There are artists whose work asks to be admired, and others whose work asks something rather more demanding of us. Amar Kanwar belongs firmly in the latter camp.
This September, the New Delhi-based artist and filmmaker comes to Serpentine North in Kensington Gardens for a major solo exhibition bringing together new and existing work from his extraordinary career, including the world premiere of his seven-screen film installation, The Charcoal Man.
Kanwar is one of India’s most internationally significant artists working in moving image. His work has appeared at Tate Modern, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and major institutions across Europe, India and the Middle East, as well as multiple editions of documenta.
But what makes this particular London exhibition compelling is not simply the stature of the artist. It is what he wants us to confront.
Power. Violence. Justice. Memory. Partition. And the uncomfortable question of how much of the past ever really stays in the past.
Stories that refuse simple answers
For more than two decades, Kanwar has created films and multi-screen installations that move between documentary, visual essay and something altogether more poetic.
The Indian subcontinent is often at the heart of his work. Its histories, upheavals and personal stories become a way of examining much bigger questions around displacement, power, violence, justice and our collective memory.
At Serpentine, visitors will encounter three major works within darkened galleries: The Peacock’s Graveyard, Such a Morning and the newly commissioned The Charcoal Man.
Each approaches those questions differently.
The Peacock’s Graveyard, presented in London for the first time, unfolds across seven screens. Kanwar brings together striking imagery, ancient and contemporary fables, oral histories and his own experiences to consider human existence, our capacity for violence and, importantly, the possibility of reconciliation and transformation.
Then there is Such a Morning, an 85-minute film following a prominent professor and mathematician who suddenly retreats from the world to live in an abandoned train carriage in a forest.
As he surrounds himself with darkness, the film begins to explore truth, ideology, prejudice and perception. It is less a conventional narrative than a modern parable, asking what we might begin to see when the familiar ways we understand the world are stripped away.
The echoes of Partition
Perhaps the work that will resonate particularly strongly with many British South Asian visitors is The Charcoal Man.
Premiering at Serpentine, the seven-screen installation has developed from Kanwar’s continuing engagement with the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent and explores the strange coexistence of fact, fantasy and fiction within the stories we inherit. Through image and text, it moves through betrayal, vengeance, passion, jealousy and rage, and considers how those cycles continue to surface in society today.
More than three quarters of a century later, Partition remains extraordinarily present.
It exists not only in history books and borders, but in family stories, migration, identity and memories handed from one generation to another. For British South Asians in particular, there is something powerful about seeing one of India’s leading contemporary artists examine that history not simply as something that happened, but as something whose consequences continue to reverberate.
Kanwar is not offering us a history lesson or a neat interpretation.
That is precisely the point.
An exhibition that asks for our attention
There is something rather refreshing about art that refuses to be consumed instantly.
We live in a world of scrolling, clips, headlines and immediate opinions. Kanwar works at another pace. His films combine images, stories, music, archives, fiction and memory, inviting the viewer to stay with an idea rather than simply react to it. Serpentine describes his work as poetic, political, ecological and deeply ethical, a practice that deliberately resists the acceleration of the world around us.
Perhaps that is part of what makes this exhibition so timely.
Kanwar’s work does not promise easy answers. Instead, it invites us to slow down, look more closely and consider how history, memory and human behaviour continue to shape the world around us.
For anyone interested in art, South Asian history, identity, politics or simply the questions we are still trying to answer about ourselves, this feels like one of London’s autumn exhibitions worth making time for.
Amar Kanwar
Serpentine North, Kensington Gardens, London
23 September 2026 to 31 January 2027
Free admission
