Pallavi Paul
Video artist and film researcher Pallavi Paul (1987, India) works with video, installations and performance. She started her scientific career with a study of literary science, and has now completed her PhD in Film Studies in New Delhi. Paul has always been interested in the power of language and its possible abuse, which is evident in her works. Deeply fascinated by the technologies of poetry and time travel, she tries to create a laboratory in which the borders between fantasy, resistance, politics and history are tested. With the mid-length The Blind Rabbit (2020), Paul explores the intersection of power, gender and narrativisation of memory. Paul’s work has been shown at, among others, Tate Gallery in London, Contour Biennale in Mechelen and Mumbai Film Festival.
The Blind Rabbit
Still from The Blind Rabbit (2020) . Film by Pallavi Paul.
A magical tiger stalks like a phantom. Because no one ever catches more than a glimpse, it is spoken of with the highest esteem. This allegorical fiction starts Pallavi Paul’s attempt to describe systematic police violence in Delhi on the basis of individual events suppressed from official history. She does so in an associative edit of texts, images and sounds, making effective use of the scattered fragments of documentation still extant, including hurriedly safeguarded video and audio recordings of eyewitness accounts as well as those of the police and security forces.
Using fiction is how Paul resolves the scarcity of objective sources, whereby she continually retells her story based on multiple fragmentary recordings of ostensibly unconnected incidents, to ultimately arrive at a coherent study of the abuse of power.
The Vancouver Biennale:
Reservoir
Sahej Rajal & Pallavi Paul, India
Title: Reservoir Artists: Sahej Rahal (b. 1988, India) and Pallavi Paul (b. 1987, India) Medium: Single-channel 13’28” video Location: Screened at the Adventure Centre in the District of Squamish, British Columbia
For their Vancouver Biennale 2014 Residency, Sahej Rahal and Pallavi Paul worked collaboratively on their project in Squamish, British Columbia. Reservoir is a film inspired by the physical beauty of this community. The protagonist of this film, time itself, is embodied as the “last piece of data” and roams an imagined post-apocalyptic Squamish. A reflection on change, technology, infinity, history, and life itself, this film is a proposition toward new ways of seeing, inviting the viewer not only to watch what follows but also to bring to mind what does not.
“We stand at a time when even the idea of the ‘human’ body is fast changing. With leaps in technology and newer ways of imaging the world, the notion of national borders seems both a pressing reality but also an imaginary abstraction.” In exploring the Biennale’s 2014 – 2016 theme of Open Borders/Crossroads, Sahej and Pallavi not only tried to evoke a futuristic vision of a post-apocalyptic world, where borders would seem absurd, but also tried to go beyond confines of form to include performance, video games, cinema, and sound. In proposing a world far in the future, they hope to be able to evoke a sense of urgency in our contemporary world.
Sahej Rahal & Pallavi Paul – 2014 Residency Artists
Bio
Sahej Rahal’s artworks revel in masculine fantasy, whilst also mocking its affectations. The solitary characters he essays seem to have emerged from Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces refracted through George Lucas’s Star Wars series. The nature of these characters, like that of the peculiar beasts he fashions, is often ambiguous. While their nature might be indeterminate or protean, these personages all appear like irruptions of a semi-mythic realm in contemporary life. Rahal has recently been part of many high profile residencies including Bar1, Bangalore, 2011; FUTUR foundation, Zurich, 2011; INLAKS Shivdasani Foundation sponsored residency at KHOJ international artists’ association, New Delhi, 2013. Pallavi Paul is a film researcher and video artist based out of New Delhi. A graduate of AJK MCRC, New Delhi she is currently a PhD student at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. Her MPhil thesis titled ‘The Trouble of Testimony’ looked at the independent political documentary in Post Emergency India with a special emphasis on the use of video technology. Her first independent video works Nayi Kheti and Shabdkosh have shown at Tate Modern Gallery London (2013), 1OO years of experimentation a festival by Films Division (2013), MAMI (2013) and KHOJ, New Delhi (2014) , Experimenta (2014). For their Vancouver Biennale Residency, Sahej and Pallavi worked collaboratively. While trained in different disciplines of painting and film, as artists Pallavi and Sahej have constantly found themselves trying to reach out to a large range of formal and methodological ecologies. Ranging from sculpture, performance, research and writing they have found their creative velocities often unsettling and reformulating our ideas around art practice. The moving image form has been central to this experience. Film, in their individual practice, has become the site where all our experiments with material, costume, objects, found footage and text , not only coalesce but begin to take on a life of their own.
This work (below) in particular makes me think about my own approach to installing my bike-work at the september seminar as well as for the end of year assessments. The tight clustered form. ALthough this work in situated on the floor and does resemble a large crawling insect. Also images are so interesting to look at regarding site-based interventions and making, while this image shows the work exhibited in a gallery setting. The transition of work from the outdoors to the indoors.
