An exhibition by Nalini Malani is coming to the National Gallery

New video animations featuring famous paintings in the National Gallery and the Holburne Museum, Bath, have been created by Nalini Malani in her new exhibition My Reality is Different.

Nalini Malani in front of Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus at the National Gallery © Photo: The National Gallery, London

Nalini Malani, the recipient of the National Gallery’s first Contemporary Fellowship, supported by Art Fund, has created a deep black exhibition space with one monumental artwork, My Reality is Different. Encompassing over 40 meters of wall, the 25 striking new animations immerse the viewer in a panorama of nine large video projections, played in a continuous loop. These animations are based on an idiosyncratic selection by Malani from famous paintings in the National Gallery and the Holburne Museum, Bath, this year’s partner museum for the Gallery’s Contemporary Fellowship.

Classical stories have been transformed by hand-drawn animations, made using an iPad, that reveal and conceal different aspects of the paintings in both collections to rediscover them from an alternative, and critical point of view.

Image: Nalini Malani My Reality is Different, 2022 Video projection © Nalini Malani

By overlapping the nine video projections and showing the animations of different length in a loop without syncing them, Malani has chosen to go beyond the Western linear view. As a result, there is an endless change of juxtapositions and interaction of the images, allowing the spectator to co- create their own meanings.

The title of the exhibition, Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different, is drawn from a phrase often associated with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in which the Cheshire Cat is claimed to have said: ‘I’m not crazy, my reality is different from yours.’

Location: Sunley Room,The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London,WC2N 5DN. Date: 2 March – 11 June 2023. Price: Free.