After more than fifty years as a pioneering video and installation artist, Nalini Malani maintains a rigor, criticality, and joy that transcends her work’s challenging subject matter. Given that this is the Karachi-born Indian artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada, it’s a curiously small sampling of projects, but nonetheless encompasses the conceptual approaches for which she is best known: strong feminist and activist perspectives on issues related to gender, race, bodily autonomy, and democratic rights; highly charged source material drawn from current or historic events; diverse literary references combined with shadowy, impressionistic figuration to produce immersive video environments; and an ongoing concern with erasure as both aesthetic device and political gesture. Can You Hear Me? (2018–20) is the centerpiece here, a nine-channel installation comprised of eighty-eight individual iPad animations projected across three walls. Each short segment repeats its own brief narrative in frenzied, arhythmic patterns, and is accompanied by a musical score that ranges from soaring and dramatic to cacophonous to (sometimes) barely audible. It’s a tumultuous and relentlessly dynamic experience, with no single focal point. Much like a painted or sculpted frieze, there is no distinguishing one vignette from the next, no firm contours to scenes that bleed across …

A camera pans over a beach littered with driftwood. As the lens approaches a stack of branches arranged as if for a bonfire, a rocket-like screeching sound pierces the scene. An instant later, the wood goes up in flames. The image fades to a view of the artist Rebecca Belmore submerged in the nearby water. Fully dressed, she flails in the shallows with a metal bucket in her hand, gasping for air. Her body is thrown around by something other than the forces of the waves—an interior torment. Belmore exits onto the beach, carries the bucket toward the camera, and with an arduous groan throws its liquid contents against the lens. What we, the viewers, may expect to be clear water is blood-red, dripping down the lens as the artist stands and looks directly at us until the video ends. In Belmore’s installation Fountain (2005), the sequence was projected onto a wall of falling water inside the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM). In its ambiguity between birth or death, creation or apocalypse, Belmore’s Fountain—her contribution to the Canadian Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005—is as potent a metaphor today as it was almost 15 years ago. The …