Single-channel video installation color, sound
42 min
Co-commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna and Public Press, New Delhi; supported by the Centre Pompidou, Paris
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

Amar Kanwar has been filming the resistance of local communities in the state of Odisha, to the industrial interventions taking place since 1999. In 2010, he returned again to Odisha but this time to film, in particular, the terrain of this devastating conflict. Almost every image in this film lies within specific territories that are proposed industrial sites and are in the process of being acquired by government and corporations in Odisha. In this "war by the state against its own land and peopleThe Scene of Crime is an experience of the battleground and the personal lives that exist within a natural landscape.

The Scene of Crime offers an experience of landscape just prior to erasure as territories marked for acquisition by industries. "Almost every image in this film lies within specific territories that are proposed industrial sites and are in the process of being acquired by government and corporations in Odisha. Every location, every blade of grass, every water source, every tree that is seen in the film is now meant to not exist anymore. The Scene of Crime is an experience of looking at the terrain of this conflict and the personal lives that exist within this natural landscape", explains Amar Kanwar. This film has marked the beginning of his project The Sovereign Forest premiered at Documenta 13 and shown at TBA21-Augarten in 2013.
 

Amar Kanwar was born in New Delhi in 1964 where he continues to live and work as a filmmaker. Kanwar studied at the Department of History, Ramjas College, Delhi University, and at the Mass Communication Research Center, Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi. After making a few films, Kanwar joined the People's Science Institute in 1988 as a researcher on occupational health and safety in the coal-mining belt of Madhya Pradesh in central India. He returned to filmmaking in 1990, and his films were then shown primarily in public campaigns, community spaces and film festivals in India and across the world. Kanwar's filmmaking practice challenges the limits of the medium in order to create complex narratives traversing several terrains such as labour and indigenous rights, gener, religious fundamentalis, and ecology. In 2002, Kanwar was invited to exhibit at Documenta 11 in Kassel whereupon his work has also been presented in several art exhibitions and museums. Connecting with diverse audiences, in multiple public spaces, Kanwar also participated in the next editions of the Documenta exhibition in 2007, 2012. and 2017. He has been an eminent voice in film and art for the past two decades

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