Vivan Sundaram: prolific & versatile titan of modern art in India

Born in Shimla in 1943 to Kalyan Sundaram, chairman of the Law Commission of India from 1968 to 1971, and Indira Sher-Gil. Vivan Sundaram had creative arts in his genes as he was the nephew of renowned painter Amrita Sher-Gil and grandson of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, a 20th century aristocrat who was also a pioneer of amateur photography and philosopher.

He enrolled at Doon School in Dehradun. He studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at MS University, Baroda (1961-65) and later at Slade School of Art, London (1966-69), where he studied History of Cinema.

In London, the budding artist was trained by British-American painter RB Kitaj for a brief period. He was active in the students’ movement of May 1968. The budding artist then helped set up a commune in the British capital city and was part of it till 1970.

Career highlights
Sundaram devoted the first 20 years of his career solely to painting. In the 1980s, he held three large shows of narrative painting and participated in the seminal group exhibition titled Place for People (1981).

During the early 1990s, he turned attention to the artistic forms of installation, photography and video art. History, memory and archiving are dominant themes in his work.

The installation titled Memorial (1993-2014) referred to the communal violence in Bombay. A monumental site-specific installation at the Victoria Memorial, Calcutta, now referred to as History Project (1998), was accompanied by the documentary titled Structures of Memory. Using photographs taken by his maternal grandfather Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, he created an installation titled The Sher-Gil Archive in 1995. In 1991-92, a set of digital photo-montages titled Re-take of Amrita shed light on the life of renowned painter and his aunt, Amrita Sher-Gil.

He held many exhibitions that featured found objects such as Trash (2008), an installed urbanscape made with garbage, digital photomontages and the videos— Tracking (2004), Brief Ascension of Marian Hussain (2005) and Turning (2008). Discarded and found materials were used to make garments that crossed over into fashion and performance in the 2011 work titled Gagawaka and in Postmortem (2013). In 2012, Black Gold, an installation of potsherds from an excavation site in Pattanam, Kerala, was made into a video forming the basis of the 2016 work titled TerraOptics which comprised digital photographs. In 2015, a collaborative project on the eminent sculptor Ramkinkar Baij, titled 409 Ramkinkars involved theatre practitioners including Anuradha Kapur, developed into a multipart installation and performance. Two years later, a collaboration with cultural theorist Ashish Rajyadhyaksha and sound artist David Chapman resulted in a public art project on the Royal Indian Navy uprising which was joined by Bombay’s working class, titled Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946.

Sundaram is married to art historian and critic Geeta Kapur.

Style, themes, influences
Sundaram’s art works reveal political consciousness, figurative representations, social issues, popular culture , perceptions and highlighted identity as a theme. His latest works often reflect Dadaism, Surrealism, and avant garde art movement Fluxus.

INTERESTING FACTS

• In the year 1999, Vivan Sundaram had created a mammoth installation at the Durbar Hall of the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata. This site specific endeavour by him presented an alternative look at history which is seen through the artifacts of the colonial era and period that came after it. All together woven into a cinematic montage and illumined as fragments of a mis-en-scene.
• Sundaram has stated that chance encounters led to several of his works. Informed art enthusiasts can find a link to these encounters with found objects and past events. Movies such as Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, about the Nazi concentration camps which Sundaram watched in the 1960s, affected his consciousness leading him to create the work titled Penal Settlement 20 years later, after a visit to Auschwitz.
• Over the years, Sundaram has taken to mentoring many young budding artists. He has been involved in many collaborative projects such as an artwork titled 409 Ramkinkars: One and the Many, with students.