Installation
Pallavi Paul
How Love Moves: Prelude
Pallavi Paul, Changing Places in the Fire, film still, 2022
In this prelude to Pallavi Paul’s upcoming major solo exhibition at the Gropius Bau in 2024, a scenography around the three-channel video installation Cynthia Ke Sapne / The Dreams of Cynthia (2017) transforms the historic Schliemannsaal into a twilight space between wakefulness and sleep.
Revolving around a contemporary poem of the same name composed by Anish Ahluwalia, the filmic work turns to spheres of love and tenderness as well as the brutality of state violence through three protagonists: an executioner, a trans artist and the literary figure of Cynthia. While the lives of the first two intertwine within the remnants of a post-industrial landscape in India, Cynthia emerges as an imaginative and ever-evolving character shifting across fields of place-making and dreaming.
The artistic approach of Pallavi Paul, the Gropius Bau’s Artist in Residence 2023, meets at the crossroads of cinema, literary cultures and enduring political struggles. She engages the camera as her primary tool to interrogate how spiritual, technological and political regimes of “truth” are produced and sustained in public life. In her multi-disciplinary work – spanning film, installation, performance, drawing and writing – Paul is particularly interested in the tension between the document and its aesthetic manifestation: the documentary.
How Love Moves: Prelude is accompanied by the public programme Six Days of Love, unfolding as a series of cinematic readings, conversational formats, performances and sonic acts between summer 2023 and spring 2024.
Media partners: Arte, Monopol, BerlinArt Link