Purvai Rai: Until Harvest
“I navigate visible and invisible voices—those of my family, local communities, archives, the Guru Granth Sahib, and Bhakti-Sufi hymns, and machines (their role and impact). Storytelling, oral histories, rituals, and songs hold equal weight to written records in my visual language— that influence my gestural and material decisions. ”
- Purvai Rai
Nunu Fine Art New York is pleased to present Until Harvest, Purvai Rai’s first solo exhibition with the gallery as part of our Project Space: Asian Voices program. Purvai Rai’s multimedia practice weaves agrarian life, ancestral memory, and socio-political histories to trace how land, labor, and lineage shape contemporary struggles for place-making and social justice. This installation centers on a floor piece composed of rice tiles, surrounded by a series of architectural elevation prints and drawings positioned unusually low along the walls. Diverging from conventional hanging methods, the works draw the viewers’ attention downward, grounding their focus in the land itself.
Shifting Fields, the central work of the installation recalls the history of a haveli in Nawanpind, Punjab— built in 1916 by the artists ancestors as a granary and distribution hub for over 200 acres of farmland. Its architecture is designed to organize and store agricultural yield, although, over time, it became a quiet witness to the ruptures and reconfigurations that followed the 1960s Land Ceiling Act enacted by the Indian government. As a result, the haveli fell into disuse and disrepair, until, in 2007, Rai’s mother restored the Haveli, transforming it with geometric patterned tiles sourced from local manufacturers as an ode to the time it was built. The grid-like geometry of the rice tiles echoes the haveli’s spatial logic, invoking histories of cultivation, communal exchange, architectural revival and reclamation.
Surrounding the rice tiles are a series of prints that are a part of a larger artist’s book titled A Hundred Ways to Witness. The 100 pages detail minimal architectural studies and elevations of the haveli in Nawanpind. Inspired by the Hindu concept of “one hundred paths”, the works meditate on the notion that “perception mocks certainty.” The individual sheets of the book each provide a new layer of the structure or configuration of space, reanimating the past and creating a malleable truth that is lived and re-lived.
The prints are hung low to the ground, gently guiding viewers to orient themselves toward each of the cardinal directions, enacting a form of parikrama, or sacred circumambulation. This embodied movement draws from the spatial configuration of Sri Harmandir Sahib (the Golden Temple), where four entryways welcome reverence from all directions. Similarly, the installation invites viewers to circle around its center, where rice tiles are carefully composed into a new kind of sacred geometry. Through this reimagined ritual, the work redirects sanctity from temple to terrain, honoring the earth itself.
Until Harvest invites viewers to consider how landscapes store memory and structures absorb history. In orienting themselves physically around the work, participants are called to reflect on their relationship to land—not only as resource but as inheritance, livelihood, and living archive.