His work challenges the limits of the medium in order to create complex narratives traversing several terrains such as labour and indigenous rights, gender, religious fundamentalism and ecology.

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.

[4] Kanwar addresses the overtaking and destruction of indigenous land in his most extensive mixed media installation "The Sovereign Forest," including films, projections on handmade books, seeds, and photographs.

He tells the story from the perspective of farmers, fishermen, citizens, and victims of violence: what did they lose with the land during the industrial and governmental overtaking of Odisha, India?

In one section of his installation, he arranges 272 varieties of indigenous rice seeds, collected and preserved by a local farmer of Odisha.

Kanwar acknowledges that the agriculture on the land was not used just for survival, but that the seeds had different personalities, flavors, meanings to the farmers and people who lived there.