The Rebellion of the Dead
Franck Barthelemy

On 8th January, I was lucky enough to check my Facebook account and found a reminder sent by Nalini Malani : “last day of my show at the Pompidou Centre”. I thought I had missed it so I rushed there along with a friend of mine who lives in Paris, is into art and had not heard of it. She was in for a shock…



Though I know Malani’s practise for a while, I had never met her for more than a minute. Besides, we exchanged a couple of emails. Through these ephemeral personal experiences and mostly through her work, I feel I know her well: she is engaged, emotional, committed, and passionate. Her videos, installations, paintings, and performances tackle issues like women’s place in society, fundamentalism, or ecological disaster. Her show in Paris was the first part of a retrospective spanning 5 decades, from 1969 to 2018. The second part will be shown at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin this year. As usual, Malini does not follow the mainstream principles (I am far from complaining about it) and invents a non-chronological retrospective.

In order to set the context and welcome the visitors, Malini reveals a few quotes in Traces (2017-2018), a large drawing on the outside wall of the venue.A quote by Simone Weil summarizes it all: La destruction du passé estpeut-être le plus grand de tous les crimes . A few cities’ names take the viewers to recent past and memories made of wars, bombings, and terror crimes. Floating black & white portraits, bodies and shadows remind us of lost ones. The work is staged as a performance: everyday, a museum employee erases a layer and creates new traces, traces of those who had died. Malini created a dramatic memory exercise that challenges the viewers. Usually, one would forget memories and burry them in one’s unconscious. Here is the reverse process, a search for memories, a search not to forget, perhaps a search to learn from our divergences, somehow a search for building blocks to reach peace. The simplicity of the work makes it very emotional. I spent a few minutes looking for the quotes and mere words spread on the surface of the wall trying to make sense out of it, trying to find my traces: a powerful introduction to the rest of the exhibition.