PALLAVI PAUL

The Afterlives of a Catastrophe

How might we live together in a world marked by catastrophe? How might we begin the work of repair without imagining that as merely returning to an earlier, unbroken state? Salt Moon brings together recent works by Pallavi Paul that attend to the afterlives of sudden cataclysms, from the loss of lives during COVID-19 to the wounds produced by political fracture. The exhibition approaches catastrophe not only through its devastations, but also through the possibilities that persist within and beyond it: new forms of kinship and care and ways of inhabiting a world whose fractures cannot simply be undone.

Pallavi Paul is a New Delhi-based visual artist and film scholar. Working across film, installation, drawing, photography, and writing, Paul interrogates how “truth” is contested in public life, particularly in the shadow of catastrophic events. Whereas a crisis calls for an immediate response with a promise of resolution, a catastrophe exceeds the event. It continues to act upon bodies, environments, and collective memory long after its apparent conclusion. Attending to the lives obscured by official narratives, Paul traces how the past persists in the present. Her work asks what it might mean to become permeable to these histories while holding space for other ways of living, remembering, and being together.

Paul’s attention to the afterlife of catastrophe comes into focus in How Love Moves (2025), a 63-minute film set in Delhi Gate cemetery, where grave-keeper Shamim Khan and his co-workers tend to the dead amidst and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and political violence. Shamim Khan lives and works at the burial grounds, feeding birds and watching the grounds become a refuge for animals and homeless people at night. The film is a witness to love as a practice through which the aftermath of catastrophe might be inhabited otherwise. Out here, an ecology of interdependence unfolds, where the living and the dead coexist with the beauty of multispecies and spiritual life.

In Ethics for a Broken World, New Zealand philosopher Tim Mulgan imagines future generations asking questions of our present day, as inheritors of the catastrophe produced by our time. Paul approaches this question from the inverse direction, asking how the dead continue to make claims upon the living. Both unsettle the boundaries of the present. The persistence of the past takes material form in Everything is Still Damp (2024), a series of screen prints on sandpaper. As the sandpaper receives the screenprinted image, the abrasive surface damages the block it is made of. The surviving images are altered each time through contact. Just as the preservation of memory is entangled with the possibility of forgetting, the reproduction of the image becomes inseparable from erasure. Rather than attempting to restore an imagined wholeness, repair becomes a practice of working with what remains.

Four brass text works extend these inquiries into time, language, and remembrance: IMAGINE THE PAST COMBUST FLICKER GLEAM JUST AS IT STRIKES YOU (2024), alongside new works RESONANCE (2026), PALIMPSEST (2026), and CONSTELLATION (2026). Each word and phrase holds an abundance of possible meanings, like a piñata whose breaking open releases an excess contained by an outer surface. Every linguistic gesture carries traces of others, allowing meanings to shift and multiply, and unanticipated connections to emerge.

Dum (2022) turns to breath as a condition of life and a force of connection. Gold-thread embroidery on red velvet gives form to an Urdu word meaning breath and strength or power. Its calligraphic form resembles a pair of lungs, bringing language into intimate relation with the body.

Salt Moon brings together these different registers of the tangible and ethereal into a constellation. The moon as a distant presence marking cycles of return and salt as a material of preservation and residue. Both evoke forms of persistence that are inseparable from change. Across the exhibition, materials and gestures carry similar tensions: images are made through erosion, words contain the possibility of their own transformation, and breath connects bodies in their shared exposure to the world. The emancipatory promise Pallavi Paul offers lies not in overcoming catastrophe but in loosening its hold on the future to make propositions for other ways of being together.

Balamohan Shingade is a writer and curator living in Titirangi, Aotearoa New Zealand. He has published essays on contemporary art, indigenous-settler relations, and authoritarian populism. He is also the publisher of Spoor Books.

Text by Balamohan Shingade. Courtesy Experimenter