This autumn, Serpentine North will become something close to a darkened cinema, though Amar Kanwar’s work has never sat comfortably within the boundaries of film. The New Delhi-based artist has spent more than three decades using moving image, sound, text and archival material to examine violence, power, memory and justice, often through histories rooted in the Indian subcontinent. His films are political, although they avoid didacticism; silence, landscape, testimony and allegory are given as much weight as hard evidence.
The exhibition brings together three substantial works. The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023), a seven-screen installation first commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 15, draws on fables, oral histories and Kanwar’s own experience to consider mortality and violence. Such a Morning (2017), an 85-minute film first shown at documenta 14, follows a celebrated mathematician who abandons his career for an isolated train carriage, where darkness becomes both physical condition and intellectual territory. The accompanying Letters, projected onto handmade ramie and cotton papers, extend the fictional professor’s attempt to catalogue 49 different kinds of darkness.
Amar Kanwar, Such a Morning, 2017 (Film still). Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
At its centre is a world premiere. The Charcoal Man (2026), a new seven-screen installation developed over three years, returns to a subject that has haunted much of Kanwar’s practice: the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan and the way its legacies continue to surface through betrayal, vengeance, fear and rage.
Kanwar has long been able to address brutality without making brutality itself the spectacle. The Lightning Testimonies (2007), for example, brought together accounts of sexual violence across different periods and regions of South Asia, using archival footage, landscape and everyday objects as witnesses. It has been shown at Tate Modern and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which acquired the work in 2022.
The show allows visitors to immerse themselves in Kanwar’s method: stories layered over stories, fact slipping into fiction, darkness used as a place from which to see more clearly. The contrast with the way violence is consumed now, in clips and alerts, is hard to miss. Kanwar asks for time and concentration. The reward is work that stays unsettled long after the screens go dark.
Amar Kanwar
Serpentine North
23 September 2026 – 31 January 2027
Admission free. More information, HERE.
Author: Lina Ress
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