Vivan Sundaram

You were one of the first artists from your contemporaries to branch out into conceptual art, photography, video art, and installation art. What intrigued you to explore these mediums?
I am a big believer in time and moment. We are talking about the early 90s – collapse of the Soviet Union, a new economic order, television etc – there were enormous changes taking place both nationally and globally. I had travelled to New York and I found that the nature of art practice in our country was very restricted to painting alone. Even in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America there were radical changes in art and I felt that the time had come. It was the moment when one could shift, it was in the air and I did. In a broad sense that was the starting point.

What kind of reaction did you receive? 
My paintings sold well because I came with a reputation but when I did a series after the Gulf War where I used engine oil and charcoal, people joked and wondered if it would last but that was still in the tradition of graphic and it still sold. The next show Collaboration/ Combine in which I made sculptural objects brought in very different elements, I worked with architects and I started using photography. In fact, I made a six-foot stone column weighing 6000 kilos but on the face of it were photographs. This piece was a curatorial show of unknown photographers who today are some of India’s top photographers, including the likes of Dayanita Singh, Ram Rahman and Ketaki Sheth. It was the beginning of an attempt to strike a dialogue with people in other disciplines, to question the notion of the single author, of participation and critiquing that uniqueness that only a hand can produce. Suddenly in art, things and objects in the world that exist could be included and employed, which is actually an old strategy coming in from the West. I felt that there were all these things that were being kept away and in our home ground we were more conservative.

What is your understanding of the Sher-Gil family? 
I have made Umrao Singh a pioneer of Modern Indian Art and Devika Daulet-Singh of Photoink constructed it into a book. I have contributed in writing a section on history of Modern Indian Photography. Naming my grandfather the pioneer does raise questions but people have gotten convinced and recognized the honour. In the same way it became more about the relationship between Umrao Singh and Amrita as they were creative people of a kind. Her mother, Marie Antoniette was also creative she was a musical person, my mother was too but they both were failures. Umrao Singh was not successful either but his photographs gave him a centrality to hold his ground. The letters that Amrita wrote her mother have a very delicate kind of tension and at times are quite expressive. There is an underlying violence between mother and daughter. Also the family came from an aristocratic class and they are meant to be well to do – that’s why the book is also a lot about money and how the mother constantly enquired of how much money her daughter spent. There is a kind of deep pathos because on the surface of the family there is a lot of glitter but they are cash strapped and are talking of it constantly.

The show of the Sher-Gil archive was done in the mid 90s and with that I had already started the process of working with images. There is an image that is more like a strip that has been created without manipulation. On one level there is Umrao Singh since childhood and below is Amrita’s life. When you look from top to bottom then there is a kind of relationship, seduction and eroticism. The way she is being looked at and how he looks at himself. In a sense I have narratorized those pictures without really manipulating them, it’s only the display. The logic of engaging in a more complex narrative became possible when the digital came about and that’s how Re- take of Amrita took form.

And finally, tell us about your forthcoming show?
In the last two decades I have moved across almost all kinds of disciplines and I have very consciously not done the same thing again. I have chosen not to get stuck to any one discipline. I have done video, and then I moved to installation art, then photography, and so on. It’s about finding myself across different mediums and if there are some themes or issues then they also cross over. As part of that crossing over I am now working on a show that has surprised me as well. I had done an earlier show called Shelter and one of the earlier definitions of a garment is shelter. I already have a trajectory in my own work in terms of Trash and the concept of readymade. I thought why don’t I take that as a kind of dominating principle and more or less stick to it and make garments out of found objects and trash. I didn’t know anything about fashion so I went to NIFT did a module course there and, ofcourse, there is a long history of art and fashion. The show is going to be exhibited at the Rabrindra Bhavan and it will be a sort of performance art piece. You will have to come and see a 40-minute fashion show after which the models and audience will move to another hall. In this space, fashion photographers will be photographing the art works and it will be interactive and the live- performance act will be more engaging. It is a challenging series and there is both nervousness and excitement.


Words Shruti Kapur Malhotra
Date 29-03-2023