The Sovereign Forest: The Constitution

Amar Kanwar’s works of the past two decades has presented a profound interrogation of the politics of power, violence, and justice. His multilayered art installation The Sovereign Forest (2011–) emerges from the conflict in Odisha, India, between local communities, the government, and corporations. For more than a decade Kanwar has been filming the industrial interventions that have reshaped and permanently destroyed parts of the state’s landscape. Since the 1990s Odisha has been a battleground on issues of development and displacement, as national and international corporations have established large-scale mining and industrial sites in various parts of the traditionally agrarian state. The resulting conflicts between local communities, the government, and corporations over the control of agricultural lands, forests, rivers, and minerals have led to the forcible displacement of indigenous communities, farmers, and fisherfolk while engendering an ongoing regimen of violence that is often unpredictable and invisible. The Sovereign Forest renders visible what has hitherto been hidden and suppressed within the site of this “modern war.” Engaging the viewer in manifold ways of seeing and comprehending, the work harnesses a set of propositions that investigate the notion of “poetry as evidence.” Kanwar’s films and the constellation of objects that accompany them orchestrate actual found and collected images, traces, records, fables, and personal stories in multiple vocabularies to surpass fact and reveal a richer, more fluid, and poetic perspective on reality and on the meaning of what is happening. The act of “seeing” in this case leads us to a deeper and more multidimensional comprehension of the relationship between life and politics, between the personal and the ungraspable implications of violence. The Constitution is part of The Sovereign Forest.

The book titled The Constitution (2012) is handmade from ramie and cotton fiber paper. As described by Kanwar, it is a book about knowledge that is not scripted, with almost no words except for the printed titles of chapters, each title locates trajectories of wisdom that are missing in formal national constitutions. The handcrafted pages have thread exquisitely embedded and woven into them, forming a series of unique scripts. Each page corresponds to, responds to, and takes further the meaning of the titles. The book can be read through its materiality, the touch of the paper, the textures visible in the orchestration of transparency and light, and the fleeting film projected on the pages.