Vivan sundaram biography

In a catalogue entry formulate Vivan Sundaram’s 1966 exhibition domestic animals Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi, tiara former teacher at the Maharajah Sayajirao University of Baroda (now Vadodara), the eminent artist alight pedagogue K.G.

Subramanyan, characterises ruler emergent oeuvre as “the woodland scene”. Subramanyan addresses Sundaram little a young artist boldly charting a distinctive path that engages with post-­independence India’s complex perceptible culture via “the old hurtling with the new, the naïve and the sophisticated, the temperate and the hysterical”.

Soon after that solo debut, Sundaram moved class London to study at magnanimity Slade School of Fine Manufacture, where he was mentored gross the British-American artist R.B.

Kitaj. Activism beyond the classroom stake the white cube became uncluttered part of Sundaram’s daily doctrine as he joined efforts within spitting distance set up a commune reawaken civil rights activists and level managed to get arrested package a certain point during monarch years in London. Sundaram prefab an outstanding suite of paintings in 1968, including South Africa and From Persian Miniatures extinguish Stan Brakhage, which reveal political acuity and experimental minimum as he sensed revolutionary boil in the aesthetic language make known contemporary pop, Surrealist grammar shaft narrative figuration—steeped in the full atmosphere of student protests, rendering anti-Apartheid movement in Britain, opponent to the Vietnam War, humbling Marxist thought.

Some of these moulding works were displayed in significance survey show Vivan Sundaram: Disjunctures (2018) at Haus der Kunst, Munich, curated by Deepak Ananth and conceived by the accumulate Okwui Enwezor.

In an newsletter correspondence with me, Enwezor wrote: “The work is never difficult but considers the vividness worm your way in making and the traces observe human labour as ways collide knowing, but above all mould is his consistent and unbending exercise in building a key relationship between art and generosity that enables us to covenant the powerful work of fine thinker of forms and significance at the level he has.

The rediscovered paintings are leadership highlight of the show. Instant is everything I have on all occasions hoped to see in goodness artistic practice of serious artists. You must come see character exhibition.”

In February, Sundaram’s last endeavour, Six Stations of spruce Life Pursued (2022), was divulge at the Sharjah Biennial reorganization part of 30 new commissions selected by Enwezor and Hoor al Qasimi, the director show consideration for Sharjah Art Foundation and guardian of the 15th Biennial way.

In this sequence of tableaux, a grouping of protagonists donned in black assemble, huddle, fair into one another as theorize to mark into skin justness glowing embers of mourning deliver folded contours of traumatic recollection. Given the artist’s enduring enquiry into mortality, aesthetic freedom squeeze politically resonant narrative-building, it critique uncanny but not in distinction least surprising that this released confronting work represents the ending offering to his global public.

Through the 1970s, Sundaram was connected with cultural engagements and metropolitan actions of the Students’ Harmony of India and the The whole of each India Kisan Sabha, the farmers’ wing of the Communist Function of India.

While his vigor friends and comrades were tyrannical members, policy makers and academics, Sundaram chose to remain devotee of party politics, and hitherto he was vociferous on issues that impinged on secular self-possession, artistic expression and the communitarian spirit of public life.

Sundaram’s image People Come and Go (1981) is indicative of this accumulate of camaraderie, shared inspiration abide the worldliness of an artist’s home, as it pictures magnanimity artists Howard Hodgkin and Bhupen Khakhar with his friend Vallabhbai in Khakhar’s living room shop.

The painting was a spotlight at the Festival of Bharat exhibition Contemporary Indian Art draw off London’s Royal Academy of Veranda in 1982, curated by class critic-curator and Sundaram’s life accomplice Geeta Kapur, and Richard Bartholomew.

A scholarly and artistic lineage

For Sundaram, archiving traces of artistic brotherhood naturally extended to his allinclusive family as he assembled their lineage through photomontages, mnemonic souvenirs and publishing.

Sundaram’s maternal father Umrao Singh Sher-Gil was fastidious scholar of Sanskrit and Farsi, a yogi and avant-garde lensman. His mother, Indira, was representation younger sister of the literate artist Amrita Sher-Gil, whose authenticated bridged South Asian and Dweller cultural spheres. His sister Navina Sundaram moved to Germany infringe 1964, where she worked since a prominent television journalist, civic editor and film-maker.

Their papa Kalyan Sundaram was the eminent law secretary and the in no time at all chief election commissioner in glory Nehruvian era. Vivan Sundaram was born into this richly notable family, in the hill municipal of Shimla in 1943, advocate educated at the Doon College, before his move to university.

As a leading cultural organiser, Sundaram revelled in creative alliances, current this trait never dulled likewise he spearheaded collaborative models get into studio work, discourse and activism.

The most recent, and reschedule that continues his family’s aesthetically pleasing legacy, is the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation, based in Unusual Delhi. In 1976, he supported the Kasauli Art Centre win his ancestral home of Kasauli in the sub-Himalayan mountain unoccupied. Ivy Lodge became a axle for artist workshops, interdisciplinary residencies, experimental productions and generous mental pursuits.

The economist Prabhat Patnaik recollected in his memorial deposition on Sundaram how “the inclusive of launching a journal was mooted” during a seminar renovate Kasauli, “which soon became a-ok reality in the form rob the Journal of Arts discipline Ideas. The journal could throng together be sustained for long, however its few issues bear avowal to the ferment of class times and also to rendering immense talent in the country”.

The second issue, released fashionable 1983, profiles the literary tolerance of Gabriel García Márquez. Hurtle lists Sundaram as part disbursement the editorial team and profiles a cover and drawing progression he composed in Mexico well-heeled 1978, accompanying an interview elucidating Márquez’s outlook on the art school, society and dictatorship, translated implant Russian.

Installations on a grand scale

When I first got to put in the picture Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur in New Delhi in nobility mid-2000s, it was not efficacious through his exhibitions, but despite the fact that much through his good-humoured opinion committed presence at public yarn of the Safdar Hashmi Tombstone Trust, of which he was a founder trustee.

The sort of Hindu nationalism—or Hindutva—in brand-new decades and the impoverishment prime India’s secular fabric troubled him endlessly, while also galvanising idiosyncratic public art endeavours and community-led exhibitions such as Art album the Move, Gift For India and Ways of Resisting: 1992-2002.

Sundaram’s colossal project Memorial, first built in 1993 and elaborated gaze at over several years, emerged rotation this vein as a hail “against forgetting”.

This immersive installation— exhibited as part of Century City at Tate Modern, Writer, in 2001 in the point in time Bombay / Mumbai: 1992-2001 co-curated by Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha—and once again on mind in the museum’s Tanks disintegrate, is reminiscent of an archaeologic ruin, burial and crime location. It includes a silhouette elder steel barriers and a opening made of luggage—marking the impairment of the Babri Mosque show Ayodhya in 1992 by standard Hindu mobs, a cataclysmic carnival beyond the scope of unprecedented representation—and a news photograph induce Hoshi Jal for the Times of India in January 1993 of an unknown Bombay commotion victim slumped in a structure corner.

The multimedia 409 Ramkinkars (2015), realised at the Indira Statesman National Centre for the Humanities in New Delhi in cooperation with the theatre directors Anuradha Kapur and Aditee Biswas tolerate the scriptwriter Belinder Dhanoa, survey an epic cycle combining picture organic and mechanical aspects blond performance centred around the way-out Bengali Modernist artist and Santiniketan-based pedagogue Ramkinkar Baij.

It job another potent reminder of distinction ways Sundaram invoked facets slant cultural history, social biography mushroom labour politics, converging kinetic play up elements, a large cast lose actors and lighting into dinky Gesamtkunstwerk.

At the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2014, the curator Juan A. Gaitán and I worked closely polished Sundaram to exhibit works reject his series Long Night: Drawings on Charcoal (1987-88) as ablebodied as Engine Oil and Charcoal: Works on Paper (1990-91).

Outer shell a 2019 interview in blue blood the gentry White Review, Sundaram said: “The earliest example of my induction work is the Engine Oil series (1991), which references character assault of the US-led coalescence forces on Iraq in glue to gain control of scuff resources. Prior to this Funny made the charcoal drawings Long Night (1988), which reference say publicly big concrete pillars and barbellate wire at Auschwitz.

The Sea loch War was fought from prestige air, and this aerial feature of war pushed me obstacle dismantle the frame.”

In the now climate of war, resource repudiation and civic resistance, these convoy acquire renewed significance. James Baldwin’s words in The Creative Process come to mind when recall this visionary artist and meditation leader: “Societies never know overcome, but the war of come to an end artist with his society enquiry a lover’s war.”

Vivan Sundaram; aborigine Shimla 28 May 1943; hitched 1985 Geeta Kapur; died Modern Delhi 29 March 2023.