Acts of Witnessing: Amar Kanwar’s The Torn First Pages

Amar Kanwar’s The Torn First Pages provides interesting parallels to the present moment as Myanmar once again finds itself under military dictatorship. With nineteen projections distributed over three frames, Kanwar’s installation is an experiment with meaning-making through image and time. In the previous post, we discussed “Part One” of The Torn First Pages in which Kanwar addressed accelerated time, stretched out time, documentary time, archival time, etc. “Part Two” explores the idea of exilic time as simultaneous time through different spaces. “Part Three” moves towards looking at the experience of time through archives as evidence. While these would be broad ways of categorising the works, they feed into each other, creating a cohesive language.

"Part Two" of the installation consists of seven screens all playing in a synchronised manner. It revolves around the lives of Burmese refugees in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The screens are configured in such a way that at times they move in tandem, while at other times the filmmaker directs our attention to specific screens by making the rest blank. Kanwar’s poetic assemblage can seem obtuse, pushing the viewer to seek out a larger narrative from the fragments. The viewers are expected to draw lines and connections between the images. However, the movement and dynamism in this multichannel narrative represents the intertwining of form and content—representing lives in exile as fragmented, nostalgic, traumatic and yet, hopeful. We watch as the community perseveres and finds new meaning. There are particularly poignant moments that stand out—such as shots of a jet plane, that look like a shooting star, making us think of the wish of these refugees to return home. Or of their houses—like picture perfect postcards—that conceal within them narratives of loss, grief and also of hope. The past, present and future are woven together as we see adults study English, while in a different sequence young children learn Burmese. The rhythm of the installation is strangely hypnotic, with memories of trauma existing not only in the telling of testimony, but in the interstices of everyday life in exile.

"Part Three” of Kanwar’s The Torn First Pages concentrates on the archival. Here, the frame places the six sheets of paper in a straight line, making one think about how the linearity of time is complicated in the telling of trauma. The three sheets on the left play out a sequence which features found footage of generals from the military junta smiling at some joke. The three sheets on the right feature footage taken by unidentified camerapersons across Myanmar who have shot and circulated these videos as forms of resistance and remembering.

What emerges is an archive of different kinds of experiences—from the 8-8-88 protests to the 2007 Saffron Revolution to lives of people in exile—mediated through the artist. Kanwar intervenes by editing the archival images such that the images on the left change magnification through the cycle of the installation. They zoom in further and further till the faces of the generals become completely distorted before eventually fading to black completely. On the other side of the frame, the images of remembrance made by resistance fighters continue to play—enduring beyond the time of the generals—an optimism for freedom and a future.

The Torn First Pages is imbued with this sense of optimism as it chronicles everyday acts of resistance. In a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Julia Peyton-Jones and Gunnar Kvaran as part of Indian Highway in 2008, Kanwar said:

“If you look at the images they (Burmese) have taken over the last fifteen years, this growing body of evidence, you begin to see a pattern in the way in which images are collected, saved and documented. It is almost as if it is for a future tribunal. You collect evidence only if you have hope. There is no point otherwise.”

Kanwar’s installation, thus, transforms the viewer into a witness at such a future tribunal. E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang in their introduction to Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations write, “(The) position of ‘witness’ may open up a space for the transformation of the viewer through empathetic identification without vicarious traumatisation—an identification that allows the spectator to enter into the victim’s experience through a work’s narration. It is the unusual anti-narrative process of the narration that is itself transformative...” By pushing us to empathise through our efforts in understanding the meaning and intent behind the installation, the work itself acts a site of resistance. It moves beyond recording the excesses of the authoritarian regime and remembering them for a day of future reckoning; by transforming us, as spectators, into witnesses—an act of witnessing that we can continue to perform as Myanmar once again finds itself under military rule.

To read more about Myanmar, please click here, here and here.

All works by and courtesy of Amar Kanwar.