Pallavi Paul (New Delhi)
Paul’s work is deeply engaged in the technologies of poetry and time travel. She works primarily with video and the installation form to propose orders of tensility that inhabit non-fiction material. Using the disruption between ‘reality image’ and ‘documentary’ as a starting point, she attempts to create a laboratory of possibilities, which test the contours of fantasy, resistance, politics and history. Her work has been shown at Tate Modern Gallery (London), Edinburgh Art Festival (Edinburgh), Hundred Years of Experimentation (1913- 2013) Retrospective of Indian Cinema and Video, Experimenta Film Festival (Bangalore) and Mumbai Film Festival (Mumbai).
Lives and works in New Delhi.
Long Hair, Short Ideas (2014) : In the trilogy of essay films - Nayi Kheti (2013), Shabdkosh (2013) and more recently with Long Hair, Short Ideas (2014) the artist creates three unfeasible conversations. The film Long Hair, Short Ideas attempts to create a conversation between the pressures of excavating a political moment and the elasticity of the documentary form. Starting from the desire to look at the women's movement the artist found herself immersed in the viscosity of struggles. The inability to find perspectival stability started to become the very site from which possibilities could sprout. The film is constructed around Vidrohi's (the revolutionary poet) wife. Her relationship to the radical movement is traced via the turbulent political history of India in the 1970s (Emergency and the gagging of free press and civil liberties) and her intimate experiences around domesticity, sexuality and labour. In revisiting her abandonment by her husband and the choices that she had to make as a result, she not only recasts the traditionally absent figure of the 'revolutionary's wife', but also pushes us to rethink the orders of 'silence’, ‘conflict’ and 'absence' within new precincts.