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Vivan Sundaram, an artist and activist extensively credited with spearheading a transition in trendy and up to date Indian artwork from European-inspired summary portray to multimedia types addressing social and political realities in his nation, died on March 29 in New Delhi. He was 79.
The trigger was a mind hemorrhage following an extended sickness, stated Esa Epstein, a curator who, with Sepia Worldwide, organized two of Mr. Sundaram’s United States exhibitions.
The product of a comfortably elite upbringing (he described it as “colonial”) in northern India, Mr. Sundaram studied artwork at Maharaja Sayajirao College in Baroda (now Vadodara), then enrolled within the Slade College of London in 1966 on a scholarship. The 4 years he spent in England modified his life.
At Slade, he was tutored by the iconoclastic British American Pop figurative artist R.B. Kitaj. On the identical time, he was swept up within the radical pupil politics of the day and have become conscious about his personal place as an outsider in a Western setting.
In London, he helped begin a residential commune of civil rights activists and contemplated the thought of abandoning artwork in favor of full-time political organizing. As a substitute, he ended up combining his two passions. Following Mr. Kitaj’s instance, and staying in contact with younger Indian up to date artists like Bhupen Khakhar and Gulammohammed Sheikh, he started making use of a semiabstract, Pop-inspired portray fashion to present political topics.
A portray like “Could 1968,” with pictures of police helmets and flaming weapons floating on blocks of vibrant colour, was a direct response to information of the day — a interval of civil unrest marked by leftist demonstrations, common strikes and pupil occupations — and presaged the socially acutely aware course his artwork would take.
Returning to India after 4 years, Mr. Sundaram remained dedicated to uniting artwork and politics, becoming a member of the Marxist faction of the Communist Get together of India and, in 1976, reworking a household house within the mountain city of Kasauli, within the state of Himachal Pradesh, into a global arts heart. It functioned as a residence for artists, writers and performers whereas presenting seminars and groundbreaking exhibitions and producing influential publications like The Journal of Arts and Concepts.
One exhibition, a 1981 group present known as “Place for Folks,” proved to be a landmark occasion. It featured six younger artists whose work, departing from the Paris-influenced abstraction of an earlier era, used determine portray to create historic narratives. The exhibition catalog featured an essay by the artwork historian, critic and curator Geeta Kapur, who married Mr. Sundaram within the early Nineteen Eighties.
Mr. Sundaram continued to lend his energies to political causes in an India torn by non secular and ethnic violence — primarily between Hindus and Muslims — on a degree not seen for the reason that darkest days of 1947, with the partition of India and Pakistan after India gained independence from Britain that 12 months. In 1989, when the 35-year-old Communist playwright and avenue theater director Safdar Hashmi was crushed to dying by right-wing thugs whereas performing close to Delhi, Mr. Sundaram, with different cultural figures, organized a collective to oppose non secular fundamentalism and sectarianism.
The Hashmi assault, and the constructing waves of nationalist violence surrounding it, pushed Mr. Sundaram’s artwork away from conventional portray and drawing to types he thought-about extra versatile and fascinating. His shrine-like “Memorial,” begun in 1993 and expanded in a number of iterations, is an immersive room-size multimedia set up made in response to murderous riots between Hindu and Muslim teams in Mumbai after a right-wing Hindu mob destroyed the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya in 1992.
The work’s central part is a life-size plaster sculpture of a fallen physique, a picture derived from a newspaper {photograph} of a sufferer of the riots. Architectural parts surrounding the determine are created from stacks of low cost tin trunks of a form related to migrants and refugees. Copies of the unique information picture, enclosed in vitrines and pierced with nails, recur all through the piece like a drumbeat.
By the start of the 2000s, Mr. Sundaram was working with archival pictures of a distinct form — colonial-era photos of his household, largely taken within the late-Nineteenth and early-Twentieth centuries by his maternal grandfather, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, a Sikh landowner.
Utilizing digital expertise, Mr. Sundaram collapsed time and place by becoming a member of disparate figures from these images — together with that of his great-aunt Amrita Sher-Gil, a famed Hungarian-Indian modernist painter — to create imaginary tableaus, a few of them erotically charged. He exhibited them in a much-traveled sequence titled “Re-Take of Amrita.”
Vivan Sundaram was born on Could 28, 1943, within the northern Indian metropolis of Shimla when the nation was nonetheless a part of the British Raj. His father, Kalyan Sundaram, was a authorities official; his mom, Indira Sundaram, was the youthful sister of Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941). His ancestry was broad: Hindu, Sikh, Christian and, from his mom’s facet, Jewish.
He’s survived by his spouse, Ms. Kapur, one in every of India’s pioneer writers within the fields of artwork, movie and cultural idea.
In his most up-to-date work, additionally within the type of manipulated images, Mr. Sundaram returned to extra overtly political topics. His 2022 sequence titled “Six Stations of a Life Pursued” consists of semiabstract pictures of caged figures and close-ups of sutured flesh. He described the work as “a choreography of our bodies which have undergone violence, skilled incarceration and lived via mourning.”
“The sixth ‘station,’” he stated, “signifies a journey premised on the historic and rehearsed with activist resolve.”
The sequence was commissioned by the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor (who died in 2019) for the present Sharjah Biennial, within the United Arab Emirates, the place it’s on view via June 11. Concurrently, a few of Mr. Sundaram’s early works — drawings from 1972 based mostly on poetry by the leftist poet Pablo Neruda — have been centerpieces of one other globalist present, the Kochi-Muziris Bienniale, within the Indian state of Kerala, which closed on Monday.
In 2018, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Artwork, in Mr. Sundaram’s house metropolis of New Delhi, organized a retrospective, titled “Step Inside and You Are No Longer a Stranger.” In the identical 12 months, a profession survey, “Vivan Sundaram: Disjunctions,” opened on the Haus der Kunst in Munich. For many years he has been represented by the gallery Chemould Prescott Highway in Mumbai.
His visibility in america has been sporadic, although robust. In 1993, he was included within the group present “Out of India: Up to date Artwork of the South Asian Diaspora,” organized by Jane Farver on the Queens Museum in 1998, with an set up known as “Home,” one other response to sectarian violence. A model of “Memorial” appeared within the group present “Fringe of Need: Current Artwork in India” on the Asia Society in Manhattan in 2005.
Sepia Worldwide introduced “Re-Take of Amrita” as a solo present in 2006, and in 2008 it introduced a undertaking known as “Trash,” for which Mr. Sundaram had assembled in his studio an enormous tabletop metropolis made totally of consumerist refuse and photographed it.
Mr. Sundaram was a lot admired by his colleagues each for his formal adventurousness and his philosophical consistency.
Though his multimedia artwork took him in lots of conceptual instructions, his fundamental drive towards experimentation had remained unchanged since his youth. “I’m a toddler of Could ’68, the type of freedom it gave,” he stated in a 2018 interview with The Indian Specific. “One thing in that historic second urged me to repeatedly query and shift, each thematically, politically and linguistically, by way of artwork. Connecting with folks from completely different disciplines has at all times knowledgeable my work.”
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