On the 29th of September, G2 had a trip to Amar Kanwar’s exhibition at Gillman Barracks which was really an eye opener to me.
Amar Kanwar’s exhibition was based on the difficulties the people experienced in Odisha, which is located in east India. The residents there had to shift multiple times, because of land developments instructed by companies or the government. As quoted from the exhibition guide, “The Sovereign Forest attest how one is never able to fully comprehend the gravity of a crime; through such an open-ended process, constantly adopting shifting perspectives, one can hope to come closer to a truth.”
Firstly we were greeted with a 40 min long video showing the calm and beautiful landscapes/ close ups of Odisha, with very small and minimal text that describes the story. Followed by the evidence and stories which were in the subsequent rooms beside it.
The artwork that I really liked the most was “Selections from the Evidence Archive” (2012-2015). This artwork consist of 251 digital prints which were either contributed by other people or found by the artist himself.
I really liked how detailed the documents were and how they were neatly arranged at the eye level and in chronological order. The evidence was interactive as the audience was able to touch and flip through everything, which I found interesting. Through the well organised display, it tells the narrative as well as the emotions of the people very clearly.
Through this exhibition, I was amazed by the materials and methods the artist used in contemporary art, as I was usually more exposed to the modern and traditional types of art. The entire setting of the exhibition was really dark and gloomy which sets the seriousness of what the artist wants to convey about the politics in Odisha. His selection of materials matches his theme as well, such as the book about “The Counting Sisters and Other Stories”, where the pages were made with handmade banana fibre paper which gave a very rough and naturalistic texture to the paper.
Amar Kanwar’s exhibition gave me inspiration as to how I can make use of found documents and infuse the sound and video footage together for future assignments. However, I do not think that I will be using those inspirations for assignment 3 as the theme that I wish to experiment on has a huge chunk of mean comments. Hence, I doubt I am able to make use of minimal text from his film. I would most likely apply what I learnt from Kanwar’s exhibition in future projects.
