The life and career of Vivan Sundaram – who died in Delhi a day ago – is especially hard to pin down, and that is how he wanted it. Both his life and work, inevitably, are deeply intertwined with all of 20th century India as he moved from colonial histories to those of contemporary radical activism, from Nehruvian nationalism to hallucinating images of dystopian globalisation.
Sundaram (May 28, 1943-March 29, 2023) was born in Simla, grandson of the photographer Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, the nephew of Amrita Sher-Gil. He studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda (1961-65) and at the Slade School of Art, London (1966-68). It was there, in the middle of the student protests of May 1968, that his work took a definitive turn, interested as much in pop art as in radical organisation, as he lived in a commune in London till 1970.
Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur in London, 1969. Photo: Gulammohammed Sheikh.
Perhaps it was The Heights of Macchu Picchu, a series of works on ink and paper he made in 1972 ― currently on display at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale ― that was the coming of age; perhaps it was The Indian Emergency, made in 1977, with the grotesquerie of politicians and military generals, which truly brought out the face of what passed for democracy ― that was truly when Sundaram hit his stride. Perhaps it was the ‘Six Who Declined to Show in the Triennale’ in 1978 that established that whatever move he would make, it would never be alone, that established him as an organiser as much as an artist.
In 1981, Sundaram participated in the seminal group exhibition Place for People. Centred around the great Baroda masters Bhupen Khakhar and Gulammohammed Sheikh, but also Sudhir Patwardhan, Nalini Malani, Jogen Choudhury and Sundaram himself, this was a stand of painters, working with oil on canvas, who transformed its essentially modernist internationalism with what they called ‘particular people in particular situations’, bringing to the fore the idea of narrative painting alongside local histories. It was significant because soon enough, indeed just a couple of years after Place for People, Sundaram would increasingly turn his back on oil painting to work with diverse materials. In 1984, Signs of Fire, made in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, included sand, pebbles and found objects inside painted boxes.
It was the mammoth Memorial (1993, 2014), an elaborate work made in response to communal violence in Bombay, that would be the true turning point towards his next step. A man killed on the streets of Bombay in the gruesome violence of the 1993 riots is sought to be given his due – given his basic rights, to die with dignity, even recognised in a fabricated gun carriage, that the man is owed something, if not by the state then by an artist stepping in to do something that the nation seems incapable of doing. The man is relentlessly buried, again and again, until finally a white dove emerges with, hopefully, some respite for the man.
In recent years, Sundaram’s interest in photography has coincided with his return to his own astonishing family history ― the installation The Sher-Gil Archive (1995), and digital photomontages Re-take of ‘Amrita’ (2001–06), based on photographs taken by Umrao Singh Sher-Gil. Amrita’s own complex life, together with that of her father, is reinscribed in a new kind of national subjectivity, into which moves in and out a small set of characters, including his mother Indira, his sister Navina and occasionally Sundaram himself.
Vivan Sundaram in 1995. Photo: Ram Rehman
Alongside these were exhibitions that did the polar opposite. Trash (2008), an installed urbanscape of garbage, digital photomontages and three videos ―Tracking (2003–04), The Brief Ascent of Marian Hussain (2005) and Turning (2008) ― sees garbage and found materials. These materials would soon turn into fashion garments in GAGAWAKA: Making Strange (2011) and Postmortem (2013). In 2012, Black Gold, an installation of potsherds from the excavation of Pattanam/Muziris in Kerala, was made into a three-channel video.
And all of this does not include the organisation: the Kasauli Art Centre which organised artists’ workshops and seminars at the Centre from 1976 to 1991, the Journal of Arts & Ideas that he helped found, the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) of which he was a trustee, the two-volume Amrita Sher-Gil: a Self-Portrait in Letters & Writings, published in 2010 and edited by him; and the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF), set up in 2016 by him and his sister, Navina.
Sundaram had been unwell for some years now, with neural disorders that required several operations. His final work, currently on display at the Sharjah Biennale, includes Sundaram’s photography-based project, Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022), signifying a journey with periodic halts that release pain, regain trust, behold beauty and recall horror.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian, cultural theorist and occasional art curator.
This article first appeared on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
This article, first teased at 7.56 pm on March 29, 2023, was republished on March 30, 2023, in full.
