AMAR KANWAR

Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to continue our artist-centric newsletter IN FOCUS, where we take the time to delve deeply into one artist on the MGG roster at a time. Aiming to show a fuller picture of the breadth of our artists' careers, we will feature our favorite stories, podcasts, interviews, artists’ writings and videos from the archive, as well as new and upcoming projects.

Amar Kanwar (b. 1964) lives and works in New Delhi, India. Kanwar has distinguished himself through films and multi‐media works which explore the politics of power, violence, and justice. His multi‐layered installations originate in narratives often drawn from zones of conflict and are characterized by a unique poetic approach to the personal, social, and political.

Today, we explore the depths of Kanwar's most recent film Such A Morning (2017), and the installations and conversations which have surrounded the work as it's been presented internationally. In Such A Morning, Amar Kanwar unlocks a metaphysical response to our contemporary reality as it navigates multiple hallucinations between speech and silence, fear and freedom, democracy and fascism. In the 85-minute 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. 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. Kanwar includes physical representations of the letters alongside the film, of which there are seven.

Follow along as we get to know the many aspects of Kanwar's practice through the lens of his film Such A Morning. ↓