New video animations featuring famous paintings in the National Gallery and the Holburne Museum, Bath, have been created by Nalini Malani, the first artist to receive the National Gallery’s Contemporary Fellowship, supported by Art Fund.  

With a fierce commitment to pushing boundaries and experimenting and exploring the possibilities of the moving image, Nalini Malani has created a deep black exhibition space in the Holburne Museum, Bath, 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.  

Pictures by Caravaggio and Bronzino in the National Gallery’s collection, and by Jan van der Venne and Johann Zoffany in the collection of the Holburne Museum, Bath, have inspired the animations in an exhibition which, following its opening at the Holburne Museum, Bath, on 7 October 2022, moves to the National Gallery next year.   

Classical stories have been transformed by playful 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.  

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.  

Embodying the role of the artist as a social activist, Malani puts the Western Canon under pressure in these animations where traditional art history and its European figures are no longer the only source of meaning.

Don’t miss their lecture on 20 October with contemporary curator, Will Cooper and art historian Dr Zehra Jumabhoy