Pallavi Paul

About the Actant

Pallavi Paul lives and works in New Delhi, where she is currently enrolled as a Ph.D candidate at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her practice includes video, installation, text, photography, research and performance. Her hybrid multi-fora practice is about working with questions of truth and the rehearsals of evidence they find themselves engaged within. Her work has been shown at the AV festival in Newcastle, Savvy Contemporary, Contour Biennale, Tate Modern (project space), The Garage Rotterdam, Cinema Zuid, Close-Up Cinema, Beirut Art Centre, Open Source Festival, Edinburgh Art Festival, Bhaudaji Lad Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, KHOJ International Artists’ Association amongst others.

The ‘incident’ unlike ‘process’ provides no closure; it presents itself as an incision in time. Pallavi’s project works between two such incisions. These have no historical trail but exist as a spectral memory. They sit, ten years apart within the story of the Delhi Police. 1967 & 1977.

1967: For the first and only time – employees of the Delhi Police asserted themselves as workers by going on strike. Efforts were made towards creating a union. Strategies of protest were discussed. The strike was brutally crushed and erased from public memory.

1977: In the summer of 1977 democracy was about to return to India. A number of children, mainly boys, aged between 10-16 years, who had been taken away by police patrols and provisionally produced as delinquents to fill arrest quotas, needed to be returned to their homes. The trouble was,  many had forgotten where they came from.

Blind Rabbit proposes to create a thick description of these two moments across different platforms.