The first part of Amar Kanwar’s new three-part installation The Torn First Pages (2008) will be screened in Docking Station, the project space for young international artists in Stedelijk Museum CS. SM’s in ‘s-Hertogenbosch is presenting the installation The Lightning Testimonies (2007).
The Torn First Pages is a three-part installation on the political and humanitarian situation in Burma (Myanmar). For this piece, Kanwar drew inspiration from the story of a book-dealer in Mandalay who was imprisoned for tearing out the first page of every book. These pages bore odes to the military regime and taunts addressed to the democratic movement in Myanmar.
Docking Station is screening part one of The Torn First Pages, which consists of six videos in colour and black and white projected onto fragile sheets of paper. Kanwar: ‘Imagine twenty sheets of paper floating in the wind, each with translucent moving images from within Burma and across the globe.’
The videos from part one of The Torn First Pages are: The Face, Thet Win Aung (a&b), Ma Win Maw Oo, The Bodhi Tree and Somewhere in May. The various parts are based to some extent on film and video material shot clandestinely in Burma. Kanwar is in contact with the Burmese resistance movement and trains ‘amateurs’ to shoot footage surreptitiously for inclusion in his work. Some of the material, however, was shot outside Burma in India, Europe, the US and Thailand. In The Face we see footage of general Than Swe, head of the Burmese junta who, in 2004, visited Rajghat, the site of Gandhi’s cremation. Swe’s visit was extremely controversial. The general is renowned for refusing to be photographed or filmed but Kanwar managed to video Swe as he scattered rose petals at the hallowed place.
Docking Station is screening part one of The Torn First Pages to coincide with the violent suppression, exactly one year ago, of the monks’ protests in Burma. This year, in early May, the situation in that country deteriorated even further in the wake of the Nargis cyclone.
From 5 September – 16 November 2008, SM’s in ’s-Hertogenbosch will be screening Amar Kanwar’s installation The Lightning Testimonies, which premiered last year at Documenta 12. In the film, Kanwar reflects on the history of conflict in the Indian sub-continent by tracing experiences of sexual violence. With eight synchronised projections, the video installation is a moving, immersive experience.
The individual projections tell the stories of women from different times and regions. Each narrative centres on the body both as a site for hate and humiliation, and as a basis for dignity, honour and protest. Drawing on different visual vocabularies, in The Lightning Testimonies Kanwar transports the viewer from a realm of pain and terror into a space of quiet contemplation.