This artist from Delhi wants you to look at your old family photos more carefully
Malik’s work unfolds like a fever dream: we see cityscapes drawn over with oil pastels, sepia-toned digital prints of old photographs paired with sparkling sari scraps. Her material palette is simple—paper, cloth, glue and oil pastels—but the artist isn’t trying to wow you with intricate detail or sophisticated brushwork. What draws you in, instead, are the ineffable connections she draws between past and present, cultures and geography, politics and personal memories.
She dedicates an entire series of works to her great-grandparents, combining photographs from the family archive with bits and bobs from her own life. In one untitled work, a digital print of a picture she took while holidaying with her friends in Japan appears behind a sepia-tinted photograph of her great-grandparents at a party. For another work, Malik collaged an old envelope and the logo of Strangers House, an art gallery in Mumbai, with bits of a letter her nani wrote (but never sent) in a mix of Hindi, English and French. Malik tells me that though she’s curious about who it was meant for, she doesn’t intend to translate the letter. “It was personal to her, and there must have been a reason why she didn’t send it.” In yet another picture, we see Prabhjot Kaur receiving the Padma Shri from Indira Gandhi, framed with fragments of her own poetry penned in Punjabi. “…And the milky… colour of the moon” goes one line, “…You are mine, you are mine alone.”
