Nalini Malani Wins 2023 Kyoto Prize

The Inamori Foundation in Japan has revealed the winners of this year’s Kyoto Prize. Established in 1984, the award is given in recognition of lifetime achievement and is the country’s highest private honor, its equivalent of the Nobel Prize. It is presented annually in three categories: advanced technology, basic sciences, and arts and philosophy.

This year’s winners are reproductive biologist Ryuzo Yanagimachi, mathematician and physicist Elliot H. Lieb, and pathbreaking video artist Nalini Malani. Each will receive ¥100 million (US $706,000) and a gold medal.

Born in 1946 in Karachi, in what is now Pakistan, Malani moved with her family to India during that country’s partition. After studying art in Mumbai and Paris, she returned to India, where she began creating work that responded to the predicament of the country’s oppressed, among them women, the impecunious, and those suffering religious discrimination. Malani placed media including video, painting, drawing, and installation in the service of making the voices of such people heard.

In the early 2000s, her work coalesced around a signature theme, motifs taken from mythological deities, which she deployed in videos and projections to illuminate the connections between oppressors and oppressed, gods and animals.RelatedHELEN FRANKENTHALER FOUNDATION SUED FOR “DESTROYING” PAINTER’S LEGACYBMA CREATES PAID INTERNSHIPS HONORING VALERIE MAYNARD The Inamori Foundation in a statement credited Malani with “creating phantasmagorical spaces with approachable art forms using various media,” lauding her as having “contributed to the ‘decentralization’ of art that has been ongoing for more than thirty years since the end of the twentieth century.” The foundation additionally noted that she “comes from a region of the world where many women face difficulty achieving social advancement.” Malani participated in the fifty-first Venice Biennale in 2005 and exhibited at Documenta 13 in 2012. In 2017, she became the first Indian artist to be given a retrospective at Paris’s Centre Pompidou. Alongside Yanagimachi and Lieb, she will receive her prize at a ceremony taking place in Kyoto on November 10; the event will mark the first time in four years that the award has been presented in person..