Purvai Rai is an artist, researcher, and educator whose practice engages Punjab as an evolving social archive shaped by extraction, labor, memory, and repair. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, textiles, sound, video, and artist books, she investigates how soil, water, food systems, architecture, and governance shape relationships between land, labor, and community.

Through long-term fieldwork, oral histories, archival research, and collaboration, Rai applies an interrogative methodology extending the dialogues on contemporary archaeology where her material knowledge treats Punjab as a living archive with personal narratives intersecting a thinking visuality of broader histories of colonialism, partition, migration, environmental change, and cultural inheritance. Grounded in her maternal family history and ongoing engagement with her ancestral village of Nawan Pind Sardaran, her research spans both Indian and Pakistani Punjab, drawing from family archives, government records, devotional traditions, and community knowledge systems.

Working at the intersection of governance, ecology, and the body, Rai examines agriculture, architecture, and care as interconnected infrastructures through which policy, labor, extraction, entitlement, and intergenerational memory are enacted. Central to her practice is a form of indexical making in which materials, gestures, and collaborative processes function as traces of encounters rather than representations of them.

Collaboration is integral to her work. Through long-term engagement with farmers, artisans, and women from her ancestral village, she develops projects that explore collective memory, stewardship, and intergenerational knowledge, creating spaces where local histories and lived experiences become visible through contemporary artistic forms.

Rai received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art and a B.Des from Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. Her solo exhibitions include Cartography of the Grounded Sky (Gladwell Projects, New York, 2026), Choreography of the Grid (Rajiv Menon Contemporary, 2026), Gestures of Infinity (James Fuentes Gallery, New York, 2025), Until Harvest (Nunu Fine Art, New York, 2025), and Confluence (Gallery Espace, New Delhi, 2021). Recent group exhibitions include presentations at Perrotin, SOAS University of London, Aicon Gallery, Gallery Espace, and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Bikaner House. Her work has also been exhibited at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai; the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation at CSMVS, Mumbai; and the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

Rai has participated in residencies and fellowships including the KinoSaito Residency Program, the Golden Foundation Residency, the Henry Moore Institute Residency, and the Paul Mellon Centre Graduate Summer Program.

Alongside her studio practice, she has taught and lectured at Yale School of Art, CEPT University, and Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology.