Viewing an exhibition brings about its own kind of experience. ‘Step Inside And You Are No Longer A Stranger’, the first retrospective of the works of Vivan Sundaram, curated by Roobina Karode at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), poses a maze-like puzzle. On the second and third visits I realised that I was no longer a stranger, but a visitant in the spaces of hypertext, a wanderer in a labyrinth, looking perhaps to locate the artist in his work. Proceeding through bends, breaks and contradictions, one realises that the artist works through the principle of disjuncture, an aspect subtly mirrored in the curation.
Immobile intensities: 'Box Five: Family Album' from ‘The Sher-Gil Archive'
What Sundaram’s work needed over the decades was probably greater institutional accommodation. Its terms of address are loaded with subversive intent and institutional critique that arise to dislodge time through an asymmetrical discourse.
For those who did not see it, I think his installation, ‘Journey towards Freedom: Modern Bengal’ (1998), threw precisely such a challenge. The site was the great Durbar Hall of the grand colonial institution, the Victoria Memorial. Even today the Victoria Memorial resists renaming and recasting in the post-colonial, nationalist mode. Imagining it as a vast marble shell, Sundaram occupied it through dialogue, with poetry and historical and contemporary objects, with their pre- and post-colonial references.
A coming together
With great efficacy the exhibition brought together the Santhal rebellion of 1855 and other peasant rebellions; the coming of the railways, which first ran from Howrah to Hooghly in 1854; the robust poetry of protest of Jibanananda Das; the naked, mannequin-like figures at Kumartuli during Durga Puja, awaiting divinity; drawings of the Bengal famine; an early printing press and nationalist tracts; a vivid four-poster bed with frilly pillow, the fetishised symbol of desire in Bengali cinema.
Immobile intensities: 'Postmortem'
In such a coming together, Sundaram dislodged architectural spaces, bringing into dialogue the museum, the College Street coffee shop, the street and its wayside art studios, the para and the adda, all as sites of being, of cultural occupation. Also, in the process, he set in active dialogue issues of aesthetic value and taste, class and community as co-producers in different periods of extraordinary historical exigency. These were, as Geeta Kapur described them, the “fragments” that made up the exhibition. The challenge that the exhibition posed then was in the suturing together of the “fragments”, the making of a coherent history of the Bengal renaissance and the surge towards freedom.
While Bengal may be a cogent subject for Sundaram’s treatment of history and literature, the ongoing retrospective challenges an overarching view. It is about so many things that it is easier to say what it is not about. It is never about the quotidian, the placid, or the tame. Rather there is a bend in the telescope whereby an episode of history is refracted and reinterpreted through the artist’s gaze.
A different time
Not to know modern history is to enter the exhibition at your own peril. What we see is episodes or fragments lifted out of their historic contexts and imbricated, embedded or rendered in another time. Time is not a continuous container of events. Rather it is like a train wreck on a child’s play table, where the containers may be rejoined with little respect for chronology and set on their way again. The nature of this synthesis, the breaking and the joining, as an affective state seems to determine his position with the past and the present.
In the process the truth becomes subject and provocation. As the artist says in an interview, “I wanted to tell a lie to pose new questions to the viewer, to provoke him or her.”
One may also consider another proposition, that of ‘disabling’. Even when Sundaram suggests the potential for movement, a dynamic flow, a surge of desire, it may be disabled. Sundaram uses the metaphoric sculptural form of the boat, the journey across longitudes and continents. However, he delivers the construction of a sort of half-boat, upturned perhaps, a boat masquerading as a shelter. There are at least three boats in the exhibition that cannot ply in water, that must be denied the pleasures of the voyage. “I feel no need to move. All the intensities that I have are immobile intensities,” writes French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Proximate to the boat is the bed, which suggests a different kind of unusability. Sundaram makes or remakes at least four sets of beds in his career. These set up the dialogue between desire and a pathology, the condition of denial but also impoverishment.
'The Sher-Gil Family'
The severed inverted boat leads us to a related reading, such as that found in the severed mannequin body parts in ‘Postmortem’, the exhibition of Sundaram’s work that followed ‘Gagawaka’ . ‘Postmortem’ is especially potent because, as its title suggests, it was predicated on the condition of after-death, presenting the human body as a cadaver, and then the wish to determine the cause of death. Post-mortem documentation as a discipline or artistic response is also a part of Sundaram’s practice, of taking apart an existing body — of works, and reinserting ideas, materials, histories.
Just as he inserts and conjoins body parts into the hollow bodies of models in ‘Postmortem’, he digitally inserts contexts within contexts. In ‘Re-take of Amrita’, through the insertion of photograph in painting and back into photograph, the passive is rendered active, the past is vivified to become the present. Through the method of what Kant describes as “thought insertion”, the rational and the normative are disrupted. It is in this insertion, one may argue, that Sundaram’s subjectivity is most apparent. To repeat his statement, “I wanted to tell a lie to pose new questions...”
Inside a grid
One may argue then that at the heart of Sundaram’s practice is the dislodging of the aesthetic attitude. The insertion of a social or political context is so deliberate, it makes you question your own attitudes towards taste (‘Gagawaka’, ‘Postmortem’, for instance). The association between beauty and truth and morality is disavowed. How then is one body of work responsive to another — if there is, as we recognise, a fracture in the chain? If we think of the broken limbs of the mannequin in ‘Postmortem’, where is the connection?
One attitude would be to see the different works in the show as a grid. As art critic Rosalind Krauss defines the grid, there is no hierarchy of entrances and exits; one may enter or leave it at any point. The sense of time is collapsed and scrambled.
But there may be another explanation. In one of the most powerful artist manifestos of the 20th century, the leading line says: “So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life — real life I mean, that in the end this belief is lost.” That is André Breton in the Surrealist manifesto of 1924. In the making of the work, the expiation of energy and the loss of belief, there is both birth and its concomitant, death. From the obsession with the idea as new, to its abortive end, we have then in Sundaram’s oeuvre, the series of works, disjunctive, seemingly unrelated and discrete, but always committed to a larger idea beyond the material present.
ON SHOW: Step Inside And You Are No Longer a Stranger; till June 30, KNMA, Delhi
The writer is a critic and curator who also runs www.criticalcollective.in.
