Pallavi Paul: Image After Image After Image

How do images continue to shape the world long after they have been made? How do memory, care, grief and political life circulate through images, but also exceed them?

New Delhi-based artist Pallavi Paul presents a talk delivered at Elam Fine Arts, Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland, on 13 August 2026. The talk coincides with Pallavi Paul’s exhibition To Be in Someone Else’s Prayer, commissioned by Te Tuhi in partnership with Satellites, curated by Balamohan Shingade and presented 9 August-4 October 2026.

Drawing on films, installations, sculptures, and writing produced over the last decade, Pallavi Paul reflects on an artistic practice that moves between documentary cinema, contemporary art and research.  The talk traces the development of works including The Blind Rabbit (2021), How Love Moves (2024) and Alaq (2025), exploring how questions of evidence, contagion, care, and collective memory have gradually transformed her understanding of what images can do.

Rather than presenting documentary as a medium that simply records reality, the talk considers it as an ecology of relations: one in which images, bodies, institutions, technologies and acts of witnessing continually shape one another. Along the way, Pallavi will share the methods, experiments and encounters that have informed her practice, offering a glimpse into how artworks emerge through research, collaboration, and sustained attention to the worlds they inhabit.

Pallavi Paul is a New Delhi-based visual artist and film scholar. She received her PhD in Film Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her work has been exhibited at the Sharjah Biennale (2025), where she received the Sharjah Biennial Prize.