By Shreya Chaudhuri
Vivan Sundaram, one of the most significant voices on the Indian contemporary art scene, was essentially an artist-activist. Sundaram’s practice centered around his artistic responses to political and historical events, which engulfed both India and the wider world.
With a career spanning over six decades, Vivan Sundaram transformed the landscape of contemporary art in India. On March 29, Sundaram died of a cerebral hemorrhage in the national capital.
Born in 1943 in Shimla in the pre-independence Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, his grandfather Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870–1954) was one of India’s first photographers. His parents were Kalyan Sundaram, a civil servant and the first legal secretary of post-independence India, and Indira Sher-Gil, sister of India’s most famous modernist artist, Amrita Sher-Gil. Sundaram studied at the Doon School and later studied painting at the College of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda in 1965, followed by a post-graduate course at the Slade School of Art, University of London in 1968. He was its stretch. of a time in London that coincided with the historic protests of May 1968 in Paris, which had an immense impact on him and which, at the same time, set the tone for Sundaram’s artistic moorings in the following times.
Vivan Sundaram’s extensive body of work is known to be multifaceted, with seamless experimentation in painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and mixed media. Sundaram’s work overlays history with memory and makes pertinent intersections while also archiving a great poetic sensibility. His body of work, while permeating creative cultural resistance, has been sometimes ephemeral, sometimes performative, while having a site-specific form. If one were to limit his practice to a particular style or broad subject matter, the common thread that ties it all together would be his deep and sustained concern with the socio-economic and political issues facing India, as well as those that shake up the world order.
Sundaram’s art was mixed with his activism, investigating political and historical events. After witnessing the Paris demonstrations of May 1968, a highly inspired Vivan Sundaram came up with an idea to organize protests by both artists and students during Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule of 1975-77 after back to India in 1971. From 1971, he worked with the Students’ Federation of India. (SFI) and All India Kisan Sabha, the farmers’ wing of the Communist Party of India (CPI). At this crossroads in his life, although he was associated with the Baroda School of Art, his political involvement took precedence over his craft.
The multidisciplinary practitioner, often regarded as India’s “first installation artist”, was known to be committed to humanist causes. Vivan Sundaram’s conceptual installation works of the 1990s marked a marked change from his earlier paintings and also heralded a major sweep for the Indian art world at the time. India in the early 1990s was in a turbulent time struggling with economic liberalization, a change in the media landscape and reported outbreaks of violence in the country. The change in his practice is most famously embodied in his work entitled Memorial (1993), which was a commentary on the rise of right-wing Hindu presence following the demolition of the Babri Mosque in the century XVI and communal violence in Bombay (now Bombay). ) which occurred soon after. The first example of Sundaram’s installation art is the series Engine Oil (1991), which refers to the assault of US-led coalition forces in Iraq to achieve supremacy over the oil resources of the region.
His response to the Gulf War was a set of really powerful drawings on paper that explored unique materials like charcoal and motor oil. In his later years, he delved into the aesthetics and socio-cultural ramifications of urban waste and found objects.
One of Sundaram’s best-known works is Re-take of ‘Amrita’ (2001-2005), in which photographs of his family taken by his grandfather Umrao Singh Sher-Gil between 1904 and 1940 are Photoshopped, to create a leaning photomontage. temporal realities with their family members across generations.
Vivan Sundaram’s long career was embedded in the art community, fostering the art scene in India on a global platform while animating it around politics and history.
