Purvai Rai’s (b. 1994) mixed media art practice traces the affective arc between the political and historical, on the one hand, and the personal and every day, on the other. It originates in the artist’s response to ‘current affairs’ – urgent, large-scale events such as the 2021 farmers’ protests or the Indian government’s steps to change school history textbooks – and her endeavour to make sense of it through the prism of history, collective memory, identity and morality. Architecture and space interest Purvai as markers of social, cultural and religious identity and discrimination in the way it encloses and orders movement, alluding to and (re-)presenting the precarious existences of communities and individuals on the margins. Purvai creates an open-ended narrative with repetitive symbols and motifs, a distilled visual language of abstract notations. Purvai’s art practice thus far has demonstrated a restless engagement with material – with textile and yarn for their tactility, texture and as repositories of civilisational memory. She also works with paper, resin, graphite, acrylic paint, beads, sequin and so on, exploring and stretching their graphic possibilities – the play of transparency and opacity, for instance – and mining their potential as cultural signifiers. Collage, as a way to aggregate and complement, has emerged as a primary process in her works.
Purvai’s recent body of works, resulting from a period of free-wheeling and intense experimentation at Yale School of Art where she worked on her MFA, is deeply rooted in the land, memory, and cultural landscapes of Punjab. Engaging with themes of ancestry, ecology, community, and oral history, she examines Punjab as a living archive — one shaped by shifting socio-political, economic, and spatial realities. Collaborating with women artisans from her ancestral village Nawanpind Sardaran, Rai incorporates traditional crafts such as knitting, embroidery, crocheting, and weaving, fostering an environment of mutual exchange and social cohesion. Through material and gesture, her work transforms family memories and oral histories into tactile, multivalent symbols.
Purvai has an undergraduate degree from Srishti Institute for Art Design and Technology (2013-17), before she went to Yale School of Art to study for an MFA. Her MFA thesis artworks were showcased at a solo exhibition titled ‘Until Harvest’, at Nunu Fine Art New York. Her solo exhibitions include ‘Gestures of Infinity’ at James Fuentes, New York (2025) and an online exposition on the Gallery Espace website ‘Confluence’ (2021). She has been a part of several significant group shows – among them ‘Unlayering the future past of South Asia: Young Artists’ Voices’ (2025), curated by Salima Hashmi and Manmeet Walia, SOAS Gallery, London; ‘Collected Memory’ (2025), THK Gallery, Cape Town; ‘Sutr Santiti’ (2023), National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai’; ‘Women is as Women does’ (2023), Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, CSMVS, Mumbai; ‘Riyaz’ (2022), Bikaner House, New Delhi; ‘Lines by Lines’ (2022), Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi; ‘Patterns of Intensity’ (2021), Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi’; and ‘Abstract Notations’ (2021), on the Gallery Espace Instagram handle. Purvai received the TAF Emerging Artist Award-South Asia for 2023, and was Artist in Residence at the Henry Moore Foundation in 2024.
The artist lives and works in Delhi.
