THE WIND IN YOUR BODY IS JUST VISITING,
YOUR BREATH WILL SOON BE THUNDER
Solo-Exhibition In the framework of Forum Expanded at Berlinale
With Pallavi Paul
Soft-Opening 09.02.2022 15:00–22:00
On Show 10.02.–05.03.2022 Daily 14:00–19:00
INVOCATIONS 06.03.2022 14:00–22:00
Visit 2G+ rule applies: Please present your proof of full vaccination with a vaccination certificate (QR-code), or an official notice of the recovery (less than 6 months ago) IN ADDITION TOa negative Covid19-test not older than 24hrs (closest test center is a 2mins walk from SAVVY at Lindower Straße). Kindly respect distance and wear a mask. Please find the Berlinale Protection and Hygiene Policy here.
Free Entry Donations welcome
SAVVY TOURS IN SAVVY TONGUES
09.02.2022 19:30 IN ENGLISh Walk through conversation with artist and curators
14.02.2022 15:00 IN GERMAN With curator Laura Kloeckner
16.02.2022 17:00 IN Hindi With the artist Pallavi Paul
17.02.2022 17:00 IN ENGLISH With curator Hajra Haider Karrar
18.02.2022 14:00 IN ENGLISH & GERMAN With curator Abhishek Nilamber and the production team
20.02.2022 15:00 IN ENGLISH With the artist Pallavi Paul
24.02.2022 17:00 IN ENGLISH With curator Hajra Haider Karrar
27.02.2022 15:00 IN Hindi With the artist Pallavi Paul
04.03.2022 17:00 IN italian With the artistic co-director Elena Augudio
05.03.2022 15:00 IN ENGLISH With the artist Pallavi Paul
/dum/dmm/dam/: دم
noun
breath, existence: سانس ، ہستی
/hasti/,/saans/
beingness, (living)entity: وجود ، ذات
/zaat/,/wajood/
mediator, moment: طفیل ، لمحہ
/lamha/, /tufail/
Simultaneously the pinnacle and the brink, the Persian lexical morpheme دم denotes the fragile border between life and death. It is the transformation of wind into breath by passing through the body animating it, activating the latter with a power that sustains life. This inherent act has repeatedly been politicized over human history, altering it to a conscious act that lies in a precarious balance. Recent times witness an increased loss of this equilibrium due to the hierarchies of existence that constrict breathing for those placed in the lowest order, where this basic and most crucial right to existence has come to resonate with the consistent struggle against racial and caste violence, police brutality, oppressive regimes, failing systems of care, class asymmetries, and the climate crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic has contributed new challenges to the existing ones by the medicalization of everyday life creating additional constraints to work and mobility that have made these systematic hierarchies even more transparent than before.
How can this condition of breathlessness and suffocation that now defines the act of breathing, beyond its biological aspect, be visualized and translated through the medium of film? In the exhibition THE WIND IN YOUR BODY IS JUST VISITING, YOUR BREATH WILL SOON BE THUNDER, the artist and filmmaker, Pallavi Paul constructs a constellation of argumentative fragments spread throughout the exhibition space that mimic the ebb and flow of the gradual cessation of breath. Extracting strands, the foundations of which lie in the usurpation of breath, she draws parallels between multiple seemingly unconnected events from the past and the present, such as Germany’s first use of poison gas and invention of chemical warfare in WWI followed by its abundant use in WWII as well as Indian caste politics. She has gleaned scientific descriptions of medical records that describe the affliction and researched meditation practices that increase the capacity of breathing. By digging into obscured archives that recount police brutality and conducting interviews with pyre-burners describing the smoke and smell that rises from the burning pyres.
Paul’s practice is invested in excavating the obscured from what is known and established, in the reconstitution of the truth by emphasizing the tension between representation and countenance where she continues to challenge the aesthetic detachment between the filmic and the world. In her process of filming, دم is that significant and inevitable moment between the lived, felt, and expired, where she resolves this detachment by pulling these fragments into a coherent description of what entails breathing now.
THE WIND IN YOUR BODY IS JUST VISITING, YOUR BREATH WILL SOON BE THUNDER is part of a series of solo exhibitions by SAVVY Contemporary in collaboration with Berlinale's Forum Expanded inviting filmmakers to present research materials from their archives as a means of complementing filmic practices: extra footage, objects, texts, notes collected in the process of filmmaking. In the process of filmmaking, sometimes hundreds of hours of filmed materials are edited down to create the final length of the film. The notion of "killing your darlings" is a method of elimination. But the crucial question is where do the darlings go after being killed? In previous iterations, we sought to resurrect the darlings in an effort to relive the archive and deliberated on the possibility of the three dimensionality of the film screen within the exhibition space. In the current iteration, Pallavi Paul is reversing the process and sharing her extensive research that is on its journey of becoming, by nurturing the darlings she creates a constellation of arguments spread throughout the exhibition space, where traversing and tying them together equals the duration of a film.
Text by Hajra Haider Karrar
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 has 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 (2013); AV Festival, New Castle (2018, 2016); Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon (2018); SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2019); Contour Biennale, Mechelen (2017); New Alphabet School, HKW Berlin (2020); The Rubin Museum, New York (2019). She currently lives in Berlin as visual arts fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
Film Crew
CREATIVE COLLABORATORS Rohan Ranganathan, Raju Biswas
RESEARCH ASSISTANT Pew Banerjee
Archive Research Moritz Friese
ANIMATION WCA Post Studio, Noida, MD Sakhawat Hossain
Exhibition Team
ARTISTIC DIRECTION Elena Agudio
CURATION Hajra Haider Karrar, Laura Kloeckner, Abhishek Nilamber
EXHIBITION PRODUCTION Rafał Łazar, Karen Heinze, Daniellis Hernandez, Jyoti Khosla, António Pedro Mendes, Nancy Naser Al Deen, Ola Zielińska
PROJECTION MAPPING Md Sakhawat Hossain
Curation SAVVY.doc Sagal Farah with Karen Heinze and Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson
MANAGEMENT Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Lia Milanesio, Lema Sikod
COMMUNICATIONS Anna Jäger
HANDOUT LAYOUT Lili Somogyi
ART HANDLING Rafał Łazar
TECH Bert Günther
LIGHT DESIGN Emilio Cordero
Visual Still from Pneuma by Pallavi Paul, 2022
THE WIND IN YOUR BODY IS JUST VISITING, YOUR BREATH WILL SOON BE THUNDER is supported by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program with funds from the Federal Foreign Office, Schering Stiftung and the artist's gallery Project 88. The exhibition is presented within the program of the 17th Forum Expanded | 72nd Berlinale.
Past iterations in collaboration with Berlinale Forum Expanded: