It hasn’t been easy getting Amar Kanwar to agree to this conversation. But it’s easy to see why; a discussion of the artist’s highly political works is not accommodated easily inside the cultivated ambience of a restaurant. After a bout of doubt and deliberations we meet at Café Zaffiro at Zaza, Zamrudpur, on a rainy evening.
A graduate from Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Kanwar began as a documentary filmmaker. Although his interest is still primarily the moving image, his work has entered different contexts. “I make whatever is compelling me at a particular moment in time. With every film, I confront a set of dilemmas of content, intent and form; and I try to address those,” he says.
He battles another set of dilemmas and chooses their grilled fish with vegetables. On an attendant’s recommendation, we also select the Dutch potato fries and mayo. He sheds light on some of his works, beginning with the most recent, The Sovereign Forest , “an exhibition that attempts to reopen discussion and initiate a creative response to our understanding of crime, politics, human rights and ecology.” A central part of the The Sovereign Forest is the film The Scene of Crime . Almost every frame of the film lies within territories that are in the process of being acquired for industrial purposes. The film is about another way of looking at these territories, at the scene of crime; and the exhibition is a constellation of evidence that is found and presented. “Reflecting on the limitations of legally valid evidence, the exhibition asks if it is formally possible to present poetry as evidence of crime, if there could be another way to cognition. The scale and depth of the processes that are underway in these territories cannot be understood through law alone.”
The sumptuous looking food arrives with a garlic bread side, and serves as a contrast to the issues of food sovereignty also dealt with in the film. “There are 266 varieties of indigenous rice in these territories. Like each frame of the film, these are also destined to not exist.”
The attempt at another way to cognition is also made in The Lightning Testimonies , which was triggered by instances of sexual violence during the Gujarat riots and the public celebrations that accompanied it. Taking this as a starting point, the exhibit explores episodic sexual violence during the partition and also during the Bangladesh war. What emerged was a kind of history, or counter-history, of the Sub Continent that is “familiar with an enormous amount of brutality.” “These occasions are usually described as ‘a momentary period of madness’. But that explanation is simply unacceptable,” Kanwar says.
Between The Sovereign Forest and The Lightning Testimonies stands The Torn First Pages . As with the other two, the evolution of a new vocabulary is a central concern. In this case, it is of the loss experienced by the Burmese peoples. The title refers explicitly to Ko Than Htay, the Burmese bookseller who tore out the first page of every book he sold as it bore the mandatory slogans of the military regime and was arrested for this act of private defiance.
Made between 2004 and 2008, as and when resources could be raised, the exhibition with its 19 projections pays tribute to the spirit of Burmese peoples who collected evidence of crime by the regime over five decades.
As the meal approaches finality, we order the Arabian nut cake and chocolate temptation for desserts.
Kanwar, who holds the rare honour of being selected for three consecutive dOCUMENTA exhibitions — in 2002, 2007 and 2012 — held at Kassel in Germany, finds the interest in his work reassuring, but cautions that “in the last 10 years the West has also been very interested in Indian bauxite ore. We need to understand the market and how it affects one’s work.”
So how does one remain innocent of these affectations? His answer lies in where The Sovereign Forest is being exhibited. Alongside Kassel, the exhibition is on display in Bhubaneswar, not far from the Niyamgiri hills.
