A surprising show by Nalini Malani and Wang Jianwei.

Nalini Malani and Wang Jianwei

Arario Gallery Beijing

November 11 – January 21, 2010

This pairing of two installation artists from developing countries leaves the grim aftertaste of political modernization.

First, Nalini Malani uses semi-abstract video work as meditations on India’s religious and ethnic violence. Most interesting is Unity in Diversity, shown in a dimly-lit red room, including a hardwood table, chairs, and photos of Ghandi – looking as if a seminar were about to take place. The video enhances details of a nineteenth-century painting with the real objects (moving within the painting), and is narrated by fragments of memoir, epistle, and lecture. It takes – as do all his works on display – a “gothic” sensibility and runs it through a specifically Indian context.

Malani’s other works play with similar sensibilities, sometimes considerably more abstract (as in the video installation Hamletmachine), and sometimes much more whimsical (as with the selection of his paintings). All, however, push viewers into accepting the artist does not seek to escape from or transcend his historical circumstances, but to recast them as concepts perceived through an aesthetic lens.

Second, Wang Jianwei’s work meditates on the lost and found of China’s physical history. The video Symptom will probably remind many viewers of the Cremaster Cycle in its historical scope and disorienting narration, but the comparison should stop there. Cryptic enactments on a stage depict late-nineteenth to twenty-first century China, taking a rather chilling – if not exactly Gothic – aesthetic as the starting point.

Wang’s other piece, the installation Notching the Boat to Find the Sword, casts staged and documentary video amongst architectural refuse. More iconic that his somewhat Soviet contribution to the recent Shan Shui exhibition, and unlike politically-engaged minimalist work (such as Ai Weiwei’s World Map) in its diffuseness, the installation distances itself from the viewer walking through it.

This very strong pairing is recommended for fresh voices that do not compromise, and induce thinking and meditation, instead of only commentary.