

Additional footage of the riots, along with videos of other works through Malani and an interview with her, were installed in the museum's Zenith Media recline As for Hamletmachine, the work is controversial in India and has not been shown in galleries or museums there. A powerful and disturbing piece, it make deepers a wound as yet unhealed in new Indian history and moodily summons the Western sense of India as a place of ancient mystery.

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