When research and art are fusing: Interview with Dr. Pallavi Paul

Dr. Paul, sometimes you live in New Delhi, sometimes in Berlin. You were a post-doctoral fellow at the BMBF-funded Merian Centre ICAS:MP in New Delhi, now you are Artist in Residence 2023 at the Gropius Bau in Berlin. What is your overarching (research) topic?

During my term as a fellow at ICAS:MP I looked at the ways in which the link between medical discourse, documentary and visual culture is being rearticulated with a pressing urgency in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. This work builds on my doctoral thesis titled ‘From Ideology to the Fragment: Documentary Reimagined’ which interrogates the relationship between documentary and public truth in India. I argue that the contract between documentary, authenticity and truth has had to renew itself across various decades under the critical pressures exerted by film technologies, censorship regimes, changing political scenarios and channels of circulation. Further, in each recension, the documentary can be located as an aesthetic response to the time of ist production. Through this project I closely track the material and philosophical termini across which this renewal is enacted. The sites where these transformations are played out and sensed include activist film, observational documentary, contemporary art and social media.

The opening of your major solo exhibition How Love Moves (2024) will run until 14 January 2024 on the first floor of the Gropius Bau. What do you want to make clear and achieve with your exhibition?

The exhibition is divided into two parts. What we have on display currently is the prelude of How Love Moves which runs until January 14th. In March 2024, we will open the solo show, which will be staged across many other rooms on the first floor of the Gropius Bau. The show deals with the themes of love and its embodied counterpart, the breath. However, these are not just explored at the level of individuals /humans – but in their metaphysical, social, molecular, scientific, geological registers. The idea is to hold space for things to be felt, without giving into the need to fix them in vision and/or meaning.

You observe what it means to recognise patterns of molecular colonialism, religious and racialised violence in today’s society. What do you mean by this?

Well… we are living in highly polarized and polarizing times where much violence is being unleashed in the name of religion, community and identity- across the world. While all these conflicts are specific, there is also much to be learnt by looking at the overlaps and connections between them. The dark history of colonial medicine where colonial subjects were used as laboratory specimens to test drugs for diseases such as TB and Syphilis or the global uproar against the brutal murder of George Floyd or the growing sentiment of Islamophobia – all speak to one another. If we can keep finding ways of connecting the dots, perhaps movements for justice can also become stronger and less isolated from each other.

And one last question: what advice would you give to other post-docs with unusual research topics?

I think as long as you like your topic and research, there will always be ways to get others interested in it. The more unusual the research project the more interesting it is!

Take a look at Pallavi Paul's exhibition at the Gropius Bau