Much of Pallavi Paul’s art practice is an attempt to stop the public from succumbing to collective amnesia and epistemic injustice. Using poetry, time travel, moving and still images and installation, the New Delhi and Berlin-based artist with a PhD in Film Studies highlights shameful political acts of history, systemic abuse of power and fractured societies, with intertwining ideas of breath and death as ominous thread-holders.

Paul’s first-ever solo exhibition, How Loves Moves at Gropius Bau (till July 21), follows her year-long stint there as an Artist-in-Residence. The compelling show points out eerie similarities involving experiences related to contagion, breathlessness, paranoia, deep isolation and mourning, between two massive healthcare crises, the 21^st century global COVID-19 pandemic and the 20^th century tuberculosis epidemic in Germany. Across the art exhibition, India’s Delhi Gate kabristan (cemetery) and Germany's Heilanstalten Hohenlychen tuberculosis sanatorium become representatives for the sites of these sensational catastrophes and serve as physical evidence through the human remains of COVID-19 and the healthcare architecture of tuberculosis.

Paul tries to ‘beautify’ these remnants of loss in a bid that they persist in collective memory. Spread across six rooms, the exhibition consists of eight artworks. Among the more recent creations, Salt Moon (2023) features luminous gravestones that act as digital screens showcasing footage of animals living at the Delhi kabristan that witnessed high burials in the COVID-19 pandemic. How Loves Moves (2023), a 63-minute film focuses on the kabristan's gravedigger Mohammad Shamim who buried thousands of Covid casualties within only two weeks. A wall-mounted installation Trousseau (2024) of a body bag—what became the uniform shroud of Covid corpses—hand embroidered in typical Indian motifs, was co-created by a loose group of women artisans living in areas that witnessed the 2020 northeast Delhi riots. The pièce de résistance is Twilight’s Envelope / Und in der Dämmerung Hülle (2024), a 20-minute film based on the diary entries of Moritz Theodor William Bromme, a 19^th century factory worker who contracted tuberculosis and was admitted to the Heilanstalten Hohenlychen sanatorium. Bromme’s poignant entries 15 years of factory work, that is 15 years of swallowing dust are juxtaposed with German lullabies and visuals from present-day ruins of the sanatorium. Some of Paul’s older works make a comeback, like Nayi Kheti/New Harvest (2013), where three deceased revolutionary poets Jack Spicer, Federico García Lorca and Ramashankar Yadav engage in a fictional conversation.

By way of contextualising How Love Moves, Gropius Bau had organised a prelude show to showcase Paul’s three-channel video film,Cynthia Ke Sapne/ The Dreams of Cynthia, (2017), of live footage, voiceovers, recitations and breath as a sonic entity to throw light on the systemic mishandling of the pandemic in India. During the creation process of How Love Moves, Paul says emotional grief and confusion were at play as she suffered extremely personal losses of family and close friends due to COVID-19. Paul spoke to STIR, explaining at length why personal is political and truth needs to be reiterated.

Here are excerpts from the interview:

Ornella D’Souza: Your exhibition How Love Moves intersects grief, loss and love, demonstrated through two healthcare crises, COVID-19 and tuberculosis. It features one protagonist for each crisis. What made you tell their stories?

Pallavi Paul: I had read about Mohammad Shamim in the news, who was transmuted as the ‘keeper of death’. Initially, he was reluctant to be documented after the barrage of media coverage. It was only after I started spending time in the graveyard that he understood that my approach was different for How Love Moves and I understood that a very different story needs to be told here. Shamim says death is not the end and often repeats that he does not believe in death. I had felt this way all along, and then Shamim said it. His is not a psychotic rejection of death, just playful disobedience of a hard historical boundary traditionally associated with death.

Twilight’s Envelope is set in the former tuberculosis facility Heilanstalten Hohenlychen near Berlin. Visually you see the ruins of this sanatorium that appear haunting with remnants of past objects such as shoes, beds and medical equipment. There’s the dark Nazi past and the medical catastrophe of tuberculosis in 20^th century Germany. These sanatoriums, set up mainly by insurance companies, were an instance of care without care because they admitted largely poor factory workers who could be sent back to the assembly lines after recovery. I was very fortunate to find the diary/journal entries of an ailing factory worker, Moritz Theodor William Bromme, who had been admitted here and had recorded his time at the sanatorium. The only problem was the text was in German, so I spent much of my residency translating it into English.

I suppose the adventure lay mainly in trying to bring together these two geographies, these two timelines and these two protagonists, Shamim and Moritz. They seem different from each other, yet their relationship to labour, marginalisation and love forges a thread between the two.

Ornella: Give us some insight into the research behind this exhibition.

Pallavi: Twilight’s Envelope uses many sections from the Fernsehsender “Paul Nipkow” broadcast, which is Nazi television. I looked at archival material from the Heilanstalten Hohenlychen sanatorium that is being taken down to build luxury holiday homes. The property’s owner, however, was extremely cooperative and gave us old documentation and unlocked portions of the property which were inaccessible. I walked around for hours at the sites, shooting architectural details. Even a wall can showcase a cross-section of different eras over time with each regime having their specific aesthetics; evident from just observing the layers of paint. The research on COVID-19 in How Love Moves came from news reports in the public domain. I didn’t want these facts to fall into a circle of amnesia, where they appear and later people forget.

• 

• 

Ornella: In your press statement for the show How Love Moves you said: “To place the contemporary healthcare crisis and the tuberculosis pandemic together can help us understand how the breath has moved between histories and geographies to pose questions and to create solidarities.” Your recent spate of artworks always gives themes of ‘breath and breathlessness’ the centre stage. Can you deconstruct for us the essence of breath in your vocabulary?

Pallavi: Breath is the site of testing yourself and the world but also of making peace with your enmeshment with the world. It is a site of argumentation, complicity, comfort and healing. It’s a memory-making process and fuels your cells. Breath incorporates contradictions. There’s a biological concreteness or urgency to breathe in, but there’s also the metaphysical abstraction attached to breathing. It is of both fixed and infinite durations. It is agile but also punctual. A single breath can encompass cosmic or planetary time, but as a ‘double pull’, it has two completely opposing processes—inhalation and exhalation, or inspiration and expiration. The biological double pull can be transposed to a philosophical double pull, between remembering and forgetting, being present and absent, having no time and having all the time in the world. For me, the breath is this continuous provocative site. So long as the breath goes on, the thought continues. So long as thought fractalises and multiplies, the breath also fractalises and multiplies. It makes us one with the world and also distinguishes us from the world.

Ornella: Did the cemetery and the sanatorium exude different moods?

Pallavi: Yes and no. The dead are not designated to be far away from the living in non-Western cultures and at the Delhi Gate cemetery I saw many visiting the graves of loved ones, spending time and having conversations. But in Berlin, there’s a deep effort to quickly erase that history with luxury homes. I did, however, find similarities in terms of sensation. Both spaces were intimately acquainted with death. That information, of course, does something to the energy of space, which you feel when you are physically there.

Ornella: What is the purpose in regurgitating a past so dark like COVID-19 aside from the possibility of these episodes happening again and so there are lessons to be learnt?

Pallavi: It is really to make sense of the widespread scale of violence and loss, the abruptness of departure, the fear of contagion, the appearance of medical objects in our everyday lives, the medicalisation of language, the psychosis that isolation produced in people, the unlocking of deep-seated anxiety, alternative modes of community building, among other things that the pandemic provoked in us. It was about comprehending this happening all at once and working with new things, producing new thought paradigms. Our job as artists was to create because of this moment, not despite this moment. Such moments are worth remembering.

• 

• 

Ornella: Did your role models and influences in your growing years help shape your art practice?

Pallavi: Growing up in the 90s, India was going through a lot of flux. Liberalisation of culture, technology and the vivacity of a shifting mediascape hugely impacted my aesthetic sensibility. I was never so exposed to the classics, high culture, high art and canonised art, until much later in life. Personally, my only consistent role model is my mother. She has worked within systems but protected her intuition and did not align with (the) institutional ethos. She did this with light, elegant playfulness; something I am still learning from her. Ranjani Mazumdar [Professor of Cinema Studies, School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University], who supervised my PhD, has hugely influenced my academic thought.

Ornella: What is your language of filmmaking?

Pallavi: I like working with language both as words and images. I find very little difference between the two and keep the boundary between them porous. My filmmaking is fluid and open. Sometimes, I shoot to know what I feel, as I don’t have an idea of what film I want to make. During the filming process or even at the edit table, I figure out the contours or the shape of what I am feeling.

Ornella: What is it like for a contemporary Indian artist living overseas and creating a presence for themselves on an international stage?

Pallavi: It is the combination of knowing what you don’t want to do and what would make you happy. I have been “on the road” since 2013, for exhibitions and residencies in London, Newcastle, and Berlin. It was also important for me to have a rooted practice in India as I was pursuing my PhD in Film Studies at JNU. Secondly, it’s easy to get exoticised and be put into the mould of the hyperlocal “Indian artist” who mustn’t concern oneself with global issues beyond a point. I actively resisted this mould. Some of the work I create is informed by India, but several times I look at things that have nothing to do with India. I don’t endorse reactive identity politics where you can’t access something from Place A because you are from Place B.

Ornella: Would it have been possible to create this kind of art practice if you were based in India?

Pallavi: That is a question for India to answer. I will do what I have to do and what I feel convinced by and India has to tell me if it allows for it or not. For now, I’m hopeful and very stubborn.