India’s ‘first installation artist’ Vivan Sundaram has died, aged 79

One in all India’s main modern artists, Vivan Sundaram, has died, aged 79, his Mumbai gallery has confirmed. He handed away earlier right now in a New Delhi hospital from problems associated to a mind haemorrhage. He’s survived by his spouse, the outstanding artwork historian Geeta Kapur.

Sundaram was born within the northern metropolis of Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, in 1943, in then-British India. He was the son of the Indian civil servant Kalyan Sundaram, the primary legislation secretary of post-independence India, and Indira Sher-Gil, the sister of Amrita Sher-Gil, India’s most well-known artists of the Twentieth-century. He was educated on the Doon Faculty, earlier than finding out on the School of Effective Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao College of Baroda (MSU) within the Nineteen Sixties beneath the famend pedagogue KG Subramanyan, and on the Slade Faculty of Artwork, London College, the place his lecturers included RB Kitaj, who influenced his early works with components of kitsch and Pop Artwork.

Over six many years, Sundaram produced a wide-ranging and aesthetically various physique of labor that features portray, sculpture, pictures, digital artwork and room-spanning installations—based on his gallery, Chemould Prescott Street, Sundaram was the primary set up artist in India. Ought to his works be sure by a mode or theme, they discover in frequent a deep and sustained concern with activist and social points inside each India and the broader world. Early works of his, such because the portray Might 68 (1968), held within the Tate assortment, reference the civil unrest that broke out in Paris in the course of the protests of Might 1968—an incident that tremendously influenced the younger Sundaram and provoked him to arrange a commune in London the place he lived until 1970. On his return to India in 1971, he labored with artists’ and college students’ teams to organise occasions and protests, particularly in the course of the years of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.

His later life, largely spent in Delhi and Mumbai, noticed him get pleasure from a profitable profession embedded within the Indian artwork group, serving to to advertise the nation’s artwork scene on the worldwide stage and galvanise it round social points. In 2003, one yr after the 2002 Gujarat riots that noticed communal violence tear throughout India, Sundaram took half in a gaggle present on the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Belief in New Delhi—of which he was a founding trustee. Right here he confirmed two sculptures, Mausoleum (1993) and Gun Carriage (1995), which depicted a Mumbai riot sufferer.

Each these works had been a part of his room-sized set up Memorial (1993–2014), created in response to violent battle between Hindu and Muslim teams in Bombay (now Mumbai) within the early Nineteen Nineties. Comprised of a lot of individually titled smaller components, the work types a commemorative tomb for an unknown sufferer of the civil battle across the razing of Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu extremists.

One in all Sundaram’s best-known works is Re-take of ‘Amrita’ (2001-2005), through which photographs of his household taken by his grandfather Umrao Singh Sher-Gil between 1904 to Forties are remixed and collaged by means of Photoshop, to create tableaux that skew house, time, and, due to this fact, actuality. Prominently that includes his aunt Amrita, the work was described by Sundaram on the time as a “photo-dream-love-play”.

Sundaram was one among 30 artists to indicate a brand new work on the ongoing fifteenth version of the Sharjah Biennial (till 11 June), the place his photomontage set up Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022) is on show. “Okwui’s [Enwezor’s] proposition suggests a story that’s dynamic but recursive in an ethically accountable manner,” Sundaram stated of the venture. “I current a photography-based venture, Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022), a choreography of our bodies which have undergone violence, skilled incarceration, and lived by means of mourning. The sixth ‘station’ signifies a journey premised on the historic and rehearsed with activist resolve.”

Sundaram is represented by Chemould Prescott Street in Mumbai and Photoink and Vadehra Artwork Gallery, each in Delhi. Shireen Gandhy, the director of Chemould Prescott Street, tells The Artwork Newspaper: “To say Vivan took dangers is an understatement. Typically one considers artists who paved the way in which because it had been, giving braveness to others to stroll that path. Vivan was that with regards to set up artwork—it was a brand new time period, pretty unknown to the modern world.”

“Vivan’s Marxist ideology, his sense of justice and his sturdy politics intersected into his artwork observe. I’ll always remember his engine oil drawings from 1991-92, after the Gulf Battle. It was presumably the primary time when he broke out of mediums like charcoal, pastels or oils. These had been massive works on paper made with engine oil—the underside of every work with trays of oil that felt like bloodspill (and fewer like an oil spill). The exhibition held at two public areas—the Shridharani in Delhi and the Jehangir Artwork Gallery in Bombay (introduced by Chemould)—was a revelation to many. My strongest reminiscence was the presence of scholars in the course of the course of not solely the exhibition, but in addition the set up of the present. I feel it was a second of reckoning each for us as gallerists and for the viewers for works to be perceived on this brave manner.”

Sundaram’s work has been included in lots of solo and group exhibitions and worldwide biennials, together with two retrospectives on the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Kiran Nadar Museum in New Delhi. His work has been proven at Tate Fashionable, The Queens Museum of Artwork, New York, and the Fukuoka Asian Artwork Museum in Japan. The artist revealed greater than 18 books, together with Making Unusual, Trash, Amrita Sher Gil: An Indian Artist Household of the Twentieth Century, Re-take of Amrita and Vivan Sundaram isn’t a Photographer.

Vivan Sundaram; born Shimla 28 Might 1943; married 1985 Geeta Kapur; died New Delhi 29 March 2023.