Some exhibitions can be taken in at a glance. This is not one of them. Amar Kanwar, born in New Delhi in 1964, makes film installations that ask you to stay, to wander between screens, and to let a story assemble itself in your head rather than on a plot line. At Serpentine North in Kensington Gardens, he presents a trilogy on partition, land and memory that runs from 23 September 2026 to 31 January 2027.
The three works are Such a Morning (2017), The Peacock's Graveyard (2023) and The Charcoal Man (2026), the last receiving its premiere here. Two of them, The Peacock's Graveyard and The Charcoal Man, are seven-screen installations. That format changes how you watch. There is no single front-facing image and no fixed beginning, so each visitor assembles a slightly different film depending on where they stand and when they arrive.
Kanwar's subjects are heavy ones: the fracture of partition, the ownership and loss of land, and how memory carries what official history leaves out. His approach is patient and poetic rather than polemical. Images tend to be exact and still, and meaning builds through accumulation and juxtaposition, not through a voice telling you what to think.
The building suits the work. Serpentine North began life as an early nineteenth century gunpowder store, later extended by Zaha Hadid, and sits beside the Serpentine lake in the park. The walk in, across Kensington Gardens, is a good way to clear your head. The walk out, into the same trees and open lawn, is better still.
Practical advice is simple: allow time. A rushed visit gives you fragments, and the work is made to be walked into. Plan for a full session rather than a quick lunchtime look, and go when you are not distracted by a train to catch. With a run through to late January, you have the luxury of choosing a quiet weekday.
If you have the energy, consider returning once the trilogy has settled with you. With seven screens running at once, no single visit shows everything, and a second pass often reveals the connections that the first one missed.
Best for Pairing with a walk through Kensington Gardens.
