Kōrero
How Love Moves: Pallavi Paul and Balamohan Shingade in Conversation

Winner of the 2025 Sharjah Biennial Prize, Pallavi Paul is among the foremost contemporary artists of her generation from India. Working across film, installation, drawing, photography and writing, Paul interrogates how “truth” is produced and contested in public life. Her multimedia practice treats documentary not just as an image or a film, but as a material ecosystem, a web of relationships, a framework for thinking, and an embodied sensory experience.

Pallavi's work was first exhibited in Aotearoa New Zealand as part of the exhibition How to Live Together (2019), curated by Balamohan Shingade. She arrives in Tāmaki Makaurau for the first time in February 2026 for a four-week residency supported by Satellites and Te Tuhi towards her first major solo exhibition in Aotearoa later this year.

She is joined by writer and Spoor Books co-founder Balamohan for a discussion of her practice, and a conversation spanning love, language and literature, and the ways the dead remain among the living.

Refreshments will be provided, and a curated selection of books from South Asia will be available for purchase from Spoor Books.

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 Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023, 2024); the Berlinische Galerie (2023, 2022); IFFR, Rotterdam (2020); the Berlinale Forum Expanded (2022); Tate Modern, London (2013); the AV Festival, New Castle (2018, 2016); the Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon (2018); SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2019, 2022); Contour Biennale, Mechelen (2017); the New Alphabet School, HKW, Berlin (2020); the Rubin Museum, New York (2019); and Colomboscope, Sri Lanka (2021).

Balamohan Shingade is a writer, curator and researcher living in Titirangi. He has published essays on contemporary art, Indigenous-settler relations, authoritarian populism, and the Indian diaspora in Aotearoa New Zealand. Currently, he is working on a doctoral thesis in social and political philosophy at the University of Auckland, where he is a teaching fellow. He is also an occasional singer of Hindustani music and runs Spoor Books—an independent publisher and an online bookstore featuring titles from India and beyond.