Events, Festivals and Exhibitions

Nalini Malani: My Reality Is Different will show at the National Gallery’s Sunley Room from 2 March to 11 June, 2023. The exhibition is free to enter.

My Reality Is Different

My Reality is Different is a collection of 25 startling animations that immerse the viewer in nine large video projections played in a loop. The artist has transformed the National Gallery’ Sunley Room into a dark chamber, which she calls an Animation Chamber, devoted to the My Reality Is Different exhibition.

In this way Malani has transformed familiar paintings that adorn the gallery walls at the National Gallery and the Holburne Museum in Bath, where the exhibition was previously staged.

Malani uses animations hand drawn on her iPad to transform classical stories so that viewers can re-examine them from a fresh perspective.

“These works of art are not sacrosanct,” the artist says. “They have to be looked at in a different way. I have the feeling it is a pressing necessity as Our Stories have to be Retold, to give us a chance to become a more humane society.”

By playing the animations which are of a different length in parallel without synching them, Malani has moved away from a linear concept of time, allowing a constantly changing juxtaposition of images and interpretations. She makes the viewers into an “active audience, … rather than passive receptors.”

Intertwined into the loops are images of the marginalised within our global society, set to a soundtrack that combines Cassandra, the Greek prophet of doom, with Rule Britannia.

My Reality is Different is derived from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in which the Cheshire Cat says, “I’m not crazy, my reality is different from yours.”

Nalini Malani

Born in Karachi, India in 1946, Nalini Malani, is the recipient of the National Gallery’s first Contemporary Fellowship, supported by Art Fund. Her art has challenged classical artistic traditions for over 50 years.

Also at the National Gallery

The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance (16 March to 11 June 2023, free); After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art (25 March to 13 August 2023, charged); and Saint Francis of Assisi (6 May – 30 July 2023, free).

Nalini Malani: My Reality Is Different

National Gallery, Sunley Room, from 2 March to 11 June, 2023. Admission free.

National Gallery is open from 10am to 6pm, Friday until 9pm.

Further information can be found here.

Main image: Nalini Malani in front of Jan van der Venne’s The Temptation of St Anthony at the Holburne Museum, Bath