The Wind in Your Body Is Just Visiting, Your Breath Will Soon Be Thunder

Breathing has become synonymous with collective rage against police brutality, racism, catastrophic climate change, the breakdown of systems of care, state backed violence, right wing extremism, and constitutional crises. This altered breath of the world has not only manifested itself in the medicalization of everyday life and a state of viral hypoxia experienced by millions across the world, but also in the beauty of those who continue to resist the onslaught on hard fought expanses everywhere. 
For the act of filming, breath poses a unique challenge. How does one produce an image of something that is present but invisible? The unrepresentability of breath swells further as it weaves across the biological, cultural, and political body—simultaneously material and ethereal. Braiding together multiple, thickly interlinked scenarios, the exhibition by filmmaker Pallavi Paul evokes the entanglement of breath with the world of its making. Presented as a constellation of argumentative eruptions, the show activates a conversation between the extensive archive of Paul’s previous works with new works and notes. The voices of pyre burners, grave keepers, medical caregivers, sewage workers, and political protestors ally together to form the sensorium, creating a breathing-like rhythm in the space it inhabits and inhaling and exhaling images, sounds, materials, and objects.

Pallavi Paul is a New Delhi-based visual artist and film scholar. Her practice interrogates how the idea of “truth” is produced and argued in public life. Paul is particularly interested in the tension between the document and its aesthetic utterance—the documentary. She received her PhD in Film Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her work has been exhibited in venues including Tate Modern, London, Beirut Art Center, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Contour Biennale, Mechelen, and The Rubin Museum of Art, New York. She currently lives in Berlin as a DAAD visual arts fellow.

Production company SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin, Germany). Director Pallavi Paul. Creative producer Rohan Ranganathan. Cinematography Raju Biswas. Commissioned by SAVVY Contemporary. 

Films

selection: 2013: Nayi Kheti/ New Harvest (11 min.). 2014: Shabdkosh/ A Dictionary (19 min.), Long Hair Short Ideas (22 min.), Burn the Diaries. 2017: Terra Firma. 2018: Star Gazing. 2017: The Dreams of Cynthia (44 min.). 2019: Acts, Incitements etcetera (18 min.). 2020: Far Too Close, The Blind Rabbit (42 min.). 2021: The Wind In Your Body Is Just Visiting, Your Breath Will Soon Be Thunder.