Pallavi Paul: How Love Moves

The Gropius Bau presents the first major solo exhibition of New Delhi and Berlin-based artist and film scholar Pallavi Paul. This exhibition brings together her early moving image work, most recent cinematic productions and immersive spatial installations, especially conceived for How Love Moves as the Gropius Bau’s Artist in Residence, expanding across six rooms on the first floor.

Pallavi Paul engages the camera as her primary tool to interrogate how regimes of “truth” are produced and sustained in public life. Through her multimedia practice encompassing film, installation, drawing, photography and writing, she negotiates the documentary not only as film or image—but as an ecology of materials, a network of alliances, a system of thought and a site of sensation.

Through a poetic and cinematic lens, How Love Moves reflects on breath as a planetary language and a continuous process of circulation in the context of global healthcare crises. The exhibition explores illness not as a metaphor but as an ethical, spiritual and biopolitical phenomenon, in Berlin, New Delhi and beyond, linking the COVID-19 pandemic with the outbreak of tuberculosis in Germany around the turn of the 20th century. How Love Moves also reflects on transient states of being, mourning and the persistence of memory, thereby conjuring up a multitude of desires.

“To breathe is to remember our individual and shared pasts and to renew our pact with the future. In this exhibition, I want to unpack the time of a breath as a cinematic act: The breath of those who exist, the breath of those to come and the breath of those who have departed will together speak to the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic that has arguably altered the world forever. 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.” —Pallavi Paul

How Love Moves is accompanied by the public programme Six Days of Love, a series of cinematic readings, performances, conversational formats and sonic acts taking place across different spaces of the Gropius Bau between spring and summer 2024.

Curated by Natasha Ginwala with Sonja Borstner.

Pallavi Paul is a New Delhi and Berlin-based visual artist and film scholar. Paul holds a PhD in Film Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In 2024, she received a scholarship for film and video from the Berlin Senat. She was the Artist in Residence at the Gropius Bau and a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2023. Also, she was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2021/2022. Her work has been exhibited at Berlinale Forum Expanded, Berlin (2022); Colomboscope Festival, Colombo (2021); IFFR, Rotterdam (2020); HKW, Berlin (2020); The Rubin Museum, New York (2019); AV Festival, Newcastle (2018, 2016); SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2022, 2019); Beirut Art Centre, Beirut (2018); Contour Biennale, Mechelen (2017); Tate Modern, London (2013).