Two pivotal events in 1984 impacted Amar Kanwar’s early years as a student. One was the orchestrated killings of Sikhs in Delhi after Indira Gandhi’s assassination on 31 October 1984. The other was the Bhopal disaster on 3 December of the same year, when toxic gas escaped from a pesticide plant owned by the American company Union Carbide, killing several thousand people and injuring hundreds of thousands more. A college student at the time, Amar Kanwar had been born into a family personally affected by the epochal partition of India in 1947, and his studies of history at the University of Delhi had sharpened his focus on political, social and media issues. In conversation with Sean O’Toole for Frieze magazine, Kanwar told of how the two months between these two major events, his first-hand experience of the violence that shook his country and the subsequent campaigns for justice had been a turning point in his life. After graduation, he travelled to a coal-mining area in the interior of India to research the problem of alcoholism and occupational hazards. Amar Kanwar became a political and human rights activist without ever belonging to any political party. Shortly afterwards he enrolled at the film school in the Mass Communications Research Centre of Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi. On completion of his studies there, Amar Kanwar went through several difficult and, as he puts it, “demoralising”, years when he questioned the medium of film but nevertheless went on to make a number of documentaries.
His breakthrough came with Earth as Witness, which he made in 1994 for the Tibetan government in exile. For the first time, he had more control over the film and was able to try out new narrative techniques. This was followed by the films for which he is best known, such as his trilogy A Season Outside (1997), A Night of Prophecy (2002), To Remember (2003), as well as King of Dreams (2001), Hennigsvaer (2006), the nineteen-part video installation The Torn First Pages (2004-2008), the eight-part installation The Lightning Testimonies (2007), A Love Story (2010) and the new film he is presenting this summer at the Documenta 13, The Sovereign Forest (2012).

While the raw substance and tangibility of Amar Kanwar’s films allow the eye and the mind to wander far afield, A Season Outside focuses sharply on one place: the Wagah border crossing. This film addresses the highly charged situation on the boundary between India and Pakistan. We see the brightly garish pageantry of the daily opening and closing ceremony on the road between the two states, counterpointed by images of the everyday watchfulness of the border guards and the shouldering and passing on of heavy sacks of grain or spices along the white, twelve-inch-wide boundary line, accompanied by the author’s long inner monologue. 

The film To Remember uses a visit to the Birla House – now known as Gandhi Smriti, where Mahatma Gandhi spent the last days of his life and where he was assassinated on 30 January 1948 – as a silent vehicle by which to explore the difference between reality and collective memory. “Gandhi was born in Gujarat,” says Amar Kanwar. “After the massacres of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, I wanted to commemorate Gandhi’s death in another way. I was invited to do a public screening in Gujarat on the 30th of January 2003, and this led me to make the film. At that time a justification for the massacres was being presented and I wanted to react to that, even if it was in a small way. To Remember became like a short, silent curse and a reminder of the justification that was also presented for the killing of Gandhi in 1948. There is a continuous reference in my work to the cycles of assassinations, of organised killings, of religious violence, of the rise of fascism.”

A Night of Prophecy, on the other hand, seems full of song and poetry. Kanwar travels the length and breadth of India with his camera to record poems and narrations being recited and sung. Inspired by a poem written in 1970 by Prakash Jadhav, a lower caste baggage handler at Mumbai airport at the time, which profoundly moved Amar when he first read it in 2001, A Night of Prophecy gives voice to many ordinary people telling of the reality of life in India. The film travels through different fault lines in the Indian nation and its history. Along the way it addresses such topics as caste oppression and untouchability, the working poor and the question of nationality – or as Kanwar says, “You have to throw the nation up in the air in order to re-imagine it.”

The Torn First Pages is an ode to the Burmese resistance, which, year after year, decade after decade, fought for a democratic society. This complex, room-filling video installation is based on a tripartite structure, the first part of which consists of six individual films: The Face, Thet Win Aung (a), Thet Wing Aung (b), Ma Win Maw Oo, The Bodhi Tree and Somewhere in May. They address, respectively: a seemingly absurd visit by General Than Shwe, Burma’s highest military leader, to the resting place of the non-violent Mahatma Gandhi; a remembrance of student activist Thet Win Aung, who was sentenced to 59 years in prison; the harrowing image of a 13-year-old schoolgirl shot dead by Burmese soldiers, which briefly received global attention before being forgotten; the life of a famous Burmese dissident painter who has lived in exile in New Delhi since the suppression of the 1988 uprising, producing politically-charged portraiture; and finally Somewhere in May, which contrasts life in Oslo on 17 May 2004, Norwegian Constitution Day, with the same day on which the Burmese military held a sham National Convention on Democracy. There is, as Amar Kanwar puts it, an agonising discrepancy between “freedom and claustrophobia, democracy and its simulation”. On the one hand, there is a strong hope for democracy and the hard struggle to obtain it; on the other, there seems to be an almost casual sense of normality that is poured into joyous celebrations and parties. The second part of The Torn First Pages is comprised of seven projections charting the world of Burmese activists in exile in America, and searches for traces of the late Tin Moe, a famous Burmese poet in exile. Part three shows archival material, detailing the gathering and collation of printed matter and film footage as a cognitive process and as the basis for change – applying the term “evidence” from which this book and the exhibition take their title. 

Henningsvaer was created in Norway, among the rich cod-fishing grounds of the island of Henningsvaer inside the Arctic Circle. Amar Kanwar had accepted an invitation to attend an art festival on the Lofoten Islands. He was also in search of information about a Scandinavian who had been murdered in a Burmese prison for aiding Aung San Suu Kyi. The entire video is filmed from one house, through many windows, looking outwards – encapsulating, as Amar Kanwar puts it, “the thin line between paradise and prison”. The wonderful vista into the magnificent, sweeping solitude of the far north can change as abruptly as the weather. In the last third of the film, the view turns homewards, inwards, towards memory. A boat glides slowly through still waters to the left; the camera follows it, imperturbably underpinning the sense of fluidity and continuity, but also of exile, the memory of home, of the fundamental need for a freedom of the soul.

The Lightning Testimonies addresses rape and sexual violence in the Indian subcontinent in the form of an eight-channel projection of hauntingly calm and subdued imagery that converges into a single projection towards the end. It explores how memory, and perhaps even the future itself, can be altered through complex, gradual thought processes and actions that can eventually free the victim from trauma and bring new vitality. And finally A Love Story: Merging the pain of individual and social separations, A Love Story is a cinematic miniature. At the same time, it is a film about filmmaking.

Amar Kanwar addresses social and political issues but is interested less in the hard facts – which can so easily be presented – or in the easily definable content, than in a more wide-reaching, more deeply rooted kind of “evidence”: the certainties that touch the very nerve of life, society and experience. He explores people’s actions, behaviours and reactions as a musician explores semitones, quartertones and intervals, meandering in a sombre, melancholy minor key through the complex labyrinth of cause and effect. How should a given situation be interpreted, or an experience, a profound event, a jarring pain? How do the representatives of the state behave and how do the people survive and overcome their trauma? How do we remember them, their special achievements, or their unbowed determination? Nuances of mood are as important here as the tempo of the narrative, the breathing, the pauses, the continuo, the rhythm – in short, the song itself. In conversation with Shanay Jhaveri, there is a wonderful moment when Amar Kanwar talks about silence and asks the question “what happens if many kinds of silences come close to each other? Then, how to listen, how to see?”
Amar Kanwar has as little faith in linearity as he has in one-dimensionality. For him life is a complex, multi-layered approach involving many levels and strata, overgrown paths and different strands of time running parallel or colliding or in various directions. In this “multiplicity”, an expression that he uses often, he creates the experience of multiple time both within and on the outside and so opening up and interlinking all forms of communication. There is no simplification; on the contrary, he wants to give things time to develop, taking them at his own pace and letting the people, events and stories in his film evolve in much the way as a long and chequered life unfolds. Like the woman in The Lightning Testimonies who carefully, thoughtfully and slowly weaves her story, her experience of violence and the terrible loss of her friend, into the fabric of a dress. The concept of evidence, certainty and proof may rise like a tree from the ground, but it is overgrown with ivy and other climbing plants, its branches spreading, stretching, groaning, as it connects with other trees, other certainties, to form one vast forest.
This book represents a moment in a life and oeuvre constantly in flux, always branching out and converging, following a course, but at times deliberately diverging, because there is time, or time can be found – to breathe, to walk, to pause, to move on, to circle. There is poetry in Amar Kanwar’s words and lyricism in his films – both method and metaphor alike by which life’s distillation and dissipation become comprehensible and deeper knowledge can be gained. Space can be grasped through time, time through poetry. What is at stake is always the life of the individual, the rules of society, power, abuse, violence, the power to enlighten and the courage to change.