The Scene of Crime

Date: 2010
Medium: Single-channel video installation, color, sound
Duration: 42 min
Credit: Co-commissioned by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna and Public Press, New Delhi; supported by the Centre Pompidou, Paris
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection; This artwork is part of the donation and long-term loan from TBA21 to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Details

Amar Kanwar has been filming the resistance of local communities in the state of Odisha, to the industrial interventions taking place since 1999. In 2010, he returned again to Odisha but this time to film, in particular, the terrain of this devastating conflict. Almost every image in this film lies within specific territories that are proposed industrial sites and are in the process of being acquired by government and corporations in Odisha. In this "war by the state against its own land and people"The Scene of Crime is an experience of the battleground and the personal lives that exist within a natural landscape.

The Scene of Crime offers an experience of landscape just prior to erasure as territories marked for acquisition by industries. “Almost every image in this film lies within specific territories that are proposed industrial sites and are in the process of being acquired by government and corporations in Odisha. Every location, every blade of grass, every water source, every tree that is seen in the film is now meant to not exist anymore. The Scene of Crime is an experience of ‘looking’ at the terrain of this conflict and the personal lives that exist within this natural landscape,” explains Amar Kanwar.

This film has marked the beginning of his project The Sovereign Forest premiered at Documenta 13 and shown at TBA21-Augarten in 2013.