“Focused on the exhaustive struggles over the resource-rich land of Odisha, in east India, and the issues concerning its ownership, The Sovereign Forest, is a long-term commitment of Kanwar, in collaboration with independent media activist Sudhir Pattnaik, the Samadrusti media activist group, and designer and filmmaker Sherna Dastur. For over a decade, Kanwar has been filming the industrial interventions that have reshaped and permanently destroyed parts of Odisha’s landscape – a battleground on issues of development and displacement sincethe 1990s. The resulting conflicts between local communities, the government, and corporations over the use of agricultural lands, forests, rivers and minerals, have led to an ongoing regime of violence that is unpredictable and often invisible. The Sovereign Forest initiates a creative response to the understanding of crime, politics, human rights and ecology, under conditions of ongoing and perpetual violence. The validity of poetry as evidence in a trial, the discourse on seeing, on compassion, justice and the determination of the self, all come together as constellation of films, texts, books, photographs, objects, seeds and processes.

The Sovereign Forest is produced with the support of Samadrusti, Odisha, India; Thyssen- Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom; Public Press, New Delhi, India; and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany”  [1].

Seed Room, 2012

The Seed Room archives over 272 individual species of rice, with each type of seed displayed in a handmade container, labelled and archived with great care.

Natabar Sarangi, a former schoolteacher turned rice farmer and seed activist, began cultivating rice a decade ago, unlike the various species of rice from his childhood, he found only a handful of different seeds still in use in Odisha. In an attempt to preserve this rich and diverse rice heritage, Sarangi collected hundreds of species of rice and archived them. For Kanwar, these seeds are the vocabulary of an extensive knowledge system that has been shared, experimented with, and developed over decades.

“Accompanying the seeds are six small books that compile texts and photographic evidence. They recount the manifold levels of resistance, not only against political and corporate violations but also against the loss of memory of the dead and disappeared and of the passage of time in the struggle to preserve, resist and survive. The Seed Book (2012) presents a selection of images that show Natabar Sarangi in his rice fields growing and experimenting with seed varieties and an indexed archive listing each seed and its specific properties and uses. The second small book, In Memory of (2012), seeks to preserve the memory of farmers who have committed suicide in recent years in Odisha due to debt and bondage. The book is an unfinished memorial to the farmers who took their own lives as they were unable to resist the strategic violence of multinational agricultural corporations, the trap of high-yielding and high-investment agriculture, market fluctuations, real estate mafias, and moneylenders.

Included in this exhibition are three large handmade books, each with a film projected on its pages. The third book (image below), titled The Constitution (2012), is also handmade but from ramie and cotton fibre paper. It is a book about knowledge that is not scripted, with almost no words except for the printed titles of chapters, suggesting necessary trajectories of wisdom that are missing from all national constitutions. Each page corresponds to, responds to, and takes further the meaning of the titles [2]."