The Sovereign Forest, by Amar Kanwar, in collaboration with Sudhir Pattnaik/Samadrusti and Sherna Dastur, is an ongoing multimedia installation that is a creative response to crime, politics, human rights, and ecological crisis. This piecet is an enquiry into an understanding of crime, politics, human rights and ecology in a constellation of moving and still images, texts, books, pamphlets, objects, and seeds.
The Sovereign Forest renders visible and collects evidence of what has hitherto been hidden and suppressed within the site of this “modern war”. Rather than taking a documentary and evidentiary look at the crime as “it is actually happening,” Kanwar orchestrates actual found and collected images, traces, and records into something that surpasses fact, revealing a richer, more fluid and poetic perspective on reality and on “the meaning of what is happening.” Engaging the viewer in manifold ways of “seeing” and comprehending, The Sovereign Forest thus harnesses a set of propositions that investigates the notion of “poetry as evidence.” Poetry carries the ability to express multiple and contingent relationships between violence, memory, and language or, more specifically, to create different vocabularies to express different memories, different faculties of archiving, of telling a story.
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