Amar Kanwar: The Peacock's Graveyard

Inspired by South Asian folktales, Kanwar's most recent film installation is a poetic, nature-driven consideration of human mortality

On the upper floor of Palazzo Grassi, the Indian multimedia artist Amar Kanwar (born 1964) presents his latest large installation, The Peacock's Graveyard (2023), part of the Pinault Collection's permanent holdings. A seven-channel video feed telling multiple tales at once, it represents a unique experience of intense meditation on impermanence and the cycle of life, inviting visitors to reconsider their vision of uncanonical beliefs and seek new forms of resistance, reconciliation and political action. Like the exhibition, the volume published to accompany it presents other works by Kanwar that offer profound reflections on a moment in history in which every truth seems to have a brutal opposing truth.