Nalini Malani was born in 1946 in Karachi, Pakistan. She graduated in the Fine Arts from Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, and later went to Paris. Her practice encompasses drawing and painting, as well as the extension of those forms into projected animation, video and film. Committed to the role of the artist as a social activist and influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the partition of India, Malani often bases her work on the stories of those that have been ignored, forgotten or marginalised by history. She came into prominence with figurative works that explored issues of race, class and gender. While her early works are expressionistic, works from the late ‘70s were more narrative in style. In the early ‘90s she diversified to include installations, and later began combining painterly and cinematic elements, sound and movement in works like The Sacred and Profane (1998) and her first video Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998). A senior multimedia artist, Nalini Malani has exhibited extensively in India and abroad and is also represented in national museum collections worldwide. She lives and works in Mumbai.

Pregnancy is a prime example of Nalini Malini’s figurative phase, through which she raised issues of race, class and gender through her work. Her charged human forms constantly refer to various aspects of a woman’s experience within a larger relationship network. Here, in a typical scene of the long wait preceding labor, her protagonist dreamily shares space with others who might share her anxiety or misgivings, bodies smoothed and slightly blurred by Malani’s light brushstroke. Malani’s narrative inhabits both social reality and fable. In her early student years, Malani illustrated short stories, and perhaps this involvement in narrative led to her clever ability to create suspense in her works. You struggle to invent a story linking the various relationships in the picture. But there is no one story. Many emotions are implied — pain, forbearance and anticipation.