“I have a compass which keeps spinning me into zones of conflict,” declares New Delhi documentarian Amar Kanwar in his masterly video essay A Season Outside (1998), and in a country like India he never has far to travel. V.S. Naipaul once called the partitioning of the subcontinent into Pakistan and India “as great a holocaust as that caused by Nazi Germany,” and tremors of ultranationalism, ethnic cleansing, and religious hysteria still radiate from that geopolitical fault line. The pacifist teachings of Mohandas Gandhi may have freed colonial India from Great Britain, but now India finds itself in a nuclear arms race with its neighbor to the northwest. The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago is exhibiting three of Kanwar’s videos, and they show an artist whose imagistic vocabulary–in video, voice-over, and verse–articulates the tensions of the Indian subcontinent. Most galleries present video art in the familiar monitor-on-a-pedestal format, but the society has wisely divided its space into a miniplex, with each video running on a loop in its own darkened theater with seating.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Renaissance Society commissioned Kanwar’s eight-minute To Remember, a silent impressionistic piece in which tourists jostle each other in the house where Gandhi was assassinated. Shot by Kanwar himself, it’s the weakest entry, as if the personal voice so forcefully visualized in A Season Outside has been lost in the chatter of other travelers. Much better is A Night of Prophecy (2002, 78 minutes), which was coproduced by the Renaissance Society and gives voice to a wide assortment of regional poets, singers, and musicians. These folk artists offer hymns to martyrs in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Nagaland, and Kashmir, and their commentary ranges from the material (land, grain) to the political (human rights, contested homelands). Minimal titles identify the performers, their locations, and their works, and Simeon captures such telling details as gravestones listing people slain in past conflicts and armored personnel carriers rumbling past.
