Purvai Rai

My art practice began as a response to socio-political events that I was experiencing in India. To respond I needed to know more; the more I learned, the more questions I had. To understand any event, I had to decode the source of the outcome. In order to uncover the source, how far into the past did I have to go?

The farmers’ protests of 2020 took me back to the farmlands in Punjab. Engaging with the farmers in my ancestral village, Nawanpind Sardaran, became a social research process, as my hands delved into the intricacies of farming, I learned about decades of experiences and lessons about the land. This made my art practice deeply rooted in Punjab - examining it as an archive, an archeological site, and a living museum. Since then, I have been studying the fragmentation and consolidation of Punjab through an auto-ethnographic lens while navigating the complex histories of successive systems of power since the 15th century: monarchy, feudalism, colonialism, democracy, and capitalism.

My “social” archive is a participatory and evolving collection of stories, craft technologies, land experiences, and documents that reflect the lived realities of my community and family, and my involvement with them. I am trying to reveal stories of resistance, reconciliation, survival, and transformation, and attempting to give voice to the previously silenced. In my practice, storytelling, oral history, ceremonies, songs, and rituals are given equal weight to written words and images.

The materials, visual elements, and gestures employed in the works function as multivalent signifiers that embody personal and collective narratives that accumulate over time. Making art assists me in finding interconnections between community, craft, agroecology (economy), architecture, and ancestrality prompting a reassessment of the influence of place on memory transmission and the formation of generational patterns.

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