The Sovereign Forest: The Counting Sisters and Other Stories

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 Counting Sisters and Other Stories is part of The Sovereign Forest.

The Counting Sisters and Other Stories (2011) is the first hand-sewn book made from banana fiber paper with screen-printed text, presenting the insights of the timeless local fable. A fascinating collection of stories written by Kanwar, the book is about the six Counting Sisters — who are mourners and count the dead, the disappeared, and many more things — and The One Alone, who counts the living. The book also presents traces of evidence embedded in the paper, such as a fishing net, a cloth garment, rice seeds, a betel leaf, and a newspaper. Adjacent to the screen-printed text is a projection of a second version of the film The Scene of Crime. Version 2 subverts the original film even as it comprises exactly the same images and the same image duration.

The sacrosanct hierarchy of the edited original film is mathematically reconfigured, and a new order of images is constructed. Silent and without any text, this re-created new film is released from the fixed narrative of the original film and projected alongside the printed stories of The Counting Sisters. The appearance of the high-definition image is transformed by the texture of the banana-fiber paper. A new relationship between text and image emerges as the varying speed of reading and page turning creates multiple random juxtapositions.