Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different

Artist Nalini Malani is the National Gallery’s first contemporary fellow. Taking her inspiration from paintings in the National Gallery and Bath’s Holburne Museum, Malani has created striking new video animations in Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different - National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship with Art Fund. The animations, hand-drawn using an iPad, reveal and conceal different aspects of the paintings in both collections, including works by Caravaggio and Bronzino in the Gallery’s collection and by Jan van der Venne and Johann Zoffany in Bath among many others, to rediscover them from an alternative, and critical point of view. The exhibition came to the Gallery following its opening at the Holburne Museum in October 2022. 

The 25 animations immerse the viewer in a panorama of nine large video projections, played in a continuous loop. Animations of different lengths overlap creating endlessly changing juxtapositions and interaction of images, allowing the spectator to co-create their own meanings.

The exhibition also has fictitious portraits of the marginalised in society that appear in between the animations; a reference to people whose work underpins the economies that connect us across the globe. 

Malani’s project is the culmination of her selection in 2020 as the first artist to receive the National Gallery’s Contemporary Fellowship, supported by Art Fund. Awarded to an artist of international standing and renown with a major body of work that has significantly contributed to 20th- and 21st-century art, the Fellowship involves peer-to-peer collaboration with a non-London collecting institution and is part of the National Gallery’s Contemporary Programme, sponsored by Hiscox.