Nalini Malani’s Show at the Venice Biennale Refuses to Let You Scroll Past Violence

I walked into the Magazzino del Sale on the opening night of the Venice Biennale not knowing what to expect.

I have stood inside a lot of spaces made by artists trying to say something difficult. I have attempted my own version of that. Not as a witness looking in, but as someone who goes inside and stays. My own projects, Bhopal: A Silent Picture and Red Balloon Global, ask communities to make meaning from their own experience rather than have it made for them. That kind of work does not come from institutional support or gallery backing or foundation money. You make it because the subject demands it. And I thought I knew what to expect.

I did not.

Artwork by Nalini Malani. Photo: Samar Jodha.

The Magazzino del Sale is a former salt warehouse on the Zattere waterfront. Venice built its empire on salt. This is where that empire stored its currency. I walked in knowing none of what I know now. No catalogue, no preparation, no prior reading. Just the door and then the darkness.

It takes a while for your eyes to adjust. The projections are moving on the walls before you can see them properly. The voices reach you first. And then slowly, as your eyes find their way, the images begin to surface out of the dark. Everything layered on top of everything else, nine channels running simultaneously, no fixed beginning, no resolution.

I had done this deliberately. Experience first. Read about it after.

Nalini Malani is 79 years old. She was born in Karachi the year before Partition, her family among the millions displaced in the violence that followed Independence. She grew up in Bombay, spent formative years in Paris in the early 1970s where philosophy and literary theory would shape everything that followed. For over five decades she has been making work about violence. War, displacement, partition, patriarchy. What gets forgotten and who gets forgotten with it.

Of Woman Born is presented by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art as a Collateral Event at the Biennale. Roobina Karode, curator and Director of KNMA, who has worked closely with Malani’s practice for over a decade, brought this work to Venice. If your practice champions a voice like this, you carry it forward. That is what this is.

This year Venice carries a particular weight for Indian art. The Biennale has been running since 1895 but India has had a national pavilion only twice before, in 2011 and 2019. This is the third, returning after a seven year gap. Curated by Amin Jaffer, Geographies of Distance: Remembering Home brings together five artists including Asim Waqif and Sumakshi Singh, whose work moves through memory, material and what it means to belong somewhere. Two very different things being said, in the same city, at the same time.

In Malani’s work, what stays with you is a girl skipping rope. She appears on the central projection. She skips, she falls, she gets up, she skips again. Beneath her, written in red in what looks like a child’s handwriting, three times: I am tired. Something about that repetition stops feeling like art. It starts feeling like something written on a wall when there was nothing left to say but the truth.

Artwork by Nalini Malani. Photo: Samar Jodha.

Malani has said the work is very dark, it has to do with the wars. That is true. You see it in the Goya etchings she has reanimated, bodies from the Disasters of War series given new eyes that open and close and stare back at you. You see it in the colonial maps that bleed red, in the text fragments drawn from Aeschylus and Conrad and Hannah Arendt and T.S. Eliot, in the screaming mouths and mutant heads that recur across multiple channels. The horror, the horror, Conrad’s words appear, written in that same childlike hand, repeated until they stop being a literary reference and become something else entirely.

We live inside a constant stream of violent imagery now. War, displacement, bodies, grief, it moves through our phones the way weather moves through a window. Most of us have learned, without quite deciding to, to keep scrolling. Not from cruelty. Just from the sheer volume of it. Malani refuses that adaptation. She takes the same screen, the same digital surface the violence travels on, and draws it back slowly with her finger, frame by frame, refusing the speed that makes looking painless. That is what makes the iPad choice so precise. She used the same screen the violence travels through, and drew it back slowly enough that you cannot scroll past it.

But for me the violence that hit hardest was quieter than all of this. There is a sequence in the work where images and text build around the life of a woman from the beginning. Not narrated. Just shown, in fragments, the way memory actually works. It starts at birth. The disappointment that nobody speaks but everybody feels. The mother who sees her own struggles repeating. The father already calculating how to secure a future before she can crawl. The family and society handing her the role before she has a name for herself. From there the script is written before she can read. The violence that happens inside the safest looking spaces. The abuse that gets explained away. And still education came, a career came, independence came. The new world arrived on top of the old one. 

Nothing left to make room. The individuality getting smaller. The personal safety never fully certain. Failure is not just failure. It is confirmation of everything they already expected. The fears with no name. The life unlived.

Malani does not illustrate any of this. She does not make argument. Just the images moving on the walls, the voices in the dark, and the girl who keeps getting up.

The question that kept returning to me walking out, and it has not stopped returning since, is not only about the women who have no voice. It is about the women who do. Who have the education, the platform, the language. How much of what they speak is still performance of the role. How much of the actual truth remains unsaid because the cost of saying it is still, in 2026, too high.

I walked into that warehouse with every privilege that means I will never fully understand what I am looking at. I am male. I come from a particular economic and social position that has never asked me to carry what this work is about. That did not protect me from what I felt inside it. If anything it sharpened it. Because the work does not ask for your sympathy. It just puts you inside something real.

There is an old spinning toy, a zoetrope, where sequential drawings inside a slotted drum, when spun, create the illusion of continuous movement. The figure runs. The figure skips. It never arrives anywhere. From the outside it always looks like play.

Nalini Malani has been spinning that drum for fifty years. The Mylar cylinders of the 1990s. The iPad in her hand now. She has not stopped.

I went back the next day.

Samar Jodha is a transdisciplinary artist and photographer based across South Asia and West Asia, and founder of Red Balloon Global. Views expressed are personal.

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