Amar Kanwar

Palazzo Grassi 
From 29 March 2026 to 10 January 2027 

Curated by Jean-Marie Gallais, curator, Pinault Collection 

Pinault Collection presents an exhibition by Amar Kanwar, featuring two important multimedia installations on the second floor of the Palazzo Grassi. Characterized by his poetic and philosophic approach to personal, social and political situations, the Indian artist creates space at the intersection of art, documentation, and activism. His installations offer a unique form of meditation on human nature.

Amar Kanwar (born in 1964 in New Delhi) has distinguished himself since the 1990s through films and multimedia works that explore the politics of power, violence and resistance. Kanwar’s gaze is that of an observer documenting the contemporary history of South Asia. Allowing parallel narratives to emerge, the filmmaker uses archival documents and testimonies, as well as poetic imagery, to create multi-layered narratives. Going beyond social or political commentary, Kanwar transcends personal and collective narratives.

His installation The Torn First Pages (2004-2008), presented at the Palazzo Grassi, documents the complexity of the struggle for democracy in Myanmar (Burma). It is the result of Kanwar’s characteristic practice of collecting, synthesizing and redeploying archival documents. The title of the installation is in honour of a gesture of protest by the bookseller Ko Than Htay, who tore the first page out of each book he sold – the page that, as mandated by law, contained declarations of the military dictatorship’s political objectives. Kanwar’s installation presents printed material and videos, drawing attention to the Burmese regime’s atrocities, and form an ode to the resilience of political protest in Myanmar and worldwide.

In a central room plunged into darkness, is presented The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023). A contemporary meditation on death, impermanency and the cycle of life, this is the most recent work completed by the artist, and is a part of the Pinault Collection. Seven invisible screens, containing image or text, weave together a floating choreography, evoking the magic of proto-cinema. A powerful and lively raga (classical, melodic Indian music based on improvisation) by pianist Utsav Lal sets a slow pace, developing into a trance. Harnessing the full potential of this multifocal narration, Amar Kanwar does not film figures or use voices, but text which is accompanied by metaphorical and abstract images. In these five short stories written by the artist (for a total experience of 28 minutes), we meet a furious priest, a hangman taught a lesson by a tree, a landlord betraying a promise, a reincarnated president, and two friends saved by their quarrels. Kanwar describes these simple and metaphysical fables as tools to help us adjust our relationship to the world, its violence and its power relations – little stories for grown-ups to take away.

The exhibition, curated by Jean-Marie Gallais, Curator at Pinault Collection, establishes a dialogue between two works created twenty years-apart and invites visitors to immerse themselves in the filmmaker’s arsenal of visual and narrative devices, exploring a poetic and politic meditation on human nature, justice and injustice, and in the artist’s own words, “on the consequences of arrogance of our species”. While The Peacock’s Graveyard takes a timeless, fictional form, it addresses contemporary issues: questions of land and water and rights, of history, memory, karma and morality. The Torn First Pages looks at individual and collective resistances of ordinary people to violence. Formally, the works share similarities, as if the first was a premonition of the second, which “distills” the same idea: the images suddenly become crystal clear, and the stories universal. The exhibition thus offers deep insights into our present time, “a moment of history in which every truth seems to have an opposite brutal truth”, explains Kanwar.