Inside Nalini Malani's thought chamber

At the collateral event for the Venice Biennale, the artist creates an immersive layering of history, myth and gender

- Avantika Bhuyan

Starting 9 May, the site of Magazzini del Sale, a 15th century salt warehouse in Venice, will transform into a "thought chamber", with animated images, text, thought bubbles and soundscapes projected on to this darkened space.

With 67 animations created from over 30,000 iPad drawings, Nalini Malani's latest work, Of Woman Born, will feature a layering of ideas around themes of gender, myth and global conflict. This site-specific commission is being presented by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) as the official collateral event of the 61st La Biennale di Venezia and will be on view till 22 November. Malani calls this large-scale multichannel installation an "animation chamber", an extension of the multisensorial environment that she has been working on since 2017.

In her practice, the 80-year-old artist has repeatedly resurrected figures from Greek tragedies to dwell on the invisibilised suffering of women across the world, be it Cassandra in the 2012 work, In Search of Vanished Blood, about the violent history of colonisation and then de-colonisation of the subcontinent, or Medea in a long-term installation project spanning 1991-96, featuring three robes made of insulating material Mylar and painted in acrylic to show the character's three states of being. Of Woman Born too is inspired by the Greek myth of Orestes, who murdered his mother and her lover to avenge the slaying of his father.

Malani situates this story in context of the present-day wars in which women continue to bear the brunt of patriarchal violence. "The drawings and the 20-minute soundscape of women's voices become a visceral, continually shifting environment in which viewers conjure up their own stories from the layered superimpositions," states the note by the KNMA.