Pallavi Paul (b. 1987, lives and works in New Delhi, India) holds a PhD in Film Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Working across moving image, installation, sculpture, drawing, performance, and writing, her practice considers the image as a site where history, sensation, and political life become materially entangled. Her works inhabit the porous boundaries between documentary and fiction, scientific and vernacular knowledge, the archival and the speculative, asking how images might register forms of life that exceed representation.
Rather than treating documentary as a stable genre, Paul approaches it as an evolving aesthetic and philosophical question. Her works often emerge through long-term encounters with landscapes, ecological processes, rituals, and communities, tracing the ways violence and care, memory and disappearance, become sedimented within bodies, materials, and environments. Across film and installation, she develops forms that invite sustained attention, where looking becomes an ethical as much as a perceptual act.
Her work has been presented internationally at the Sharjah Biennial (2025), where she received the Sharjah Biennial Artist Prize; the Kochi–Muziris Biennale (2025); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2024, 2023); Berlinale Forum Expanded at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2022); Berlinische Galerie (2023, 2022); Haus der Kulturen der Welt's New Alphabet School, Berlin (2021, 2020); Colomboscope, Colombo (2021); the Rubin Museum of Art, New York (2019); Beirut Art Center (2018); AV Festival, Newcastle (2018, 2016); Contour Biennale, Mechelen (2017); and Tate Modern, London (2013).