Purvai Rai employs laborious techniques and repetitive mark-making as durational gestures responding to complex sociopolitical realities. This body of work began with her engagement with recent revisions to school curricula — particularly the removal of chapters from social science textbooks. Purvai turns our attention to how erasure itself operates.
Working with textbooks from classes 6 through 12, alongside official deletion documents, the artist manually marked each removal. The collages disrupt regular methods of school learning, making absence visible and tracing the ways in which knowledge is edited and controlled.
The works in resin and textile sustain and insist her concerns. Purvai uses threads — black, white, orange, blue, and mauli thread — as material and symbol. Encountered across religious contexts including the Nizamuddin Dargah, the mauli thread came to represent continuity and shared hope across constructed boundaries. Together, the threads bind and interrupt, obscure and reveal. The series understands education as an act of hope, questioning what we choose to pass on and what responsibilities come with shaping knowledge itself. In doing so, it highlights the role of noninstitutional archives in preserving what risks being lost.