This display arises from an artist’s consistent immersion in archival work as part of her day job.
Since 2018, Pallavi has been engaged in the somewhat repetitive tasks of scanning, cropping, organising, entering metadata, and uploading art historical documents. The three works presented are about shifts and distortions in an archivist’s experience of time—the illusion of rocking back and forth, where time is passing but feels still, the wavering of grid-cells in excel sheets, the glitching matrix of the Gregorian calendar.
AAA in India’s office serves as both site and context, which Pallavi cohabits with her colleagues, and where her longer preoccupations with geometry and organisational structures intermingle with her digitisation duties. She responds not so much to the “information” in the archive, but the process and effects of archiving itself.
This is an experiment in annotating the quotidian affairs of a workspace with the criss-crossing of artistic and archival practice.
This exhibition has been generously supported by Susanta Mandal and Rakhi Peswani.
Pallavi Arora is an artist based in New Delhi, whose practice is concerned with geometry, structure, and space. She completed an MA in Visual Arts from Ambedkar University, Delhi, and a BFA in Painting from the College of Art, Delhi. She is Research Assistant at AAA in India.
Samira Bose is Curator at AAA in India.