Gropius Bau

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the act of breathing has turned from an individual into a social act, layered with medical, historical and political reverberations across the globe. While streams of images from this catastrophic time of contagion circulated through media spheres, Pallavi Paul – as an artist, filmmaker and scholar of cinema – discerns, within this sensorial abundance, a crisis in vision. Through the lens of poetry and the cinematic, Paul now turns to the invisible aspects of the breath, situated at the margins of the documentable.

Following a year-long residency at the Gropius Bau in 2023, Pallavi Paul’s solo exhibition brings together her early moving image work and most recent cinematic productions with immersive spatial installations. Her newly produced films intertwine contemporary health care crises and the spreading of tuberculosis around the turn of the 20th century in Germany. They explore illness not as a metaphor but as an ethical, spiritual and biopolitical phenomenon in New Delhi, Berlin and beyond.

How Love Moves traces the cycle of breath across lovers, collective dying, ruination and mourning amidst the impacts of industrial society and collapsing health infrastructures. It further reflects on breath as a planetary language and a continuous process of circulation, connecting the individual to all living entities.

Curated by Natasha Ginwala and Sonja Borstner