From the bright light of an Indian summer in Hyde Park, there’s a dark place where you can take shade from the sun’s glare. Serpentine North is plunged into blackness, and visitors are warned it will take a few moments for the eyes to adjust. Blackness: it’s not just one thing, but a whole catalogue of blackness of varying levels and tones. It is key to the new exhibition by internationally renowned New Delhi artist and filmmaker, Amar Kanwar, who last presented at the Serpentine’s Indian Highway exhibition 18 years ago in 2008.
the charcoal man (2026) marks the 80th anniversary of the 1947 Partition of India, riven with ‘betrayal, vengeance and illusion’. An extension of the peacock’s graveyard (2023) and presented here in London for the first time, this digital installation weaves together memories, image, text and archive material, stories, ancient wisdom, fables and parables. Seven invisible screens in the blackness present a striking form of visual verse, some magical, drawn from family stories, oral history, archive footage and historical documents.
such a morning (2017 – 2019) is a feature-length film that follows a renowned professor of mathematics who, after retirement, seeks refuge in an abandoned train carriage in the forest. He gradually blacks out the carriage windows one by one and evolves a new heightened way of seeing. These are expressed throughout the extended gallery where 49 types of darkness have been identified, and extracts of the professor’s letters can be found on the handmade banana, ramie and cotton fibre papers that represent the carriage windows.
The result of a decade of endeavour for the artist, “tired of arguing” or pretending he “knows the answers” such a morning, a contemporary parable about truth is profoundly beautiful: a place of pause, rest and darkness, a meditative space of politics but also poetry, philosophy, prayer and peace. While the violence of India’s partition in 1947 catalyses all the work, and this response of resistance and reconciliation, it’s not necessary to know this history to be affected by the universal themes transmitted.
An antidote to the brashness and material concerns of the modern world, the nature outside in Hyde Park extends here into this contemplative space where it’s replicated through sound, image and text. Beautifully conceived and curated, a striking level of craft, discipline and beauty touches all the exhibits. While compact, it requires time to absorb, read and feel the work and its themes. It demands the viewer slow down and think about the transience of beauty and life, war and peace; despair and hope, darkness and light, as in both the visual (or absence of) and the truth.
Madness and hubris are evident on every continent, and Kanwar’s art cannot fail to touch with its lyricism and parallels in contemporary global politics. He asks how long we can stare into darkness before we start to see the light.
Runs until 31 January 2027
