Project 88 is pleased to present Pallavi Paul’s fourth solo exhibition How Love Moves at our gallery space. This is a show about love – a love that isn't only limited to the human but also journeys through the ecological, microbial, political, planetary, and the cinematic. The exhibition presents a weave of materials and gestures that acknowledge the transformative power of love. Emerging from the artist's ongoing research on grief, contagion, virality, and breath since 2020, the exhibition takes its name from Paul’s newest film, How Love Moves, alongside a new body of fabric collages, sandpaper prints, text installations, and paintings. This constellation of the etheric, material, and cinematic is imagined by the artist as an amulet. Protective spells, they remind us of what urgently needs safeguarding against the corrosive excesses of our time. This show is an ode to a kind of simple beauty that is fragile, under assault, and yet offers comfort, redemption, and protection to those who enter its fold.
How Love Moves is a 63-minute film set in one of New Delhi’s largest cemeteries, reflecting on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic through the perspective of a gravekeeper and a cross-border love story. Out here, viewers are immersed in the beauty of multispecies and spiritual life, as well as the brutality of political and racialized violence. Following Shamim Khan and his coworker’s daily care for the Delhi Gate Cemetery over the last few years, the film attempts to comprehend an event unprecedented in the recent history of the world – the COVID-19 pandemic – through the eyes of a keeper of the dead. As a cinematic structure, Paul unpacks the timespan of a breath through five chapters titled after Islamic prayer times – ﻓﺟر (Fajr, before dawn), ظُﮭْر (Zuhr, afternoon), اﻟﻌﺻر (Asr, late afternoon), ِ ﻣَﻐْرب (Maghrib, after sunset) and ﻋﺎﺋﺷﺔ (Isha, nighttime) – which simultaneously mark a disruption in the prayer’s connection to the circle of life. Eventually, How Love Moves also traces a cross-border love story that defies religious divides and yet ends in loss. It relays the daily cost of mortality in the current world and how caregiving brings comfort across devotional acts at the onset of death.
In parallel, Everything is Still Damp (2024), a series of screen prints on sandpaper, explores memory’s persistence and fading. Dum (2022), a gold-thread embroidered drape on velvet, is suspended at the delicate border between life and death. Translated as life and strength, Dum is a portal between breath and the world. Karamaat / Miracle (2024) is a watercolour series on delicate Duong paper, where fleeting, otherworldly visitations offer a quiet, ephemeral connection to a realm beyond. Amulet (2025) and Rosary (2025) are a series of embroidered collages exploring devotion and transformation. Amulet is a series of large-scale pieces that repurposes found ceremonial prayer chadars from Sufi shrines in Delhi, reassembled into diaphanous landscapes filled with time, prayer, and divine energy. Rosary continues this theme with watercolour and hand-embroidery on paper to trace devotional patterns, imagining sewing as a form of prayer. Finally, the text installation IMAGINE THE PAST COMBUST FLICKER GLEAM JUST AS ITS STRIKES YOU (2024) looks at time as a healing force and a source of light.
