At 75, Vivan Sundaram is having his first retrospective and he is understandably ecstatic about it. With a career spanning five decades that witnessed constant reinvention and experimentation, a show mapping such a journey, indeed assumes significance for the artist as well as the viewers. “I have never had a retrospective and at this age it becomes very important. It charts my journey, takes a stock of different periods of my career. I am constantly questioning the aesthetic of my work which shifts to personal, social, historical and political,” explains the artist.
Curated by Roobina Karode, ‘Step inside and you are no longer a stranger’ will have around 180 art works on display. The title makes one curious and the artist explains that it has been drawn from a 1976 show which had an 8ft-tall painting, featuring smashed glass – “Step Inside...”
From his eclectic oeuvre, the curator has dipped into the seminal phases of the artist to create a powerful narrative. It all starts from his early works done in London. There, his teacher R.B.Kitaj at Slade School of Fine Art, had a seminal influence on him.
One of the highlights of the retrospective, is a set of three paintings of Sundaram which have never been shown before. Relating the incident about these paintings, the veteran artist says, “There are three paintings, nobody has ever seen because they were with my friend in London. After he died, the paintings remained in his attic. And few months back, when I told his daughter about it, she went to the attic and got them. I am very happy to show these works.” He adds that these works draw from Persian miniatures and pop political references to the momentous May 1968 when a wave of civil unrest swept across Europe. Sundaram, who was at the time, pursuing post-diploma from London’s Slade School of Fine Art, has often called himself a child of the May 1968 protests.
Add to that his engine oil drawings, Machchu Picchu series of drawings and a viewer who has known or seen only his conceptual art, would be able to join the dots.
Speaking of his drawings, there is a room called “Bad drawings for dost”. The dost in question is late artist Bhupen Khakar and the traces of their friendship can be found in these paintings done by Sundaram in 2004-05.
Then there are collages, sculptures, photo-montages and installations culled from different periods of his artistic career showing his engagement with a new aesthetic of a new material and how it resulted into experiential works. The viewer doesn’t remain a viewer but becomes a participant. If in “Memorial”, he was responding to Mumbai riots, in “Trash”, he was using material obtained from garbage dump, commenting about urban lives and their chaotic nature. “One tried to find a sense of order and beauty in that chaos,” he says.
However, both “Memorial” and “Trash” are not part of the show as Sundaram wanted to show some of his other installations like “The Plough” and “Mill Recall”, which comprised the bigger cross-genre piece called “409 Ramkinkars”, exploring the world of Ramkinkar Baij, a work from “Postmortem” (After Gagawaka), “12 Bed Ward”, “River Carries its Past”, “Retake of Amrita”, but the highlight of the show, according to Sundaram, is “Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946” created in collaboration with cultural theorist Ashish Rajadhyaksha and film historian Valentina Vitali last year. In this blood red steel and aluminium structure resembling the hull of a ship, standing 10 feet tall and 40 feet long, around 35 visitors will sit and witness the days of Royal Indian Navy's uprising – a reaction to the poor quality of food and racial discrimination against the British officers in 1946 through a spectacular amalgam of lights and sounds. “There will be about 2-3 shows every day,” informs Sundaram.
Deeply interested in Sundaram's art practice, Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor is taking the show to Haus der Kunst, a global centre for contemporary art located in Munich, Germany. Okwui, its director, was the non-European art director of Documenta 11 held in 2002 and was also the curator of the Venice Biennale in 2015.
(The exhibition will be on view from February 9 to June 30 at KNMA, Saket)
