At Tate Modern in London, Nalini Malani transforms painting, projection, sound, and moving shadows into immersive environments where mythology, memory, displacement, gender, and contemporary experience overlap.
Inside Tate Modern in London, the work of Nalini Malani feels especially powerful.
The museum’s vast industrial spaces already encourage a different relationship with scale, sound, and movement. Within that environment, Malani’s installations expand beyond the idea of a single image and become something closer to an experience you physically enter.
This stop is part of Tarik Talk’s 30 Days, 4 Cities: European Art Tour, exploring art and culture across London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Brussels.
A Practice Built Through Layers
Malani is known for creating immersive works that bring together video, painting, sound, projection, mythology, and installation.
Her practice often begins with stories that already carry cultural or historical weight.
Ancient myths, literary references, and historical narratives become material for thinking about the present.
Rather than retelling these stories in a straightforward way, Malani fragments and reinterprets them.
Images overlap.
Figures appear and disappear.
Sound moves through the room.
Stories seem to form and dissolve at the same time.
Rotating Cylinders and Moving Shadows
One of Malani’s most distinctive approaches involves painted translucent cylinders that rotate while light is projected through them.
As the cylinders turn, the painted imagery casts moving shadows across the gallery walls.
The effect is constantly changing.
A figure may appear clearly for a moment and then stretch, distort, or disappear.
Different images intersect with one another, creating new relationships as the installation moves.
There is no single fixed perspective.
The artwork continues transforming depending on where the viewer stands and what is happening in the space.
When the Viewer Enters the Work
This movement changes the relationship between audience and artwork.
You are not simply standing in front of an image.
You are surrounded by it.
Projected figures move across walls.
Shadows cross your field of vision.
Sound creates another layer of experience.
The installation becomes something spatial and temporal rather than static.
The viewer has to move through it, allowing the narrative to unfold gradually.
Mythology and Contemporary Experience
Malani frequently draws from mythology, but the stories are never treated as distant historical material.
She uses them to think about contemporary experience.
Her work can address themes of memory, displacement, gender, conflict, and the experiences of women, bringing ancient narratives into conversation with present-day realities.
This creates a sense of continuity between history and the current moment.
Myth becomes a tool for understanding recurring patterns in human experience.
Fragmented Storytelling
One of the most compelling qualities of Malani’s work is that it does not require a linear reading.
There may not be a beginning, middle, and end.
Instead, meaning emerges through fragments.
A face.
A shadow.
A voice.
A painted gesture.
A remembered story.
These elements accumulate over time, creating an emotional rather than strictly narrative experience.
You do not necessarily have to decode everything.
Sometimes the work is understood through atmosphere.
Sound, Movement, and Memory
Sound adds another dimension.
Layered audio can make the gallery feel intimate one moment and expansive the next.
When combined with moving projections, it creates a rhythm that carries the viewer through the installation.
That rhythm can feel meditative, but it can also introduce urgency.
Memory in Malani’s work behaves in a similar way.
It is rarely stable.
It returns in fragments.
It overlaps with the present.
It shifts depending on perspective.
Nalini Malani at Tate Modern
Tate Modern’s scale allows Malani’s work to fully inhabit space.
The former power station provides an industrial framework, while her projections and shadows bring something fluid and ephemeral into that architecture.
The contrast makes the installation feel even more alive.
Solid architecture meets moving image.
Massive gallery space meets fragile shadow.
History meets contemporary experience.
Part of the 30 Days, 4 Cities European Art Tour
Experiencing Malani’s work at Tate Modern becomes part of a larger journey through European museums, galleries, and cultural institutions.
Tarik Talk’s 30 Days, 4 Cities: European Art Tour moves through London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Brussels, exploring how different cities approach art, history, architecture, and contemporary culture.
Each stop offers a different way of seeing.
At Tate Modern, Nalini Malani’s work becomes a reminder that storytelling does not have to remain fixed to a page, screen, or single image.
It can surround you.
It can move.
It can disappear and return.
And sometimes the strongest response is not a clear explanation, but a feeling that stays with you long after you leave.
Explore Tarik Talk in London
Tarik Talk explores museums, galleries, exhibitions, artists, and cultural institutions around the world through on-location episodes and visual documentary storytelling.
The London series brings audiences inside major museums, galleries, exhibitions, and cultural spaces while documenting the artists and ideas shaping the city’s creative landscape.
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Tarik Talk is an international podcast and visual documentary series created and hosted by Brazilian artist Tarik Mendes, exploring contemporary art, culture, and creativity through conversations and on-location experiences around the world.
With more than 200 episodes across 30+ seasons, recorded live in more than 10 countries and reaching audiences in 160+ countries, Tarik Talk brings audiences inside museums, galleries, artist studios, art fairs, cultural institutions, and creative spaces.
Through interviews, exhibition visits, artist profiles, museum tours, and special documentary series, Tarik Talk connects artists, places, ideas, and creative communities across the international art world.
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