Nalini Malani at the New Museum - New York

Nalini Malani was in the forefront of a generation of Indian artists who, in the 1980s, moved into international focus. At that time she was a figurative painter whose works powerfully raised issues of race, class and gender, primarily in India. In the '90s, thanks to installations at the 1995 Johannesburg Biennial and other venues, she came to be known as a media artist. Based on German playwright Heiner Muller's adaptation of Euripides, her 1993 work Medeaprojekt addressed sexual exploitation as an aspect of colonization. Combining theater, painting and video, the work situated Malani within a web of references both Eastern and Western, from Gandhi to Bataille.

The centerpiece of her New Museum show, Hamletmachine (2000), was created during a residency in Japan, again adapting a play by Muller, this time to critique Hindu nationalism. "India is Hamlet," she says, "never quite knowing which way to go, how to decide, and therefore making wrong decisions." The work consists of four video projections, three on walls and the fourth on a rectangular bed of salt on the floor. This last projection was a reference to Gandhi's Salt March of 1930 (a 24-hour walk protesting a government monopoly on the staple), but with swimming fish at times projected onto it, it also served as a metaphor for the unconscious depths.

On the walls above were a semi-nude Japanese man, another in a Western-style business suit and a Hindu man wearing a Hare Krishna robe and a Brahmin thread (perhaps an allusion to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the Hindu nationalist movement). Images of Coca-Cola signs mix with fragments of scenes from 20th-century fascism, and a four-armed Hindu deity is transformed into a man in a Western-style business suit. On the soundtrack, an ominously beating Japanese drum sometimes sounds like thunder, sometimes like a roaring fire; it is combined with women's voices uttering short texts in which the Hamlet story mingles with contemporary issues. The series climaxes in footage of Mumbai burning during the riots incited by the Hindu Nationalist party Shiv Sena in 1992-93. A woman's anguished screams mount as all four projections are consumed by images of flames. In the end, to fading fascist military music, Ophelia drowns in the salt pool projection, swarming with fish.

Additional footage of the riots, along with videos of other works by Malani and an interview with her, were installed in the museum's Zenith Media Lounge. As for Hamletmachine, the work is controversial in India and has not been shown in galleries or museums there. A powerful and disturbing piece, it deepens a wound as yet unhealed in recent Indian history and moodily evokes the Western sense of India as a place of ancient mystery.

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