Amar Kanwar and the Ethics of Memory

Loved speaking with Amar Kanwar about Co-travellers, his exhibition at Palazzo Grassi — one of the most intellectually and emotionally restrained exhibitions I encountered in Venice.

What struck me most was the quiet strength of the work. In an art world often driven by spectacle, speed and visual overload, Kanwar creates the opposite: spaces of stillness, slowness and moral attention. That restraint feels especially striking considering Delhi, the dense and intense city from which the artist comes.

For decades, Kanwar’s practice has moved between poetry and political testimony, engaging with some of the most fragile and contested histories across South Asia: the aftermath of Partition, military dictatorship in Myanmar, ecological destruction, state violence, land conflict and the vulnerability of democratic structures.

Yet his work never functions as straightforward documentary. Instead, Kanwar deliberately destabilizes certainty. Film, sound, archives, text and installation become layered forms of witnessing rather than fixed narratives. Viewers are not guided toward simple conclusions, but asked to remain inside ambiguity, memory and unresolved ethical tension.

What makes Co-travellers particularly compelling is the way it treats history not as something finished, but as something continuously carried — through bodies, landscapes, testimony and silence. The exhibition repeatedly returns to themes of displacement, fragility and coexistence, while resisting the simplifications through which political violence is often consumed visually.

The architecture of Palazzo Grassi itself reinforces this atmosphere. Rather than overwhelming the space, Kanwar allows emptiness, pacing and silence to become structural parts of the exhibition. Time slows down. Looking becomes more attentive.

What stayed with me afterwards was the sense that Kanwar’s work refuses to separate aesthetics from ethics. Beauty is present throughout the exhibition, but it is never detached from responsibility, memory or political reality.

Very much looking forward now to seeing his upcoming presentation at the Serpentine.