Curator Roobina Karode discusses Nalini Malani’s ‘Of Woman Born’, a monumental Venice Biennale presentation that confronts political violence, historical erasure, and women’s enduring resistance.
19 August 2026
For more than six decades, Nalini Malani has transformed mythology into a language of dissent. In ‘Of Woman Born’, presented as a collateral event of the Venice Biennale, memory, animation, sound and shadow converge to expose the recurring violence embedded in patriarchal histories. ART AFRICA speaks with curator Roobina Karode, KNMA’s Artistic Director and Chief Curator, about bringing Malani’s immersive practice to Venice, the silenced voices that haunt dominant historical narratives, and the possibilities for deeper artistic solidarity across Africa, South Asia and the wider Global South.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘Of Woman Born’ brings Nalini Malani’s decades-long engagement with mythology, memory, and political violence into the Venice Biennale. How did the invitation to create this site-specific collateral exhibition shape what the work needed to say in this global moment?
Roobina Karode: Nalini’s practice has always pushed the boundaries of what art could demand of its audience, engaging some of the most challenging realities of our time with both intellectual depth and profound questioning. KNMA’s decision to commission ‘Of Woman Born’ emerged from our belief in the urgent concerns her practice raises about violence, memory, and the erasure of women’s voices in the world today. It has been in the making for over a year, built on the conviction that Nalini’s questions are not ones the world can afford to look away from. ‘Of Woman Born’ does not allow you to stand outside the work and observe it safely, and it demands that you sit with grief and resist the urge for an easy resolution. The Magazzini del Sale gave us the scale and the gravitas to honour that demand. This project is a natural extension of our long journey with the artist and our belief in her practice, having had the privilege of working on Nalini’s three-part retrospective in 2014, the first-ever in India, and of supporting her large-scale retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, among others.
Koyo Kouoh’s Biennale theme, In Minor Keys, encourages audiences to pay attention to quieter histories and overlooked voices. How do you see ‘Of Woman Born’ entering into conversation with that curatorial vision, especially through its focus on women omitted from dominant historical narratives?
There is a profound conceptual resonance between ‘In Minor Keys’ and ‘Of Woman Born’. Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial vision asks us to attune ourselves to quieter histories, subtle frequencies and voices that have long remained unheard. This is something that has been at the heart of Nalini’s practice for over five decades. For KNMA, bringing ‘Of Woman Born’ to the Venice Biennale is therefore both a curatorial conviction and a shared responsibility. The exhibition encourages the viewers to question the conditions under which history is written, whose memories are carried forward, and whose voices continue to be omitted from dominant historical narratives. It foregrounds the experiences of women who have significantly borne the deepest wounds of war, displacement and patriarchal violence, yet have been kept away from mainstream historical accounts. In this sense, ‘Of Woman Born’ does not simply respond to the Biennale’s theme, but it extends it.
Nalini Malani’s work has consistently challenged Eurocentric understandings of history by placing Indian experience, feminist thought, and postcolonial realities at the centre. What does it mean to her practice to present these perspectives in Venice, a space that shapes the global art-historical canon?
Presenting ‘Of Woman Born’ at the Venice Biennale marks a significant opportunity to bring the difficult questions that have shaped Nalini’s five-decade-long practice into dialogue with one of the world’s foremost platforms for contemporary art. Rather than operating within binaries of East and West, her work constantly challenges the idea of fixed or singular historical narratives. Her practice embraces what she describes as the porosity of structures, histories, and identities, revealing how violence, memory, and power transcend geographical and cultural boundaries. The exhibition’s visual language mobilises mythological figures as critical frameworks through which to examine violence, exile, memory, agency, and resistance as transcultural experiences. Drawing on multiple mythic and literary traditions, Malani collapses distinctions between past and present, demonstrating how stories of oppression and resilience reverberate across cultures and time. Her reworking of the Orestes myth, for example, foregrounds questions of justice, accountability, and the gendered consequences of war, asking whose histories are remembered and whose voices remain unheard. At the same time, ‘Of Woman Born’ extends beyond feminism to encompass ecology, politics, literature and the human condition, inviting viewers to recognise the universality of these concerns through multiple cultural lenses.
How do you see Nalini Malani’s practice as part of a broader conversation among artists working across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and other parts of the ‘Global South’ who confront colonial histories, displacement, and systems of violence?
Nalini’s practice has always resisted the idea of history as a series of separate, siloed national narratives. Her practice cuts across geopolitical boundaries and addresses deeply human sentiments of mythology, memory, displacement, and violence, speaking directly to the concerns of artists across Africa, Asia, and Latin America who are similarly confronting the long shadows of colonial histories and the systems of power that continue to shape their present.
Nalini Malani’s life began in the aftermath of the Partition of India, and that experience of inherited displacement continues to inform her work. Do you recognise echoes of these histories in contemporary struggles across Africa and the wider Global South, and how have those parallels shaped ‘Of Woman Born’?
As mentioned on several occasions, Nalini’s practice has always been rendered at the intersection of histories, myths and narratives from across the world. The core of her inquiry, however, is that of violence inflicted on women’s subjectivity, whether through colonial and neocolonial apparatus or through the institutions of contemporary warfare. In this installation, she speaks about how the institutions of war continue to alienate women from making any decisions, despite being the ones who bear its impact the most.
Throughout the exhibition, mythology becomes a language for speaking about present-day conflict, rather than a story confined to the past. Why does myth remain such a powerful tool for addressing contemporary political realities across cultures and geographies?
Myth remains so powerful because it reveals patterns of power and victimisation that repeat across time and geography, rather than staying confined to any single moment. We have had multiple conversations in the months leading up to the exhibition regarding the deep-set commonalities in the roles women play in various mythologies. The more she worked with mythology, the more she realised that women were treated the same everywhere, whether it’s Greek mythology or Hindu mythology. The stories all centre around how women have been treated, how women have been punished, how women have had no voice. Nalini uses it to ask what these inherited narratives still reveal about power, justice, and the present moment we find ourselves in. Myth, in her hands, is never a retreat into the past – it is a language to speak to the brutalities of today.
The installation refuses a single narrative, instead creating an immersive environment where memory, sound, animation, and movement overlap. In a Biennale that brings together audiences from around the world, what conversations or reflections do you hope visitors will carry with them after leaving the exhibition?
‘Of Woman Born’ invites the viewers into an immersive encounter where multiple histories, memories and mythologies unfold simultaneously. Its fluid and non-linear structure mirrors the way memory resurfaces across generations, refusing a single, fixed narrative.
Drawing from Nalini’s personal experiences, the work reveals how histories of aggression, displacement and erasure are never entirely confined to the past. Through animation, sound and layered visual narratives, her stories become acts of remembrance that ask us to reconsider what we inherit, what we choose to remember, and what we allow ourselves to forget. Rather than imposing a particular reading, we hope visitors leave with a heightened awareness of the recurring cycles of power, violence, and resistance that continue to shape our world. ‘Of Woman Born’ is not a sentimental invocation but a political proposition that asks us to recognise and foreground the labour, suffering, resistance and foresight of women whose histories have consistently been marginalised.
If the exhibition inspires viewers to question inherited narratives, reflect on the consequences of historical amnesia, and recognise the enduring relevance of these voices in our own time, we will know it has fulfilled its purpose.
Nalini Malani’s work has inspired generations of artists across the Global South through its commitment to social justice and experimentation across media. Looking ahead, what possibilities do you see for stronger artistic dialogue and solidarity between South Asia, Africa, and other regions reshaping the future of contemporary art?
An active artistic dialogue between South Asia, the African continent, and other regions of the Global South will open a fantastic reading of histories of post-colonial and decolonial resistances to historical and contemporary violence based on race, gender, caste, and sexuality. Taking a cue from Nalini, it would also be worthwhile to unpack the diverse renditions of patriarchy and masculinity that continue to impact the political landscape of the Global South.
This exhibition is on view as a collateral event at the Venice Biennale until 22 November 2026.
