HONG KONG.- M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District, premiered In Search of Vanished Blood (2012/22), a new commission by trailblazer of the contemporary moving image Nalini Malani, on the M+ Facade tonight. The work is displayed on the M+ Facade from today until Sunday, 2 October 2022, from 7pm to 9:10pm daily. From Saturday, 8 October 2022 to Sunday, 30 October 2022, the work will be presented from 7pm to 9:10pm during the weekends only.

Comprising live-action performance, animation, drawing, painting, and found footage, this silent eight-and-a-half-minute video is tailored for display on the M+ Facade in a bold visual dialogue with Hong Kong’s dynamic skyline. Complementing Nalini Malani: Vision in Motion, the inaugural exhibition in the Studio at M+, In Search of Vanished Blood continues Malani’s longstanding artistic investigation into the effects of war, violence, and the repression of women. The enigmatic video mingles coded images from Greek and Hindu mythology with personal and real-world references, layering architectural forms, cloudy skies, world maps, human faces, and a gigantic prostrate female figure that emerge from shadows and darkness.

M+ will also present LIFE (2022), a new digital commission work created by Malani for M+’s Instagram account (@mplusmuseum) from Wednesday, 10 August to Thursday, 18 August 2022. Featuring a total of nine animations, one animation will be posted each day over nine consecutive days. The work makes reference to the poem The Elements of Composition by Indian poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan as a metaphor for the cyclical movement and nature of life, death, and the afterlife. Audience can refer to the M+ website and its Instagram account for more details on Nalini Malani’s commissioned works.

In conjunction with the display of Nalini Malani’s commissioned works, M+ will host an online talk, ‘In Conversation: Nalini Malani x Suhanya Raffel’ on 10 August 2022 from 7pm to 8:30pm. The talk invites audiences to join artist Nalini Malani and Suhanya Raffel, Museum Director, M+ in reflecting on the artist’s trailblazing and cross-disciplinary works spanning the past fifty years. The talk will be held in English and livestreamed via M+ website, Facebook, and YouTube. A recording of the talk with bilingual subtitles will be made available subsequently on the M+ website.

Born in Karachi, British India (now Pakistan) in 1946, Malani studied at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Mumbai from 1964 to 1969, during which she had a studio at the Bhulabhai Memorial Institute. In 1969, she was invited to participate in the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) where she made her first stop-motion animation and a series of black-and-white films. She continued her studies in Paris from 1970 to 1972 with a scholarship from the French government, and in 2010, she received an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute. Malani has had retrospectives at Centre Pompidou, Castello di Rivoli, and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, as well as thirty solo presentations in museums around the world.