About the Artworks
→ Amulet, 2025
embroidery on fabric, 224 x 138 cm (5 each)
Amulet is an ongoing series of embroidered collages that treats devotion as a lived practice shaped by time and touch. The work involved collecting ceremonial textiles, such as prayer chadars, in various states of natural decay at Sufi shrines in Delhi. These objects have passed through countless hands, carrying traces of offering, movement, and longing. Paul reassembled them into collages featuring foraged fragments that come together to form diaphanous landscapes filled with time, prayer, and divine energy. Many of the sites Paul visited have since been demolished, making the process of gathering material into acts of reclaiming and archiving objects and symbols. The works hold faith in suspension, as something fragile, accumulative, and continually becoming through labour, memory, and care.
→ How Love Moves, 2023
single-channel video, 63 mins
Set in the Delhi Gate cemetery, How Loves Moves weaves together the stories of two narrators: Mallika is a migrant who had come to India in search of a new life and found love, only to end up witnessing her husband’s brutal murder during the Delhi riots of 2020; the other is a grave-keeper named Shamim Khan, who helped bury about 4,000 bodies amid the devastating first two waves of COVID-19 and the riots.
Following Shamim Khan and his coworkers for over two years, the film attempts to comprehend an event unprecedented in recent world history – the COVID-19 pandemic – through the eyes of a keeper of the dead. Shamim Khan lives and works at the burial grounds, feeding the birds and watching the grounds become a refuge for animals and homeless people at night. Out here, viewers are immersed in the beauty of multispecies and spiritual life, as well as the brutality of political and racialised violence. The disproportionate amount of grief Shamim Khan witnesses every day makes him announce that he no longer believes in death. Although the statement sounds like a denial of death, it is a nuanced reading of life’s end by the grave-keeper.
As a cinematic structure, Paul unpacks the timespan of a breath through five chapters titled after Islamic prayer times – Fajr (before dawn), Zuhr (afternoon), Asr (late afternoon), Maghrib (after sunset) and Isha (nighttime) – which simultaneously mark a disruption in the prayer’s connection to the circle of life. Redefining the cinematic form, Pallavi Paul mobilises strategies of narrative subterfuge, poetic dissidence, and hybrid fabulation to puncture acts of institutional forgetting. The film stitches together official records, media excerpts, intimate testimony and storytelling in a non-linear narrative arc. 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 the current world and how caregiving brings comfort across devotional acts at the onset of death.
→ Offering to a Moving Shore, 2026
seaweeds, dimensions variable
Pallavi Paul’s practice has long attended to forms of grief, whether the intimate sorrow of personal loss or the collective wounds produced by political fracture. Across her work, she asks how art might create spaces in which grief can be accompanied. For this installation, Paul returns to a material she first worked with in her practice nearly a decade ago: seaweed.
During her February 2026 research residency in Aotearoa, Paul encountered traditional Māori objects of mourning held in the collections of Auckland Museum and Te Papa, including kākahu and pōtae tauā. Pōtae tauā are mourning caps traditionally worn during periods of bereavement, particularly following the death of a loved one. Woven into their flax fibre structures are black-dyed seaweeds.
Situated centrally within the gallery, an expansive seaweed canopy creates a space of dwelling and contemplation. Drawing on the South Asian vernacular form of the chadar – a covering that offers refuge and healing – the work enters into dialogue with the traditions of accompanying grief in Aotearoa. Through seaweed as a shared material language, Paul brings together distinct cultural approaches to mourning, exploring how materialities of care can travel across places, histories, and forms of remembrance.
The artist gratefully acknowledges the generosity of curators Nigel Borell, Megan Tamati-Quennell, and Isaac Te Awa.
*Special thanks to Cindy Huang.
→ IMAGINE THE PAST COMBUST FLICKER GLEAM JUST AS IT STRIKES YOU, 2024
brass, dimensions variable
This constellation of brass letterforms and sentence fragments returns the visitor to one of the exhibition's central questions: how does the past continue to live within the present? Rather than understanding the past as static or complete, Pallavi Paul imagines it as a force that continues to combust, flicker, and gleam, capable of illuminating the present while opening onto other possible futures. Suspended beneath the seaweed canopy and cast in brass, a material that gathers warmth and reflects light, the work becomes a quiet armature for the space below, holding open the possibility of encounter, remembrance, and return. Its fragments attend to the visitations the canopy invites.
→ Dum, 2022
embroidery on fabric, 396 x 274 cm
Approached through an architectural passageway inspired by the vernacular forms of South Asian dargahs, Dum appears as a luminous threshold at the end of the gallery. The passage evokes the intricate jali screens found in Sufi shrines – perforated lattices that dissolve the boundaries between inside and outside, concealment and revelation, the living and the dead.
Rendered as a gold-thread embroidery on a rich red velvet drape, the work centres on the Urdu word dum, written in the Nastaliq script. The word carries multiple meanings: breath, strength, and power. Paul transforms the script into a form that recalls a pair of lungs, bringing together language and the body to evoke breath as the fragile condition of life.
Throughout the exhibition, breath emerges as both life force and contagion, as biological fact and spiritual and political force. It is imagined as a shared substance that binds bodies together even as it exposes their mutual vulnerability.
→ Alaq, 2025
three-channel video, 45 mins
Alaq is a three-channel video work structured around the notion of a contagion. The film enquires into two types of contagion moving imperceptibly through a more-than-human time. During the first wave of the Nipah virus, Linni Puthussery passed away while working as a nurse in Kerala. Her story is tenderly retold by her husband Sajeesh, and interspersed with microscopic imagery, family photographs, and letters. Just as the human body can succumb to an indiscriminate biological virus, the contagion of sectarian violence threatens architectural bodies in the subcontinent. The film incorporates archival photographs of the 1992 demolition of Babri Masjid and the more recent demolitions of dargahs, mosques, and graveyards.
At times, a forensic logic to the imagery in Alaq helps to reveal the fragility of human bodies and architectural bodies. At other times, the film invites us into an entirely other logic – a spaciousness for grief and healing. It periodically returns to the Beemapally Dargah, a shrine of mystic-saint Beema Beevi, revered for her ability to heal people of their ailments. The shrine was designed by Govindan Gopalkrishnan, an architect from a Hindu background who, during his lifetime in the South Indian state of Kerala, designed over 100 mosques. Beemapally Dargah is where people across religious divides come to pray for healing. Here, while immersing us in recordings of qawwali music, the film invites gentleness through scenes of a dog grooming her pup, reflections of the dargah in undulating water, and the scattering of rose petals upon a chadar.
→ How It Feels to Be in Someone Else’s Prayer, 2026
mixed material, watercolour, 42 x 59.4 cm (4 each)
This exhibition takes its title from a series of new watercolour paintings that emerged from Pallavi Paul’s February 2026 research residency in Aotearoa. In these works, Paul returns to the chadar as both material and metaphor. Across the series, Paul attends to the borders and edges of chadars, transforming them into vibrant fields of colour and gesture. The edge becomes a recurring motif throughout the exhibition, suggesting that it is at thresholds – moments of transition, vulnerability, and encounter – that acts of care become most necessary.
The watercolours bring together patterns drawn from traditional chadars with gestures of holding, protection, and healing. One image depicts an embrace that simultaneously recalls the first-aid manoeuvre to prevent choking, bringing together intimacy and emergency, tenderness and survival. Another incorporates kawakawa, a medicinal plant deeply embedded in Māori healing and ceremonial practices. Used in a range of rituals, including the launch of canoes and the opening of houses, kawakawa has also come to be associated with tangi, particularly when worn as a wreath during mourning.
→ Trousseau, 2025
embroidery on embroidery on medical body bags, 183 x 61 cm (3 each)
In Trousseau, Pallavi Paul returns to the traumatic memory of the COVID-19 pandemic, when countless dead in India were transported and buried in medical body bags, stripped of ceremony and dignity. The French word trousseau refers to a collection of belongings prepared for a bride as she enters a new phase of life. In Paul's work, the body bag becomes a different kind of trousseau: a preparation for departure.
During the pandemic, the body bag emerged as a haunting global image of mass death and institutional care, its sterile, industrial surface becoming synonymous with loss, anonymity, and the erasure of ritual. Paul transforms this brutal, utilitarian object through intricate embroidery, working in collaboration with women from Jahangirpuri to sew beauty, tenderness, and attention back into its surface. Their collective labour restores a sense of care to an object designed for efficiency rather than remembrance.
Through this act of making, the body bag becomes a site of repair. Its surface, once marked by anonymity and disposability, is reimagined as a vessel for memory, one that insists on the dignity of those it carries and honours the gestures of care that persist even in the face of collective trauma.
→ Unwounding, 2026
B&W print on wallpaper, 270 x 456 cm
In Unwounding, Pallavi Paul turns to photographs of the rubble left after the demolition of a portion of the Faiz-e-Ilahi Mosque in Old Delhi to reflect on histories of violence, loss, and political fracture. Drawing on strategies of forensic investigation, she approaches the image not as evidence of a completed event but as a living site that continues to exert pressure on the present. The work asks how images can bear witness while remaining open to acts of care and transformation.
Rendered at the scale of a mural, the photograph is overlaid with delicate forms and recurring motifs from To Be in Someone Else's Prayer: embroidered gestures akin to those in Trousseau, birds in flight, and the scanned edges of chadars. These interventions do not obscure the violence embedded in the image. Instead, they remain in intimate relation to it, tracing another way of looking through acts of stitching, layering, and repair.
For Paul, unwounding is not the undoing of harm or the promise of healing. It is the careful work of attending to what remains, creating space for care, memory, and imagination to inhabit histories marked by violence. Through this gesture, the image becomes not only a record of destruction but also a site of possibility, asking how tenderness might reshape our encounter with what has been broken.