Grazer Kunstverein
Tom Burr
​Paul

In Paul, Tom Burr engages with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s unrealized film on the life of Saint Paul—a script drafted in 1966 that reimagined 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, by revelation, by the unbearable weight of seeing too much, too clearly.

Burr takes up this figure—not as a saint or martyr, but as a vessel of rupture, desire, and disorientation. He recasts Paul’s blinding on the road to Damascus as something other than divine revelation: a violent unfastening—from certainty, from state-sanctioned belief, from the straight lines of power. Echoing the film’s unrealized condition, Paul treats incompletion as a generative condition—an opening for modeling forward through unfinished ideas, speculative forms, and inherited fragments. In this suspension, Paul becomes a haunted mirror, a lingering disobedience, where to be struck down is also, somehow, to begin again.