Exhibition texts

Nayi Kheti / New Harvest

2013, video, 11 min

This short film reconsiders the idea of authorship and truth, tracing a fictional conversation between three poets – Jack Spicer, Federico García Lorca and Ramashankar Yadav (also known as Vidrohi) – across different timelines and geographies. Influenced by the US-American poet Jack Spicer’s publication After Lorca (1957), in which he enters into an imagined dialogue with Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca nearly 20 years after his death, Nayi Kheti / New Harvest asks: What do you do with a poem once it is over? In this filmic work, Pallavi Paul envisions Lorca’s response from the beyond as a vantage point from which to reconsider the afterlife of a document. Filmically connecting Spicer’s material to the writings of Indian poet and university campus activist Ramashankar Yadav, whose work circulated mostly orally, Paul tackles the question of the (post-) document from a new perspective.

Twilight’s Envelope / Und in der Dämmerung Hülle

2024, video, 20 min

Fusing narrative and temporal strands within the documentary through new footage and archival material, this experimental essay film captures the remnants of the Heilanstalten Hohenlychen, a former tuberculosis facility that opened in Brandenburg (near Berlin) in 1902. Now overgrown by layers of dust, plants and animal life, the film attends to the building’s unresolved past, which is permeated by attempts to both cure and violate bodies. In 1942, after the sanatorium had been converted into a military hospital in the First World War and a sports sanatorium during the Nazi regime, the facility’s doctors and medical staff arranged and committed brutal experiments on inmates of Ravensbrück, the largest women’s concentration camp on Germany territory.

Textured by the recollections of factory worker Moritz Theodor William Bromme, a tuberculosis patient who chronicled daily life in a sanatorium in his journal Lebensgeschichte eines modernen Fabrikarbeiters (1905), the film carries viewers through an architectural ruin haunted by psychological, bodily and spiritual remnants of the past.

Everything is Still Damp

2024, screenprint on sandpaper

The series Everything is Still Damp similarly features floral motifs and ornaments dedicated to both the persistence and the fading of memories. The screenprints on sandpaper show roses and the patterns of a chadar, a textile which in the Islamic tradition is laid on graves as a symbol of respect and care for the deceased. The manual production process of the prints on the rough surface creates variations of the original motifs, which allude to the dissolution, fragility and transience of memory.

How Love Moves

2023, video, 63 min

This experimental documentary film revolves around one of the largest Islamic cemeteries in New Delhi, surrounded by the beauty of multispecies and spiritual life, as well as the brutality of political and racialised violence. Following Shamim Khan’s and his co-workers’ daily care for the Delhi Gate Cemetery over the last two years, the film attempts to comprehend an event unprecedented in the recent history of the world – the COVID-19 pandemic – through the eyes of a keeper of the dead.

As a cinematic structure, Pallavi Paul unpacks the timespan of a breath through five chapters titled after Islamic prayer times – فجر (Fajr, before dawn), ظُهْر (Zuhr, afternoon), العصر (Asr, late afternoon), مَغْربِ (Maghrib, after sunset) and عائشة (Isha, nighttime) – which simultaneously mark a disruption in the prayer’s connection to the circle of life. Eventually, How Love Moves also traces a cross-border love story that defies religious divides and yet ends in loss. It relays the daily cost of mortality in an authoritarian nation and how caregiving manifests across devotional acts at the onset of death.