Amar Kanwar’s project “The Sovereign Forest” (2011– ) is a portmanteau, created in collaboration with Sudhir Pattnaik and Sherna Dastur, incorporating documentary that explores major themes of resistance toward global capital and political corruption, as well as systematic destruction of the environment and community. The project’s most recent presentation at Singapore’s NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) comes in the form of a densely-packed exhibition, which demands time and attention to unpick it within the context of Singapore, having already been shown and reviewed in Europe and India. To facilitate the projection of two large videos, The Scene of Crime (2011) and A Love Story (2010), which are the major features of this multipart project, the gallery space has been dimmed. This atmosphere also encourages a tactile encounter with the handmade paper used in Kanwar’s three books arranged around an inner room in the middle of the gallery. Each book relates a part of “The Sovereign Forest” story through the text on its pages, with images projected onto them literally, as well as in the way that the pulp of the pages are embedded with threads and seeds. However, the concrete presence of the three books, laid out like rare reference manuscripts with other archive materials in the main space, reminds us that the unwinding of personal narratives is the key to understanding the exhibition—especially its inquiry into the erasure of the life of India’s Odisha region.

The book The Counting Sisters and Other Stories (2011) presents a folk tale of a small act of resistance by a group of women who carry out a ritual of remembrance while, around them, state and local politicians and corporations collude to rewrite the legal documents that define the ownership and status of their village. Projected onto the pages are film images of landscape, plants and village life—the same scenes that the sisters in the story try to save. The viewer temporarily erases the images just by the act of turning the page of the book. Here the organic facticity of Kanwar’s book made from banana-leaf pulp brings home the visceral reality of the sisters’ stories of murdered and disappeared villagers. The piece reminds us that there is a role for the artist in representing such personal archives and strategies of opposition. More than being a series of vignettes or a collection of reportage, “The Sovereign Forest” appears in Singapore as a type of portable museum, an archaeology of the recent past with some similarities to the memory palaces of Ilya Kabakov, or Gerhard Richter’s “Atlas” (1962–2013). The constellation of tragic view points that “The Sovereign Forest” presents, as well as the artist’s investment in them, is at times overpowering yet is to be expected from a project of such urgency.