MUMBAI, March 15 -- As the world watches conflict and violence -- Russia and Ukraine, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, America and Iran - claiming thousands of lives, which include children, artist Nalini Malani, 80, voices a collective sentiment: "There's nothing more horrible than an innocent child dying." Her face, that was just minutes ago aglow as she counted the birds on a tree outside her studio in Colaba, has hardened. Her gaze sharpens as she says, "Nobody asks the women why they would want to be in this scenario, where they see their children being maimed; dying not only from the bombs but also of acute hunger. It is tragic - women still don't have agency." Her anger serves as a catalyst of her new site-specific installation, 'Of Woman Born'. The layered work is a sum of 67 animations with more than 30,000 iPad drawings that will be revealed in nine videos, superimposed with recorded women's voices. The work will be shown at the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale (May 9 to November 10) as an official collateral project, presented by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA). The title of the work draws from 1976 landmark book in feminist literature by Adrienne Rich 'Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution'. The American feminist poet and writer argues that while the experience of mothering can be liberating, the institution of motherhood is a patriarchal construct designed to control women. Malani places her work within this context, also presenting a contemporary reflection on the Greek legend of Orestes in her work. According to legend, Orestes kills his mother to avenge his father's death. But despite this, the crime is pardoned by Goddess Athena. "For Malani, the contemporary world is unfolding much like the story of Orestes, where wars are led in the name of self-defence with no accountability for individuals who perpetrate the violence," says Roobina Karode, chief curator and artistic director of KNMA. "She urges us to rethink the geopolitical demarcations of the world and locate the agency of women who bear the brunt of the global conflict." Thus 'Of Woman Born' becomes a chamber of thought and reflection on women, myth and global conflict. "When an aggressive male head of a state starts to behave as if he was born from the gods, it becomes a problem," says Malani. "That means a woman has been annihilated from that person's life, which is happening a lot. That's sad and provokes me into making things. I want to say - look, the only way we can move further is if we remember how you were born, through a woman." Malani's six-decade long practice has been politically engaged, cross-cultural and based on historical dialogues, staged as complex, layered and multifaceted narratives of feminism, nationalism, injustice and violence. Malani creates these by superimposing drawings, animation and sound and drawing -- her sources originating from literature, mythology and philosophy. Her 1998 video installation 'Remembering Toba Tek Singh', drew largely from Saadat Hasan Manto's 1955 short story 'Toba Tek Singh', criticising the political race for becoming a nuclear power. In 'Search of Vanished Blood' (2012), she referenced the Partition of India and the 2002 Gujarat riots. Its title came from Faiz Ahmed Faiz's 1965 poem 'Lahu Ka Suragh', translated into English by Kashmiri-American poet and translator Agha Shahid Ali. In this video work, shown at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany, Malani evoked the Greek myth of Cassandra, the Trojan princess, to connect ancient injustice to political violence. But how do multiple forms, material and stories come together in Malani's works? "It's like an organic cellular growth," she says. "What do I do if I am angry about something? I can't go on the street and shout. So I draw." That's how it starts, simmers and takes shape. "I then want to place the subject in a space, create a sound to go with it and it goes on. The process totally embraces you. And that's how larger installations are created," adds Malani. In India, Malani is recognised as a pioneer of video art. Her first video work, an 8mm stop-motion animation film 'Dream Houses' was created in 1969, during her time at the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW), in Mumbai. It was an experimental multidisciplinary initiative founded by artist Akbar Padamsee. The two-minute film explored modernist Indian architecture and the utopian ideals of the Nehruvian era. Although she was trained in painting at Mumbai's Sir J J School of Art, she soon realised that durational work such as cinema, film, video and theatre, has the capacity to draw a larger audience. "Whereas, a painting in an art gallery, especially in our country, doesn't invite a large audience," she says, referencing how when she showed 'Remembering Toba Tek Singh' at the then Prince of Wales Museum's Coomaraswamy Hall, "5,000 people walked in every day". The installation featured tin trunks used by refugees during Partition, fitted with video monitors that played archival footage of violence and bombs thrown at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A video also showed two women facing each other across the room, attempting and failing to fold a sari, referring to how women often bear the brunt of nationalistic violence and are left to nurture the deformed in the aftermath of a war. Malani mastered the art of creating works that present some of the harshest realities of life as an engaging experience. "I am not interested in creating works that rub people the wrong way," says Malani. For her, art has to do with the artist, the artwork and the viewer. "The three together make the artwork; otherwise, it makes no sense. Though I think the people who are doing it the best are in talk shows, using humour. We artists are still struggling." Such multitude and inclusion can be attributed to her early influences of working at the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute -- a legendary multidisciplinary art centre located at Warden Road, which observed an open-door policy for spontaneous exchange of ideas and collaborations between artists across art, music, theatre and dance. Artists V S Gaitonde, M F Husain, Tyeb Mehta and Nasreen Mohamedi had studios here. Malani too secured one while just a first-year student. Pandit Ravi Shankar founded his Kinnara School of Music here, and theatre directors Ebrahim Alkazi and Satyadev Dubey used its terrace and rooms for experimental performances. "It's here that I got a lot of intellectual knowledge through other senior artists," she says. "It was a holistic kind of multidisciplinary scenario, where there was no teacher as such, and you imbibed whatever you could pick up. I really soaked it all in like a sponge." Her time here also influenced her theatre collaborations including the one with actor and director Alaknanda Samarth. Together, they created a performance/installation at the Max Mueller Bhavan based on German dramatist Heiner Muller's play 'Medea Material'. While Malani's time at the institute nurtured her as an artist and shaped her practice, amongst her earliest influences came from her family's move to Kolkata from Karachi during the Partition, when she was just about a year old. She grew up in a house full of grief and anxiety stemming from displacement. "My parents had to start everything afresh," she says. When she just three, her mother enrolled her in the Metro Cub Club, a marketing initiative launched by the American film studio MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) to build a loyal audience among Indian children for Hollywood films. "It was an absolutely enchanting experience to see Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The moving image already had an impact on my mind," reflects Malani. After moving to Mumbai, then Bombay, she secured a spot in J J where she learnt to draw. But it's during the two years she spent in Paris (1970-72) on an arts scholarship, where she learnt to look at the world differently. "I always say Paris was the university of my life because it opened up a whole new chapter for me." She was listening to the views of the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and American linguist Noam Chomsky, who taught her how to observe and analyse. And then came the blast of Mumbai's cosmopolitan fabric. "Mumbai is my whole world. Everything has happened because of this city. I went to school and college here. My children were born here; I would never move out of this city," she adds. "You hear 10 different languages when you walk down the street. No other city has that. Also, thanks to public transport, everybody sits next to each other - the person who sweeps your street could be sitting right next to you. It levels people up." She however laments the easy camaraderie between people in the past. "People were a lot less angry at the time. If you had an accident on the road, people would come out, apologise, shake hands and get back on their way. There's a lot of rage nowadays coupled with a sense of entitlement - not sure where it's all coming from."...