ART-PRESENTATION: Amar Kanwar-Such A Morning

Amar Kanwar is an artist shaped by a commitment to social activism. Born in New Delhi where he lives, he works strictly with documentary and archival images in the process of documentary filmmaking, employing various methods of editing and presentation to create a sense of atmosphere and reveal underlying motives and histories.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive

Amar Kanwar was born in New Delhi in 1964. In 1984, while he was studying history at the University of Delhi, two events occurred that impacted his subsequent philosophical and artistic development. On October 31, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by Sikh bodyguards, resulting in mass retaliatory violence against Sikhs in Delhi. Then, on December 3, a toxic gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant, known as the Bhopal disaster, killed thousands of people and exposed hundreds of thousands more. These pivotal experiences instilled in Kanwar a commitment to social activism. Enrolling in the film school at the Mass Communications Research Center of Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi, he began to work on pushing the poetic limits of documentary filmmaking. He later expanded his practice to multi-channel video installation, adding other audiovisual elements. The work of Amar Kanwar is on presentation at Marian Goodman Gallery in a solo exhibition entitled “Such A Morning”. Originally presented at Documenta 14, the film “Such A Morning”, navigates transitions between juxtaposing states of minds, with each character seeking the truth through phantom visions from within the depths of the darkness. “Such a Morning” is a modern parable about two people’s quiet engagement with truth through phantom visions from within the depths of darkness. Searching for a way to re-comprehend the difficult times we are living in, Kanwar asks “What is it that lies beyond, when all arguments are done with? How to reconfigure and respond again?” In the feature length film, a famous mathematician at the peak of his career unexpectedly withdraws from his life and retreats to the wilderness to live in an abandoned train carriage. Creating a zone of darkness so as to acclimatize himself before total darkness descends, the professor begins to live in a realm bereft of light. Thus starts an epic sensory journey into a new plane of emotional resonance between the self and the surrounding world. A parallel story emerges within the course of the film, providing a compelling, analogous narrative to the protagonists. Over time, the professor records his epiphanies and hallucinations in an almanac of the dark, an examination of 49 types of darkness that emerge as a series of letters. Based originally on Kanwar’s research into the diversity of existing narrative structures in the Indian subcontinent, “Such a Morning” reaches beyond place to expose the complexity of a fractious moment in history in which every truth seems to have an opposite brutal truth. As part of this work, Kanwar conceived a narrative that continues beyond the film, the professor continues to write his letters, towards a research project with diverse artistic, pedagogic, metaphysical and political collaborations. These become the rubric for a continuing project, which are at the core of the series of Letters that accompany the film and are also shown in the Gallery. The seven Letters presented here contain texts, 17 video projections, 45 light projections.

Info: Marian Goodman Gallery, 79 rue du Temple, Paris, Duration: 12/1-7/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.mariangoodman.com