Cassandra's conundrum

The academic introduction to her art practice was tedious, the audience polite but discomfited, the honour - the St Moritz Art Masters Lifetime Award instituted by Cartier - meritorious, but what was it about Nalini Malani's work that had led to this milestone? It was certainly not the first prize of her career, and over dinner, where the glitterati were made to pay attention to speeches in between their sit-down courses, Malani appeared almost bemused at the attention. Only hours earlier, I had watched some of the same visitors at the Engadiner Museum grapple to understand her video installations in the 300-year-old building. If the attempt was to shock, or provoke, or incite thinking and dialogue, she had succeeded marvellously.

In New Delhi, since the start of this year, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art has been running a retrospective of the artist's work, the third "chapter" of which opened recently. It has helped define the artist and show her career's outing in one place, even if not chronologically, making it easier to make sense of her work. Malani herself dislikes having to "explain" anything, and perhaps rightly, for she is also one of the most visual artists India has produced. Her work speaks in several ways - for, in essence, hers has been the cant of an observant storyteller.

At first, it was her own choice of medium that she found beguiling. In the 1980s, Malani opted to work in watercolours, evolving into installations - even though that particular coinage had not yet come into practice - from a close association with film and theatre production units. Instead of accepting the aesthetic format of art for its own sake, she preferred the narrative mode as a commentary on social issues that have becoming increasingly scathing over the decades.

Not that the KNMA retrospective - You Can't Keep Acid in a Paper Bag - has been her first in a long career, that honour having been bagged by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem in 2001, and the Musee Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne in 2010. Certainly, she has been exhibited and is almost certainly better known in international art fora than in India where the discomfort her work alludes to makes it ideal for biennales but hardly for the group show format preferred by most galleries. Some of her struggles with gender issues find a reflection not just in her work but also in a patchy attempt to create a collective with other women artists.

If her video installations suggest better suitability to the documentary format of indie films, this - the third part of her nine-month retrospective in New Delhi - is most closely reflective of her practice. It has almost certainly been my own favourite, documenting her attempt to create limited edition books by photocopying and binding her own multi-media works of art, using her popular reverse painting technique in a graphically unfolding panorama, and using rotating Mylar cylinders that turns each viewing into an intimate, even if uncomfortable, conversation.

Culturally, Malani does not root herself in India, choosing to cut across geographies to dissect different societies to reinforce her viewpoint in the nature of evolving storyboards. She likes to present them amidst a maelstrom of chaos, so that the eye and mind find it difficult to focus at any one point, creating a sense of discomfort. This deliberate pictorial obfuscation found her at the receiving end of resounding applause over dinner at Art Masters, even though the disconnect with her narrative - for those who had taken the opportunity to view her works - probably caused many to lose their appetites.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated