CIRCUIT CAST

How do images continue to shape the world long after they have been made? How do memory, care, grief and political life circulate through images, but also exceed them?

New Delhi-based artist Pallavi Paul presents a talk delivered at Elam Fine Arts, Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland, on 13 August 2026. The talk coincides with Pallavi Paul’s exhibition, To Be in Someone Else’s Prayer, commissioned by Te Tuhi in partnership with Satellites, curated by Balamohan Shingade and presented 9 August-4 October 2026. 

Drawing on films, installations, sculptures, and writing produced over the last decade, Pallavi Paul reflects on an artistic practice that moves between documentary cinema, contemporary art and research.  The talk traces the development of works including The Blind Rabbit (2021), How Love Moves (2024) and Alaq (2025), exploring how questions of evidence, contagion, care, and collective memory have gradually transformed her understanding of what images can do.

Rather than presenting documentary as a medium that simply records reality, the talk considers it as an ecology of relations: one in which images, bodies, institutions, technologies and acts of witnessing continually shape one another. Along the way, Pallavi will share the methods, experiments and encounters that have informed her practice, offering a glimpse into how artworks emerge through research, collaboration, and sustained attention to the worlds they inhabit.

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 the Sharjah Biennale (2025), where she received the Sharjah Biennial Prize.

For the final episode of Ka Mua Ka Muri – Walking Backwards Into the Future host David Upton (LUX Scotland) speaks with Sandy Wakefield (NZ) and Andrew Black (UK) about using the moving image to affirm ancestral connections to land and home. They discuss one film by each artist; Sandy's Nakunaku (2020) set on Rakiura / Stewart Island and Andrew’s Dàn Fianais (2022), set on the Isle of Skye. In the face of tourism and rapid commercialisation both islands still retain a deep sense of place which is held in the songs, stories and heritage of local people. Both works stream on LUX Scotland 23 March - 5 April 2026.

https://luxscotland.org.uk/programme/events/ka-mua-ka-muri-sandy-wakefield-andrew-black

Image: Left: Sandy Wakefield, Nakunaku (2020). Courtesy of the artist. Right: Andrew Black, ‘Dàn Fianais’ (2022). Courtesy of the artist.

For the second episode of ‘Ka Mua Ka Muri – Walking Backwards Into the Future’ we present a conversation between Maria de Lima (UK/ Brazil) and Alex Monteith (NZ), two artists using moving image in a time of fragile ecologies as a platform for global knowledge exchange, deep time awareness and human rights. Hosted by Mark Williams.

From 9-22 March 2026 we will be presenting Alex Monteith's, ‘Deepwater Currents’ (2020) alongside Maria de Lima’s ‘This Map of Affections’ (2024) on LUXScotland.org.

This podcast series has been made possible with support from the British Council and their programme Connections through Culture.

Image: Maria de Lima, ‘This Map of Affections’ (2024). Courtesy of the artist.

Ka Mua Ka Muri - Walking Backwards Into the Future is a thee-part podcast series that brings together artists who work with CIRCUIT and LUX Scotland.

In this episode Thulani Rachia and Jamie Berry (Te Aitanga-a-Mahaki, Rongowhakaata, Ngāti Porou, Ngā Puhi) discuss Thulani's obuyile (2021-ongoing) and Jamie's Hiwa-i-te-rangi (2023). Both works are based on a shared interest in dreaming, abstraction, repetition and rest as a contemporary continuum of ancestral knowledge.

obuyile and Hiwa-i-te-rangi show on LUX Scotland from 23 Feb-8 March 2026.

Ka Mua Ka Muri has been made possible with the support of the British Council arts fund Connections Through Culture.

Tessa Laird: Cinemal

“All film is made out of hooves”. Mark Amery speaks to writer Tessa Laird about her new publication Cinemal: The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film, and discusses the various animal qualities of cinema, like scratching and sniffing, vibrant colours, and voices.

00:00: Introduction

01.52: What is a Cinemal?

On the hybrid of Cinema and Animal. Inspiration of films by Australian film-makers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill. The idea of 'a cinematic animal...(while watching a film) the human viewer may also become animal...”

The subtitle 'the becoming animal of experimental film', where does that come from?
Tessa discusses the book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980) by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, Tessa's resistance to reading it, discovery of the books assertion that “all art comes from the animal… when we are engaged in artistic production we are at our most animal”. Discusses our “current hyper separation from the natural world".

7.14: What is experimental film?

Discusses non-narrative film, the work of Australian film-makers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill.

9.52: Meeting the Cantrills, following research into work by Nova Paul, discusses three colour separation, “the lingering of ghosts”. Seeing the Cantrill films in the original format, understanding the tactility of film. Understanding celluloid film as a dying medium, much as natural species were dying out. Mentions the Cantrills'film in new Zealand, 'Bubbling mud pools in Rotorua'.

15.29: Community of film-makers around the Cantrills from the 1960s onwards, the magazine Cantrills Fllm Notes, which included New Zealander Phil Dadson, Nam Jun Paik and others. “They were a network”.

16:40: In what way is film like animal? Discusses how celluloid includes a gelatin component. The book Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009), and how animal parts have furnished the rise of capitalism. “All film is made out of hooves”. “You can’t have a vegan cinema that’s made out of celluloid”. Film being full of toxic chemicals. The colour, grain and translucency of film. Question of whether the interest in film is just a nostalgic medium. “I think it’s more than that but I’m prepared to be challenged on that”.

20:15: Film being animal. Technological analogy between watching animal movement and media. Discusses the book The Squid Cinema From Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulumedia (2020) and animals as screens. Animal attributes as technology.

23:00: The sixth sense and our bodily feel for cinema, the inexplicable - spirit, energy. The human and the non-human.

25:20 The eye of the camera.

25:50: On film programme accompanying the Cinemal book launch. The work of Nova Paul, and her phyto-filmic practice, working with trees. Vegan Cinema. On Sriwhana Spong working with film, realising the specificity of the medium in her practice, film as an entity.