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Vivan Sundaram:
Vivan Sundaram, painter, sculptor, installator is a key figure in a group of contemporary artists, who have, over the last decade, moved away from the enterprise of easel painting.
Opposed to the comfort of looking at art from a drawing-room perspective or with disengagement, Sundaram, is more committed to realising multidimensional projects which invite audience participation as in open-stage theatre where, the distance between spectator and performer is minimal. You can sit inside a room, or on |
a car-seat or bed or within a sheltered space, for instance, in a hut with live video and music to experience and evoke multiple meanings.
Sundarama’s work is conceived as a cultural product or debate rather than fine art to hang on the wall. It crucially relates to social and political history, the environment and to historiography itself. The viewer can take part in looking and thinking about event and issue and story in response to painted, crafted constructions and enclosures which are placed as excavated phenomena on the stage or, what can be a museum-like gallery space. Alternatively, the exhibition arena resembles an abandoned machine workshop or the karkhana (factory,in Urdu) of a toy-maker.
Sundarama’s monumental artworks or relic-like objects acquire different meanings on different sites. An industrial landscape, is polemically represented as a totem-like structure, made with charcoal on paper and a tray of gleaming engine oil; the body of a man, killed in a communal riot, photographed by a reporter is an appropriated image, used by Sundaram as a "Fallen Man" emblem for many exhibitions; the memorial cum gateway,(a recurrent theme) made with tin trunks, the dwellings, cast as the House/Boat compositions or the dilapidated trawler-boat and its fragments are the image-structures which recur as the grammer of the environmental condition he models and re-models. The sculptures are erected and dismantled for shows in different cities.Their architectural instability, their incompleteness, along with the recently, added animistic exhibits of a bed |
VIVAN SUNDARAM
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