Last updated on September 9th, 2024 at 05:37 pm
Vivan Sundaram has purposefully made it difficult to categorise his life and work. Moving from colonial histories to those of modern radical action, from post-independence Social-Nationalism to hallucinatory pictures of dystopian globalisation, his life and work are inevitably profoundly entwined with all of 20th-century India.
Sundaram was the grandson of photographer Umrao Singh Sher-Gil and the nephew of Amrita Sher-Gil. He was born on May 28, 1943, and died on March 29, 2023. From 1961 to 1965, he attended the Faculty of Fine Arts at MS University of Baroda, and from 1966 to 1968, he studied painting at London’s prestigious Slade School of Art. While living in a London commune during the student uprisings of May 1968, his work took a decisive turn; he became equally interested in pop art and radical organising. He remained there until 1970.
Sundaram was the first installation artist in India, according to his gallery Chemould Prescott Road, and he created a body of work that spans several mediums and aesthetic traditions for six decades. If his writings have a unifying style or theme, it is a longstanding and passionate interest in activist and social issues in India and beyond. The civic turmoil that erupted in Paris during the uprisings of May 1968 strongly influenced the young Sundaram and prompted him to set up a commune in London, where he stayed until 1970. This is reflected in works such as May 68 (1968), preserved in the Tate collection. After moving back to India in 1971, he coordinated protests and events with student and artist groups, particularly during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule.
He spent the latter part of his life in Delhi and Mumbai, where he had a fruitful career as an integral part of the Indian art world, promoting Indian artists internationally and rallying them behind social causes. Sundaram, a founding trustee of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust in New Delhi, participated in a group exhibition in 2003, a year after sectarian violence ripped across India in the wake of the 2002 Gujarat riots. Here, he displayed two sculptures that each commemorated a victim of the 1993 and 1995 riots in Mumbai: Mausoleum and Gun Carriage.
Re-take of ‘Amrita’ (2001-2005) is one of Sundaram’s most well-known works. It consists of Photoshopped collages and remixes of family photographs taken by Sundaram’s grandfather Umrao Singh Sher-Gil between 1904 and the 1940s. As Sundaram put it, the piece was a “photo-dream-love-play” that prominently included his aunt, Amrita.
Photography has been increasingly important to Sundaram as he has recently returned to his remarkable family history, both in the form of the installation of The Sher-Gil Archive (1995) and digital photomontages. Shot using stills from the original 2001–2006 ‘Amrita’ by Umrao Singh Sher-Gil. Amrita’s own complicated life, along with that of her father, is re-inscribed in a new form of national subjectivity, into which a handful of characters, such as Sundaram’s mother, Indira, sister Navina, and Sundaram himself, float intermittently.
Sundaram had been ill for some time, suffering from neurological conditions that necessitated multiple surgeries. The Sharjah Biennale now features Sundaram’s photographic series, Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022), until June 11.
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