Renowned Indian artist Vivan Sundaram passed away at the age of 79 on Thursday, leaving behind a legacy of ground-breaking artwork that helped solidify installation art as a veritable medium in the Indian art scene during the early 1990s. Sundaram’s art in many mediums is seen as key within the development of the Indian art scene of the past few decades. He is also fondly remembered for his outspoken leftist views. Sundaram believed that art could mirror the world, and potentially even change it, and his work marked one way to marry his politics and his genuine belief.
One of Sundaram’s installations that is considered a game-changer is 1993’s Memorial, a piece made in response to the destruction of the Babri Mosque, a 16th-century religious structure in Ayodhya, by a right-wing Hindu mob the year prior. Composed of photographs struck through with nails, a triangular structure with a plaster body on its floor, trunks stacked to form an archway-like sculpture, and more, Memorial paid homage to how Sundaram had experienced the events of 1992 remotely. “The fact that the photograph was a found object, and that I didn’t witness the violence first-hand as my friends in Mumbai did, added another layer: my entry into the tragedy was from a distance,” he said in a 2019 interview with the White Review.
Later works would continue to rely on found materials. 12 Bed Ward (2005) features 12 bed frames lined with the soles of shoes instead of mattresses. Arranged in two rows like a Minimalist grid, the bed frames hint at people who are left at the margins of Indian society. “Its shadows gesture mutely toward those who are deemed irrelevant in the New India,” critic Zehra Jumabhoy once wrote.
Vivan Sundaram was born in Simla, Himachal Pradesh, in 1943. He came from a decorated family history, his grandfather being Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, an early photographer in India and a landowning Sikh; his aunt was Amrita Sher-Gil, a pioneering modernist artist, and his father was Kalyan Sundaram, a prominent politician. The family had a plural identity, since the Sher-Gil side contained Hungarian and Jewish ancestry, and his father was a Tamil Brahmin. He would later describe his comfortable upbringing as “colonial” and reflect on it in his art.
Sundaram initially attended school in Baroda, where his teachers included K. G. Subramanyan. Later, he departed for London to study at the Slade School of Art, where he took courses with the painter R. B. Kitaj and focused on the history of film. In London, Sundaram encountered the upheaval of 1968, which ended up reshaping his art. Works from his time at Slade reach beyond the history of painting and comment on leftist causes. From Persian Miniatures to Stan Brakhage (1968), a painting now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, alludes to the work of the titular experimental filmmaker by way of intersecting geometric planes. May 68, a work now on view at Tate Modern in London, features such objects as a police helmet as a meditation on the leftists protests of the period.