Amar Kanwar's solo exhibition transforms Serpentine North from 23 September 2026 to 31 January 2027. Admission is free.
Amar Kanwar was born in New Delhi in 1964 and has worked as a filmmaker there ever since, though almost none of his work reaches a cinema. He makes films about land, resistance, violence and ecology in India — the Odisha forests, the mining that displaced the people in them, the courts that heard about it — and then builds them into rooms, so that the viewer walks between screens rather than sitting in front of one. The Sovereign Forest, his long project on Odisha, has toured as an installation that includes seeds, books and evidence alongside the films.
The argument of the practice is that a documentary shown once and forgotten is a poor instrument, and that a form which asks the audience to stay and move is a better one.
He takes Serpentine North from Wednesday 23 September 2026 to Sunday 31 January 2027 with a site-specific installation that brings new and existing films together, turning the building into a single meditative environment of image and sound. Admission is free, which for four months of an artist of this standing is the most straightforwardly good thing about it. It opens a month after the Hockney closes in the same room, and runs through the whole winter. Four months in a free gallery is the most generous thing the Serpentine does.