Indian artist wins Spain’s Joan Miro prize

Nalini Malani, the renowned Indian artist, has won the seventh edition of the Joan Miro Prize, an international award in Spain that is considered among the world’s most prestigious art awards and comes with a 70,000-Euro (USD78,000) cash prize.

Malani (born in Karachi in 1946), a film, photography, installation, video art and performance artist, was delighted to receive an award that bears the name of an artist she admires greatly and has been influenced by throughout her career, the artist said at the awards ceremony in Barcelona on May 23.

“The jury acknowledged her longstanding commitment to the silenced and the dispossessed all over the world, most particularly women, through a complex artistic quest based on immersive installations and a personal iconography where a profound knowledge of ancient mythologies converges with a bold condemnation of contemporary injustices,” the Joan Miro Foundation said.

When she received her award alongside the Director of the Joan Miro Foundation, Marko Daniel, and the Director General of the Caixa Foundation, Elisa Duran, Malani was visibly overcome with emotion as she reminisced about her first encounter with Miro in the early 1970s while she was studying in Paris. Malani is set to exhibit her work for the first time in Spain with a 2020 exhibition at the Miro Foundation, a space that the artist says fascinates her.