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Lot Essay
Nalini Malani employs Lewis Carroll's fictional character Alice to explore the interaction between women and their environments in her latest suite of paintings. Refusing to coalesce into an organized and linear narrative, Malani tells a story which is made interesting through disconnected symbols. The figures reference from the Kalighat patta paintings and Manga comics.
"I would like to read 'Alicetime' as a Phantasmagoria that presents us with three alternative scenarios concerning the political space that we, as Indians, occupy... In the second, we come upon the artist addressing the symbology of a broken Alice, readable as a reflection on the dismemberment and fragmentation of the nation... In Broken Alice II, Alice rips open her stomach and her intestines fall out like a whip. Little Alice from John Tenniel's illustration cries, as she witnesses the death of her counterpart in another Alicetime. The White Rabbit is stained Red, and when he pulls out his watch from his waistcoat, you know you will hear him say, "I shall be too late." A speech bubble falls like a hard axe at Alice's feet, and you know another story is waiting to be told."
(Nancy Adajania, Nalini Malani - Living in Alicetime, "In the Bazaar of Babel: The Nature of Communication in Nalini Malani's Recent Works", exh. cat., Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2006, p. 13 illustrated.)
"I would like to read 'Alicetime' as a Phantasmagoria that presents us with three alternative scenarios concerning the political space that we, as Indians, occupy... In the second, we come upon the artist addressing the symbology of a broken Alice, readable as a reflection on the dismemberment and fragmentation of the nation... In Broken Alice II, Alice rips open her stomach and her intestines fall out like a whip. Little Alice from John Tenniel's illustration cries, as she witnesses the death of her counterpart in another Alicetime. The White Rabbit is stained Red, and when he pulls out his watch from his waistcoat, you know you will hear him say, "I shall be too late." A speech bubble falls like a hard axe at Alice's feet, and you know another story is waiting to be told."
(Nancy Adajania, Nalini Malani - Living in Alicetime, "In the Bazaar of Babel: The Nature of Communication in Nalini Malani's Recent Works", exh. cat., Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2006, p. 13 illustrated.)