This is a transcendent show full of revelations, the kind of show that could change your life – if you let it. Amar Kanwar is a New Delhi-based artist working predominantly in the moving image and for his first London show in 8 years, he’s presenting three films, one feature length alongside two multi-screen film installations. Now these movies aren’t exactly Avengers: Doomsday – we’re talking slow, contemplative parables about the Indian subcontinent. It requires caffeinated Londoners to let go of the hyped-up, logged-on, rat-bot race and adjust to a more meditative pace: a big ask. And also, the entire point.
Kanwar wants people to escaped what he calls the “illness” of contemporary life, when “somebody gets too full of themselves that arrogance takes over the mind”, and his brilliance is in connecting this to stories of the partition of India in 1947, which still reverberates through the generations and that illustrates in the starkest, most violent terms, what happens when people close their ears and start pointing fingers.
