Can You Hear Me?

In October 2020 we visited the exhibition Can You Hear Me by Nalini Malani at the Whitechapel Gallery with members of the Art+Critique Autumn 2020 cohort. This was our first hybrid off-site visit and everyone was asked to write a critical review of the exhibition. Any number of things could have gone wrong.

It was during a brief and controversial time when the UK tentatively popped it’s head out of lockdown in the middle of the Covid pandemic. Our visit was surprisingly hassle-free; despite the compulsory booking, wearing masks and having our temperature taken. Except, it was unlike any other gallery visit because only two of us were there. Everyone else joined via Zoom because they were based outside of London, in the UK and Europe.

It went surprisingly well, all things considered. We had the place to ourselves most of the time and filmed the exhibition on two phones for those at home. Our internet connections and battery life held up and we even managed to have a discussion, but the installation audio was distorted for those who joined online. The reviews are as much about the exhibition as they are about Covid and they are varied as much in their response as their writing style, see what you think.

CONTENTS

Slush Economics and Other Symptoms by Siobhan Beaton

Nalini Malani Review by Ania Grajek

So I Scream: Can You Hear Me Now? by evershonk

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Slush Economics and Other Symptoms by Siobhan Beaton

It occurred to me the title of Nalini Malani’s exhibition at the Whitechapel ‘Can You Hear Me’ was unintentionally apt, considering I was experiencing the show remotely via a zoom call with other people. I found the live stream preferable to the usual online exhibition experience – you got a sense of the work set out within the space – although the distance created by the screen still remained.

As we ‘entered’ the room, I saw different animations filling the walls, projected at strange angles. There was a sense of things rushing at you all at once. The sound, mediated through a phone speaker sounded shrill and indistinct, compounding this feeling. Occasionally the brickwork could be seen, giving the impression of a sort of ‘living’ graffiti. Malani’s multidisciplinary background includes theatre and video art, which is evident in the design and presentation.

Malani has been described as a social activist and the title Can You Hear Me? could be seen as a reference to this. Although the style is engaging and the animated violence feels cartoon-ish, it’s touching on actual events. The Dada movement, an influence of Malani’s, produced art that was satirical and nonsensical in nature in reaction to the horrors of the first world war. This work feels like it has been made in reaction to crises we’re currently experiencing – covid, climate and polarisation.

There is a sense of an interior monologue or personal journal; fragments of nonsense and the profound rub up against each other. The references trigger an emotional and physical response in the viewer. I found the simply drawn figures consisting of a few gestural lines vulnerable; when the words ‘I miss you’ momentarily flash up before vanishing it’s strangely affecting. Certain images repeat on a loop like an anxious thought or worry – a woman’s face screams silently for a moment, before being scratched out only to suddenly reappear again.

The scenes of violence are interspersed with excerpts of text from writers such as Proust, Chomsky and Brecht, seeming to nod to the gallery’s past life as a library. Malani appears to be looking for answers in the work of thinkers and writers. These ghost lights appear suddenly, luminescent in the darkness before fading, flickering in and out of the consciousness. The title of the exhibition could equally apply to them.

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Nalini Malani Review by Ania Grajek

Hey, you wanna come clubbing?
There’s music and visuals. It’s kinda underground.
Yeah you have to wear a mask, and yeah it probably won’t fill up.
They’ll zap you on the way in but they won’t search your bags.
Just come, I mean when’s the last time you were out?

‘The Nalini Malani show at Whitechapel gallery is better post Covid.’ Why?

Because going out at night feels better
Because seeing something not on screen feels better
Because seeing something you can’t fit into your living room feels better
Because hearing some pair mutter in the corner is no longer a problem (I would ask them to sit on my lap if I could)
Because now when we look at the anxious flickers of someone else’s mind we get it 2020 style.

The show fires all at once
It’s nice to see new walls, changing walls.
Bricks inside for those who can’t go outside.

Watch her sketchbooks, she drew everything.
Blow up your diary, call it graffiti.
Don’t mind the pillars, this wall ain’t caring.
She’s 74? Yup.

I never managed to finish reading nothing.
Szymborska is my favourite poet, maybe I’ve memorized that one anyway.
Hey, it’ll come round again on loop.
We can stay for an hour most places nowadays, or was that last week?

Human bodies on red, privately drawn – but thanks, again, for still drawing,
girls in skirts, faces, touching, talons, some phallic thing. A cloud cut in half.
Music matching what?
Maybe the way the light from one wall disturbs the other picture.

All in one room again,
Cool.

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So I Scream: Can You Hear Me Now? Nalani Malani, Whitechapel Gallery by evershonk

Writing a review in these times feels like an impossible task. Our lives lived through a screen, part of me wants to urge you to not read this, or view another online exhibition but to go and experience the work for yourselves. Another lockdown. Galleries closed. To the Whitechapel Gallery, to experience Nalini Malani’s Can You Hear Me?

TEMPERATURE. I show my face to a phone to check my temperature on entering the gallery space. Malani’s animations are a disruptive encounter. The flow is erratic and jarring, my body absorbs the tension. The 90 stop-motion animations are multiple bodies brought to life by their contact on the cold brick institutional walls. MASK. Malani’s work embodies a plurality of voice, text, style and form. I am surrounded by these voices through text, a text that flickers, scrolls quickly and is repeated. It creates a sense of restlessness and frustration. I have to read and re-read and read again the projections that are on a loop. Voices that hold power, voices that are silenced. Malani displays voices as equal. The philosopher, the activist, the psychoanalyst, the dancer, the self, the child. ZOOM. I am recording the installation as I experience it to others not able to physically attend the show. I am in charge of what can and cannot be seen. I am the mediator, the technology mediating the experience. I have power. ONE WAY. Projections engulf me, the work immerses me. The sound and light, multi-dimensional, across all walls, freed from a linear path. The form of the animations scrunch up, transform, scrunch up again. Scribbles unravel, revealing a child dancing, a mythical creature, a feminine form, a black body. STAY ALERT. Two teenagers run through the gallery space, adding another unruly voice to the cacophony of chaos. They want to rebel, the controls are too tight. The staff walk them out following the stickered one-way system. SOCIAL DISTANCE. The
bookshop is ring-fenced, a barrier put up. Knowledge, voices, people, ring-fenced. Can you hear me? The inner struggle is situated alongside, in conflict with, the external struggle. We are battling not just the systems of power and violence that permeate our very existence, but also ourselves. The question mark is important. It is a call to the other with the self. We can ask the question, what is that worth, without another to hear. No, not merely hear, to listen.
LOCKDOWN. AGAIN. The repetition of the texts and animations, multiple loops of multiple animations, the multiplicities of a singular and shared consciousness, re-drawing territories. Repetition, a sense of time lost, a loop. The work unsettles this loop. I am experiencing: bodily, emotional, cognitive. I read, I feel, I sense, I hear – the sounds disassociated from image, a disembodied voice, text as quote, brought into the present whilst also escaping a certain reality. The escape was temporal. At home I stare at a screen, screaming into a hyper-informational, technological void.

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