Tom Burr: Paul

In Paul, Tom Burr works with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s unrealized film on the life of Saint Paul—a script drafted in 1966 that reimagines the apostle not in robes and desert dust, but in a trench coat and city streets, striding through the hard geometries of Paris, Rome, Geneva, and New York. Pasolini’s Paul is a man undone by light, revelation, and the unbearable weight of seeing too much, too clearly. Burr takes up this figure—not as saint, but as a fault line of unrest and longing, of vision turning against itself. He recasts Paul’s infamous blinding on the road to Damascus as something different from divine revelation: a violent unfastening—from certainty, from state-sanctioned belief, from the straight lines of power. Echoing the film’s unfinished state, Paul embraces incompletion as a generative method for pushing inherited fragments and unresolved ideas into motion. The exhibition inhabits the unfinished: a form that rehearses other forms, carried forward into subsequent iterations, arrangements, and contexts. Throughout its making, Burr will develop a publication in collaboration with the exhibition’s curator, Tom Engels, extending the exhibition beyond its present iteration and preparing its next lives—further mutations of Paul that will morph with each new staging. In this unravelling, Paul becomes a fractured mirror, a lingering disobedience, where to be struck down is also, somehow, to begin again.

Tom Burr (b. 1963, New Haven) is an artist whose oeuvre includes sculpture, collage, photography, and writing. Drawing directly from the formal languages of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, and responding to the political commitments of feminist art and institutional critique, Burr interlaces autobiographical references—particularly around queerness and public space—into his installations. His work persistently interrogates how bodies navigate place, desire, and control, exposing the tension between visibility and invisibility as both a personal and political condition. Burr lives and works in New York and Connecticut.