A New Delhi filmmaker who builds his work into rooms rather than screens, Amar Kanwar transforms Serpentine North into a single installation to 31 January 2027.
Amar Kanwar, a filmmaker whose work has shown at Tate Modern and the Metropolitan Museum, fills Serpentine North Gallery in Kensington Gardens with one site-specific installation. It runs from Wednesday 23 September 2026 to Sunday 31 January 2027.
Kanwar was born in New Delhi in 1964. For three decades he has made films that sit between documentary, travelogue and visual essay, almost none of them for a cinema screen.
He returns often to the aftermath of the 1947 Partition that created India, Pakistan and, later, Bangladesh. He uses lived testimony to examine displacement, power and memory.
He builds his films into rooms, so a viewer moves between screens instead of sitting in front of one. This year the approach also took him to the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
At Serpentine North the rooms hold a trilogy. Such a Morning, a feature-length film from 2017, sits beside The Peacock’s Graveyard, a multi-screen installation from 2023. The third part, The Charcoal Man, is a new seven-screen work making its premiere here.
Together the three run to roughly three hours. Visitors can watch them from start to finish or move between rooms as they choose.