Animation at the Biennale

I’ve just returned, exhausted, (as ever)!, from the 2026 Venice Biennale.

I took this photo at a stand-out collateral event: Nalini Malani: Of Woman Born, a huge, site specific 9-channel installation by Indian video artist Malani, which references the Greek myth of Orestes, who murders his mother in retaliation for the death of his father, and uses this to bear witness to how patriarchal structures have enacted and validated violence against women for thousands of years.

The installation continues Malani’s immersive ‘animation chambers’ series.  Accompanied by a soundscape of women’s voices articulating stories of trauma, resistance, and erasure, it combines 30,000+ hand-drawn iPad sketches into overlapping animated sequences projected onto the brick walls of an historic Venetian salt warehouse.

The warehouse walls themselves, drenched in animated colour but with their ancient salt-coated brick surfaces showing through, are a metaphor for the surface of women’s bodies, which have been used by men throughout millennia as a canvas on which to express and enact rage and fear.

This reminded me of how in my films: It Started With a Murder and The Betrayal, I similarly use the skin’s surface to inscribe trauma. Although I focus on individual traumas and Malani here uses a vast warehouse to comment on the universality and extent of male violence, I see parallels in the work, and her installation has inspired me to think about site-specific approaches for my next film, which will again explore trauma, but in addition will incorporate drawn animation, and which I will be starting work on after completing my book.

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“There is but one reality and that is the truth and each of us are aspects of it — like facets of a gem. As filmmakers and artists, all we can hope to do is to be as true to ourselves as we are able, and in so doing find a resonance with others — like the refraction of light in a well-cut diamond. Only a facet that is truthfully defined can hope to reflect light inwards. The only thing that matters is the truth. Be true to oneself.”

“There is but one reality and that is the truth and each of us are aspects of it — like facets of a gem. As filmmakers and artists, all we can hope to do is to be as true to ourselves as we are able, and in so doing find a resonance with others — like the refraction of light in a well-cut diamond. Only a facet that is truthfully defined can hope to reflect light inwards. The only thing that matters is the truth. Be true to oneself.”

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