Such a Morning
Amar Kanwar
Jan 20- May 20, 2020
‘Nothing can be measured anymore
Every light is a spectrum
Every sliver is an open door’
Few words from Amar Kanwar’s ongoing film installation at Ishara Art Foundation with Alserkal Avenue which premiered at Documenta14 back in 2017. This feature-length film is a modern tale of two people’s quiet engagement with truth. It follows a mathematics professor who withdrew to the wilderness to live in an abandoned train carriage. As each character seeks the truth through epiphanies and hallucination within their own depths of darkness, the professor records this in an almanac of the dark, an examination of 49 types of darkness that emerges as a series of letters which is displayed alongside the film.
This multimedia installation is a layered allegory in response to violence and perhaps it is the film maker’s comprehension of one’s own response to the events around him that did not make sense to him. It is within such confrontation with doubt that he withdrew, just as the professor did to the solitude of his carriage. The need to step back and rethink, as referred by the professor that he cannot teach unless everyone reconfigures, when one can identify the 49 types of darkness, it is only then that we can conceive anew, to speak and teach with clarity.
Amar Kanwar is a distinguished filmmaker and works with different facets of multimedia to best articulate his response to the politics of power, violence and justice. His exhibitions are the poetic culmination of Visual Installations that use backlight projections and handmade papers as for instance the Letter series. Apart from this ongoing solo exhibition, he has also exhibited at Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain (2019). The above installation was also exhibited at marian goodman gallery, New York (2018). He attained Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, Maine College of Art 2006 and is also the recipient of the Prince Claus Award in 2017.
