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

Forum Expanded 2022

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.

by Pallavi Paul India / Germany 2016 English, Hindi 120’ Colour

Crew

Director	Pallavi Paul
Creative Producer	Rohan Ranganathan
Cinematography	Raju Biswas
Commissioned by	SAVVY Contemporary

Produced by

SAVVY Contemporary

Additional information

Curators: Hajra Haider, Abhishek Nilamber, Laura Kloeckner

Pallavi Paul

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.

Filmography (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

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2022