On crime, politics, and ecology
: Artist Amar Kanwar is distinctively diligent, paying
attention to tiny detail as he goes about collecting ‘poetic evidence’
for stitching up his multi-layered tales of crimes against humanity or a
people.
‘The Sovereign Forest’, one of the artist’s
noted installations that earned him kudos at the Doumenta exhibition in
Kassel in Germany, has the artist painstakingly weaving together many
subplots of a wider narrative that brings out the numerous dimensions of
issues pertaining to land grabbing, sovereignty of crops, the resultant
politics of power and violence that sustains it.
The installation is on display in the Kochi Muziris Biennale at Aspinwall House in Fort Kochi.
Amar
Kanwar, who spent his formative years in Kochi as a naval ward, has
displayed 266 varieties of paddy grains that are endemic to Orissa but
on the verge of extinction with the mining mafia having its way, as part
of his installation.
“The loss of rice varieties is
only the subplot of a wider story, which encompasses a whole host of
issues: the sovereignty of crops, the overpowering influence of market
forces on the selection of crops and the usurpation of land,” says Mr.
Kanwar,
If farmland is usurped, the knowledge about
these crops will also be gone, he rues. The installation offers a
scorching political statement empathising with the underdogs
and attempts to reopen discussion on understanding crime, politics,
human rights and ecology.
Central to the installation
is a film ‘The Scene of Crime’, which is projected on the pages of a
case diary kept for reading by visitors. It centres on the killing of a
trade union leader Shankar Guha Niyogi a few years ago. With the
hawk-eye of an investigator, the artist pieces together a library of
evidence — brought about by way of moving and still images, texts,
pamphlets, albums, seeds, events, judicial process, etc. — that is
continuously expanding and complements the forensic understanding of the
crime, of human life and of the nation itself.
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