Nalini Malani is creating animations on her iPad and sharing them on social media.
In May, artist Nalini Malani was working on a 25-metre wall drawing for Castello Di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Rivoli, Italy, which will host a retrospective of her work later this year. In between work, whenever she took a break, Malani started a new project – creating notebooks of iPad animations. She opened an Instagram account to share these notebooks in May, and by the end of June, she had shared 15 animations.
An artist’s notebook is a glimpse into her creative process, a guide of sorts to viewing the world as she does. It is rare to get a glimpse of a senior artist’s notebook and even rarer to find one making original artworks for Instagram. So why is Malani – who has had 12 solo exhibitions at international museums and retrospectives at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi – interested in sharing these notebooks on social media?
“This is a fun thing I like to do,” she said, in a phone conversation in June. “I keep doing these little exercises to open up my imagination. It’s like having a conversation with a friend. You could call it ‘short thoughts’. Also, I like the idea of Free Art.”