The Inamori Foundation in Japan has announced 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 honour, 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 groundbreaking video artist Nalini Malani. Each will receive 100 million yen (US$706,000) and a gold medal.
Born in 1946 in Karachi, in what is now Pakistan, Malani moved with her family to India when that country was partitioned. After studying art in Mumbai and Paris, she returned to India, where she began creating works that addressed the plight of the country’s oppressed people, including women, the poor, and people suffering from religious discrimination. . Malani placed media, including video, painting, drawing and installation, at the service of making the voices of these people heard. In the early 2000s, her work revolved around a signature theme, motifs drawn from mythological deities, which she deployed in videos and projections to illuminate the connections between oppressors and oppressed, gods and animals.
The Inamori Foundation, in a statement, credited Malani with “creating spooky spaces with accessible art forms using various media”, praising her as having “contributed to the ongoing ‘decentralization’ of art. for more than thirty years since the end of the 20th century.” The foundation further noted that she “comes from an area of the world where many women struggle to access 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 benefit from a retrospective at the Center Pompidou in Paris. Alongside Yanagimachi and Lieb, she will receive her award at a ceremony in Kyoto on November 10; the event will mark the first time in four years that the award will be presented in person.
