What Happens When an Artist Stops Arguing? | AMAR KANWAR AT SERPENTINE NORTH
Eliza Pritchett reviews Amar Kanwar’s new exhibition at Serpentine North, opened 23 September 2026,
Hans Ulrich Obrist, art director of the Serpentine, opened Amar Kanwar’s exhibition with a simple proposition: “Art unites us.” It is the sort of maxim that can easily collapse into sentimentality. Yet, as Kanwar began to explain how the exhibition came about, the phrase took on a less comfortable meaning. For Kanwar, finding common ground isn’t about reaching mutual understanding. Instead, he confronts the uncomfortable: human fragility, inherited trauma and our endless capacity for arrogance.
What happens when all the arguments are over? What kind of conversation remains possible?
For over three decades, the Indian artist and filmmaker has made work addressing political violence, decolonisation and the horrors of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. But around 2014, Kanwar realised that, after thirty years of political filmmaking, he was exhausted by endless debate. What happens, he asked, when all the arguments are over? What kind of conversation remains possible? That question forms the foundation of his exhibition at Serpentine North. Rather than forcing another argument into the void, Kanwar steps back. He curates a dark, quiet space that forces people to sit down, slow down and simply absorb.
Darkness recurs throughout the exhibition, but Kanwar is careful not to treat it as inherently negative, as art often does. For him, darkness describes unexplored territory.
This proposition is clearest in Such a Morning, an 85-minute film in which a mathematics professor abandons his career and withdraws into darkness. The film gradually unfolds into a series of letters, and crucially, its story does not remain confined to the screen. The professor continues writing, and those letters spill into the gallery, becoming physical extensions of the film and blurring the line between the fictional world and our own reality. The exhibition repeatedly performs this same transformation: image becomes text; film becomes object; narrative refuses to remain where it was placed.
Kanwar invites slowness and darkness, interested in what might become visible once we stop treating them as things to immediately escape. I found that sitting in a dark room made me rely on my other senses and think differently, perhaps unlocking areas of human experience I would otherwise overlook. Arrogance provides another route through the exhibition. Kanwar spoke of a hidden “illness” that he feels we increasingly suffer from: a subtle arrogance that takes over the mind without the person noticing. It is, he suggested, a disease that everyone is catching.
This disturbing idea destabilises the comfortable position of the viewer. We can recognise arrogance in others; tyrants, governments or historical actors conveniently separated from ourselves. But if we are truly arrogant too, we may be precisely the people least capable of recognising it. And if that is true, argument alone cannot cure it. His art forces us to consider that we might be part of the problem. I found Peacock’s Graveyard to symbolise this idea. Seven large screens display shifting images, fragments of history and personal memories simultaneously across the room. Because the screens surround you rather than delivering information sequentially, it is impossible to stand in one perfect spot and see everything at once. This design forces a quiet realisation: you cannot master or comprehend the whole picture. By denying the viewer complete visual control, the installation directly challenges our intellectual arrogance - the belief that seeing something briefly means we fully understand it.
Kanwar’s thoughts become most difficult, and perhaps most compelling, when he turns towards vengeance. His work frequently returns to the 1947 Partition, an event that displaced millions and unleashed widespread violence. Kanwar does not treat 1947 as distant historical material. He examines why cycles of revenge persist generations after the original violence: Why do people carry on hating decades after a war ends? Why do people continue to reenact vengeance for injuries they never personally experienced? Why does revenge possess its own pleasure?
Why does revenge possess its own pleasure?
Kanwar describes human consciousness as a kind of “soup of the mind”, in which history, time, news, parents, private memory and inherited stories all merge until their origins become unstable. History does not sit politely in the past. It infects the present; it contaminates it. This cycle continues into The Charcoal Man, a new seven-screen work premiering at the Serpentine. The installation extends Kanwar’s examination of betrayal, vengeance and the persistence of violence into the present. There is no clean catharsis waiting in the final room. No easy emotional closure. That may be the point.
The exhibition’s resistance to resolution extends beyond the films themselves. A new publication, conceived by Kanwar as a “storybook for adults” and designed by filmmaker and designer Sherna Dastur, translates material from all three moving-image works into print. It also includes an extended conversation between Kanwar and Hans Ulrich Obrist, gathering discussions stretching from 2008 to the present.
In a cultural landscape increasingly speeding up - the instant image, the immediate response, the argument delivered before contemplation has had time to begin - Kanwar proposes something almost stubbornly simple: stop. Listen. Spend some time in the dark.
By confronting our shared vulnerabilities - our grief, our hidden arrogance and our susceptibility to old grudges - Kanwar achieves what the opening speech promised. The exhibition unites us not through shared opinions, but by reminding us of how fragile and flawed we all are.
Amar Kanwar is at Serpentine North until 31 January 2027. Admission is free.
