One of India’s leading contemporary artists, Vivan Sundaram, has died aged 79, his Mumbai gallery has confirmed. He died today in a hospital in New Delhi due to complications related to a brain hemorrhage. He is survived by his wife, the leading art historian Geeta Kapur.
Sundaram was born in Shimla in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh in 1943 in what was then British India. He was the son of prominent Indian civil servant Kalyan Sundaram, the first legal secretary of post-independence India, and Indira Sher-Gil, sister of Amrita Sher-Gil, India’s most famous modernist painter. He was educated at the Doon School, before studying at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSU) Faculty of Fine Arts in the 1960s under renowned pedagogue KG Subramanyan, and at the Slade School of Art, University of London, where his teachers included RB Kitaj, who influenced his early works with elements of kitsch and Pop Art.
Vivan Sundaram’s May 68 (1968)
© Tate
Over six decades, Sundaram produced a wide and aesthetically varied body of work that includes painting, sculpture, photography, digital art and space installations; according to his gallery, Chemould Prescott Road, Sundaram was the first installation artist in India. If their works are linked by a style or theme, they share in common a deep and sustained concern with social and activist issues both in India and the wider world. His first works, like painting May 68 (1968), held in the Tate collection, refers to the civil unrest that broke out in Paris during the May 1968 protests, an incident that greatly influenced the young Sundaram and prompted him to establish a commune in London where he lived until 1970. On his return to India in 1971, he worked with groups of artists and students to organize events and protests, especially during the years of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.
His later life, spent largely in Delhi and Mumbai, was marked by a successful career in which he was embedded in the Indian artistic community, helping to promote and galvanize the country’s art scene. around social issues. In 2003, a year after the 2002 Gujarat riots that saw communal violence rip through India, Sundaram participated in a group exhibition at the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust in New Delhi, of which he was a trustee founder Here he showed two sculptures, mausoleum (1993) and Carriage of weapons (1995), which represented a victim of the Bombay riots.
Both 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 Bombay) in the early 1990s. Composed of a series of smaller, individually titled parts, the work forms a memorial tomb for an unknown victim of the civil conflict surrounding the razing of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu extremists.
Vivan Sundaram’s Sisters with two girls (2001)
One of the best known works of Sundaram is Remake of ‘Amrita’ (2001-2005), in which photographs of his family taken by his grandfather Umrao Singh Sher-Gil between 1904 and 1940 are remixed and collaged using Photoshop to create paintings that compel space, time and, therefore, reality. Prominently starring his aunt Amrita, the play was described by Sundaram at the time as a “photo-dream-love-play”.
Sundaram was one of 30 artists to show new work at the 15th Sharjah Biennale (until June 11), where his photomontage installation Six seasons of a haunted life (2022) is on display. “Okwui’s [Enwezor’s] The proposal suggests a narrative that is dynamic yet recursive in an ethically responsible way,” Sundaram said of the project. “I present a project based on photography, Six seasons of a haunted life (2022), a choreography of bodies that have suffered violence, experienced imprisonment and experienced grief. The sixth ‘station’ means a journey grounded in history and rehearsed with activist determination.”
Vivan Sundaram’s 100,000 Sorties, ‘Motor oil and charcoal on paper’, (1990–1991) © Vivan Sundaram. Courtesy of the artist
Sundaram is represented by Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai and Photoink and Vadehra Art Gallery, both in Delhi. Chemould Prescott Road manager Shireen Gandhy explains The Art Journal: “To say that Vivan took risks is an understatement. He is often considered to be artists who paved the way so to speak, giving courage to others to follow that path. Vivan was that when it comes to installation art, it was a new term, quite unknown in the contemporary world”.
“Vivan’s Marxist ideology, his sense of justice and his strong politics intersected in his artistic practice. I will never forget his motor oil drawings of 1991-92, after the Gulf War. Possibly it was the first time he broke out with media such as charcoal, cakes, or oils. These were large works on paper made with motor oil—the bottom of each work with oil trays that looked like blood spills (and less like an oil spill).The exhibition held in 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 not only during the exhibition, but also during the installation of the exhibition. I think it was a moment of reckoning both for us as gallerists and for the public so that the works are perceived as this brave way.”
Sundaram’s work has been included in many solo and group exhibitions and international biennales, including two retrospectives at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Kiran Nadar Museum in New Delhi. His work has been shown at the Tate Modern, the Queens Museum of Art in New York and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan. The artist published more than 18 books, among them Making Strange, Trash, Amrita Sher Gil: A Family of 20th Century Indian Artists, Amrita’s Recovery i Vivan Sundaram is not a photographer.
Vivan Sundaram; born Shimla on 28 May 1943; married Geeta Kapur in 1985; He died in New Delhi on 29 March 2023.
