Purvai Rai (b. 1994, New Delhi, India; lives and works between New York and New Delhi) is a multimedia artist whose practice maps the entanglements between land, lineage, labor, and ecological precarity. Working across sculpture, textiles, drawing, and bookmaking, Rai grounds her work in the agricultural and architectural histories of her ancestral village of Nawanpind in Punjab, a landscape shaped by monsoon cycles, colonial land interventions, forced crop shifts, and ongoing political protest. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2025 and her BFA from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology in 2017. Her work has been exhibited at Perrotin, New York; Nunu Fine Art, New York; THK Gallery, Cape Town; and Gallery Espace, New Delhi, and is included in the collection of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), India. She was a 2024 Artist-in-Residence at the Henry Moore Foundation in the United Kingdom.

Purvai Rai's project, A Hundred Ways to Witness, 2024–2025, embodies this methodology with particular clarity. Structured as an artist book comprising one hundred works on paper, the project meditates on Punjab’s ecological fragility, the increasing frequency of floods, and the interdependence between care, cultivation, and survival. Each page offers a discrete study in spatial reconfiguration, mapping the Haveli’s architecture, agrarian cycles, and environmental shifts as a series of evolving perceptions rather than fixed truths. Two sculptural works, Chronometer 1, 2025, and Chronometer 2, 2025, function as the book’s material armature. Composed with the temporal logic of measuring instruments, they index the shifting relationship between agrarian time, colonial time, and embodied time, thereby framing the book as both an archive and a devotional object.