Multidisciplinary practitioner organised artist and student group protests during Indira Gandhi's Emergency government of 1975–1977 after being inspired by the 1968 Paris demonstrations.
Pritish Bagdi
Vivan Sundaram, a prominent modern artist from India, passed away at the age of 79, according to his Mumbai gallery. He died early today in a hospital in New Delhi as a result of complications from a brain bleed. His wife, the well-known art historian Geeta Kapur, is the only survivor.
Sundaram was born in 1943 in the then-British India's northern city of Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. He was the son of Amrita Sher-Gil, one of India's most well-known 20th-century artists, and Indira Sher-Gil, an Indian government servant who served as the country's first law secretary after independence. He received his education at the Doon School before going on to study at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSU) in the 1960s under the direction of renowned educator KG Subramanyan. He also attended the Slade School of Art at London University, where one of his professors, RB Kitaj, had an impact on his early works by incorporating kitsch and Pop Art elements.
Over six decades, Sundaram produced a wide-ranging and aesthetically varied body of work that includes painting, sculpture, photography, digital art and room-spanning installations—according to his gallery, Chemould Prescott Road, Sundaram was the first installation artist in India. Should his works be bound by a style or theme, they find in common a deep and sustained concern with activist and social issues within both India and the wider world. Early works of his, such as the painting May 68 (1968), held in the Tate collection, reference the civil unrest that broke out in Paris during the protests of May 1968—an incident that greatly influenced the young Sundaram and provoked him to set up a commune in London where he lived till 1970. On his return to India in 1971, he worked with artists’ and students’ groups to organise events and protests, especially during the years of Indira Gandhi's Emergency.
His later life, largely spent in Delhi and Mumbai, saw him enjoy a successful career embedded in the Indian art community, helping to promote the country's art scene on the global stage and galvanise it around social issues. In 2003, one year after the 2002 Gujarat riots that saw communal violence tear across India, Sundaram took part in a group show at the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust in New Delhi—of which he was a founding trustee. Here he showed two sculptures, Mausoleum (1993) and Gun Carriage (1995), which depicted a Mumbai riot victim.
Both these works were part of his room-sized installation Memorial (1993–2014), created in response to violent conflict between Hindu and Muslim groups in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the early 1990s. Comprised of a number of individually titled smaller parts, the work forms a commemorative tomb for an unknown victim of the civil conflict around the razing of Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu extremists.
One of Sundaram's best-known works is Re-take of ‘Amrita’ (2001-2005), in which photos of his family taken by his grandfather Umrao Singh Sher-Gil between 1904 to 1940s are remixed and collaged through Photoshop, to create tableaux that skew space, time, and, therefore, reality. Prominently featuring his aunt Amrita, the work was described by Sundaram at the time as a “photo-dream-love-play".
Sundaram was one of 30 artists to show a new work at the ongoing 15th edition of the Sharjah Biennial (until 11 June), where his photomontage installation Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022) is on display. "Okwui's [Enwezor's] proposition suggests a narrative that is dynamic yet recursive in an ethically accountable way," Sundaram said of the project. "I present a photography-based project, Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022), a choreography of bodies that have undergone violence, experienced incarceration, and lived through mourning. The sixth ‘station’ signifies a journey premised on the historical and rehearsed with activist resolve."
Sundaram is represented by Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai and Photoink and Vadehra Art Gallery, both in Delhi. Shireen Gandhy, the director of Chemould Prescott Road, tells The Art Newspaper: "To say Vivan took risks is an understatement. Often one considers artists who paved the way as it were, giving courage to others to walk that path. Vivan was that when it comes to installation art—it was a new term, fairly unknown to the contemporary world." "Vivan's Marxist ideology, his sense of justice and his strong politics intersected into his art practice. I will never forget his engine oil drawings from 1991-92, after the Gulf War. It was possibly the first time when he broke out of mediums like charcoal, pastels or oils. These were large works on paper made with engine oil—the bottom of each work with trays of oil that felt like bloodspill (and less like an oil spill). The exhibition held at two public spaces—the Shridharani in Delhi and the Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay (presented by Chemould)—was a revelation to many. My strongest memory was the presence of students during the course of not only the exhibition, but also the installation of the show. I think it was a moment of reckoning both for us as gallerists and for the audience for works to be perceived in this courageous way." Sundaram’s work has been included in many solo and group exhibitions and international biennials, including two retrospectives at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Kiran Nadar Museum in New Delhi. His work has been shown at Tate Modern, The Queens Museum of Art, New York, and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan. The artist published more than 18 books, including Making Strange, Trash, Amrita Sher Gil: An Indian Artist Family of the 20th Century, Re-take of Amrita and Vivan Sundaram is not a Photographer.
Vivan Sundaram- born in Shimla on 28 May 1943, married in 1985 with Geeta Kapur, died in New Delhi on 29 March 2023.