SOSA JOSEPH: RAIN OVER THE RIVER
DAVID ZWIRNER is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Indian artist Sosa Joseph. This will be the artist’s first show in North America, and it follows Pennungal: Lives of women and girls.
November 7 - December 20, 2025
Quasi-autobiographical yet enigmatic, the paintings in Rain over the river reflect on the particularities of life in Parumala, an island village situated on the Pamba River in the South Indian state of Kerala, where the artist spent the first twenty-four years of her life. As she recalls, the banks of the Pamba would flood every year during the rainy monsoon season, forcing large populations to seek refuge in makeshift camps and public shelters. For Joseph, this rain offers an array of symbolic resonances, standing in for emotional suffering and strife as well as the physical ordeals heralded by the monsoon. Oscillating between sobering reportage and intimate psychological reminiscence, her work offers an alternative approach to the artistic tradition of history painting—one in which everyday moments take on the heft of the extraordinary, and individual narratives coalesce into a richly tapestried collective history.
I come from a rain-drenched riverbank. Apart from the river, which always flowed by, the phenomenon that governed our being was the rain. Its presence or absence did not merely mark the seasons—it shaped the very fabric of our consciousness. We lived through alternating spells of rain and rainlessness; everything happened either during the rain or in its brief interludes. When it poured without end, flooding the riverbank and driving us away from our homes—making us refugees of rain—we prayed for it to stop. Yet when it finally went away—we never knew where—it left a silence so deep and hollow that we longed intensely for its return. If only it rained! we would say, as heat clung to us through the scorching days. Thus, even in its total absence, the rain never truly left us; it continued to fall within our minds. This inner rain blended rain and rainlessness. At times pouring incessantly and faintly resented, and at other times gone but missed with intense yearning, rain was always there, like the river itself. Through alternating currents of longing and loathing, adoration and fear, it held our consciousness captive all year round. The rains I remember have many colours and distinct characters. The long spells of loud rain that silenced the earth through June and July fell in an all-consuming monotone—mighty, yet tame. In contrast, the rains that ravaged Octobers and Novembers came laden with thunder rolls that frightened us children to no end. In the colour perception of my soul, afternoon rains were brass and amber; night rains, blue and purple; and the clamouring showers we woke up to on drenched mornings, olive and grey.
My attempts to paint the rain began early, but without success. The rain proved too alive to be held still. Yet each failure only renewed my hope and longing to capture its spirit, its texture. This time though, I realised it was not the rain itself I must paint, but what is rained over—the drenched and dampened lives and geography, transfixed by the rains, both inner and outer. These soaked, damp, and dry vignettes of life along the river—through rain and rainlessness—coalesce in my mind into a single, unbroken rain. Ever-present and timeless, much like the river. Because, for us, rainlessness is also a kind of rain.
These damp canvases are my attempt to capture those rains. The ones that fell over and around the river, and within us, over the years.
—Sosa Joseph