The retelling | Nalini Malani's 'Of Woman Born'

Nalini Malani's latest work is being showcased at the Venice Biennale by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

ISSUE DATE: May 11, 2026

For decades, the work of Mumbai-based artist Nalini Malani has explored nationalism, inequality and violence against women. Her latest, ‘Of Woman Born’—set to be featured as an official collateral event of the 61st International Art Exhibition: La Biennale di Venezia—returns to these questions in the form of a dazzling mixed-media presentation. Commissioned and presented by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), it uses a Greek myth as a starting point to interrogate contemporary concerns.

“Politically engaged, cross-cultural and historical dialogues have been the basis of my art-making for 60 years,” said Malani in a press release. “All the more today, I feel it is a pressing necessity as our stories have to be retold to give us a chance to become a more humane society.”

Malani has long been among India’s foremost artists, a feminist practitioner considered a pioneer of video art in India. Her multimedia practice traverses painting, film and even theatre.

‘Of Woman Born’ builds from a 2017 series and deploys 67 animations and a soundscape that cohere to produce a ‘thought chamber’. Images flash in quick succession, creating an immersive experience that mingles myth and memory, history and geopolitics. The installation will be projected onto the brick-walled interiors of Magazzini del Sale, a 500-year-old warehouse complex in Venice.

The new work takes off from the Greek saga of Orestes—the tragic figure who killed his mother but was later forgiven by the goddess Athena. Malani uses this as a starting point to interrogate questions of patriarchal violence. “Malani draws parallels from the mythic and historic to contemporary times across geographies and cultures, alluding to violence against vulnerable communities with no retribution for the perpetrators for such large-scale devastation,” says Roobina Karode, artistic director and chief curator at KNMA. “‘Of Woman Born’ is not a response only to this moment—it is a reckoning with every moment that brought us here. Venice, in its global scale of artistic conversations, felt like the appropriate stage for that.”

A recurring figure in Malani’s oeuvre is the ‘skipping girl’, a child with a skipping rope, who reappears in her latest exhibition. Karode describes her as “a witness, survivor, a symbol of exhaustion, but a relentless desire for hope”.

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