Purvai Rai’s solo exhibition Choreography of the Grid begins from a simple premise: we live within systems. The most elemental grid—longitude and latitude—positions us on the surface of the earth, rendering the planet measurable and locatable. Yet this cartographic structure does not remain neutral. Across history, the grid mutates—from a tool of orientation into an instrument of division, regulation, and control.
In Punjab, colonial surveying transformed land into a quantifiable surface. After colonial Independence, land reform legislation redefined how much land could be held and by whom, shifting the grid from imperial allocation to bureaucratic regulation. Today, agricultural fields remain shaped by further systems of measurement: soil classifications, crop cycles, yield metrics, inheritance laws, and market demands. What appears vast and open is, in fact, highly structured.
The exhibition centers the agricultural field as a living grid—one that organizes land, bodies, labor, and belief through repetition. Farmers move along furrows; sowing and harvesting return seasonally; bureaucratic systems measure, record, and cap; infrastructure channels water through canal geometries. The grid measures, divides, allocates, and renders space legible to capitalist logics of productivity and extraction. Yet it is never only imposed. It is inhabited, softened, resisted, and rewritten through daily gestures—sowing, carrying, cooking, sweeping, weaving, repairing. Movement both follows and unsettles structure. Water seeps beyond boundaries, roots extend past property lines, winds disregard survey maps.
Formally, the works treat the grid as a choreography of materials, pressures, and returns. Surfaces are ruled, impressed, layered, crocheted, knotted, and scored—procedures that echo architectural planning and agrarian technique while registering time through accumulation. Paper is layered upon paper; canvases join in fragments; threads are knotted across textile grids. Each work is composed of smaller units coming together, mirroring how land is divided into parcels yet experienced as a continuum. The grid appears sometimes visibly, sometimes embedded as process.
The exhibition stages a tension between the grid as command—survey lines, canal geometry, property boundaries, yield metrics—and the grid as commons: shared infrastructures of nourishment such as kitchens, courtyards, langar, collective labor, and collective feeding. Within this tension lies a central contradiction: private ownership and private labor often underpin what appears as public sustenance.
Ultimately, Choreography of the Grid proposes that every grid is performed. A boundary holds only through repeated enforcement; a map becomes legible through our placement in it; a harvest cycle becomes “normal” through its yearly return. The field becomes grain. Grain becomes flour. Flour becomes roti. The open landscape is absorbed into the body. What begins as planetary coordinates ends as nourishment, entering and sustaining every cell.
By tracing this movement—from global cartography to agricultural plot to domestic kitchen to bodily survival—the exhibition reframes the grid not only as a structure of control, but as a choreography of life. It asks: Who draws the line? Who lives within it? And how do materials remember the systems that shaped them, while still offering tools to imagine another arrangement?
Purvai Rai (b. 1994, New Delhi, India) lives and works between New Delhi, India and New York, NY, USA. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT, USA in 2025, and BFA from Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology in Bangalore, India in 2017.
Her solo exhibitions include Choreography of the Grid, Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2026); Gestures of Infinity, James Fuentes, New York, NY, USA (2025); and Confluence, Gallery Espace, New Delhi, India (2021).
Group shows include – POWER LINE, Perrotin, New York, NY, USA (2025); (UN)layering the Future Past of South Asia: Young Artists’ Voices, curated by Salima Hashmi and Manmeet Walia, SOAS Gallery, London, England (2025); Collected Memory, THK Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2025); Sutr Santiti - Then. Now. Next, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (2023); Women Is As Women Does, Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, CSMVS, Mumbai, India (2023); Riyaz, Bikaner House, New Delhi, India (2022); Lines by Lines, Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi, India (2022); Patterns of Intensity, Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi, India (2021); and Abstract Notations, Gallery Espace, New Delhi, India (2021).
Rai completed The Golden Foundation Residency Program in 2026 and was artist-in-residence at the Henry Moore Foundation in 2024. In 2023, she received the TAF Emerging Artist Award.