SAHMAT has issued this statement on the passing away of renowned artist, Vivan Sundaram:

VIVAN SUNDARAM

28 May 1943 –29 March 2023

Vivan Sundaram, artist and a founding trustee of SAHMAT , passed away in Delhi this morning. The cremation will be at Lodhi Cremation on Thursday, 30 March, at 12 noon.

Vivan Sundaram was born in 1943, in Simla, Himachal Pradesh. He studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda (1961–65) and at the Slade School of Art, London (1966–68) where he also studied History of Cinema. Active in the students’ movement of May 1968, he helped set up a commune in London where he lived till 1970. On his return to India in 1971, he worked with artists’ and students’ groups to organize events and protests, especially during the Emergency years.

In 1981, Sundaram participated in the seminal group exhibition, ‘Place for People’. Since 1990 he has made installations that include sculpture, photographs and video: Memorial (1993, 2014), an elaborate work made in response to communal violence in Bombay; a monumental site-specific installation at the Victoria Memorial, Calcutta, now referred to as History Project (1998); continuing work on his family, which includes the installation, The Sher-Gil Archive (1995), and digital photomontages, Re-take of ‘Amrita’ (2001–06), based on photographs taken by Umrao Singh Sher-Gil. A series of exhibitions using found objects include Trash (2008), an installed urbanscape of garbage, digital photomontages and three videos: Tracking (2003–04), The Brief Ascent of Marian Hussain (2005) and Turning (2008). Garbage and found materials were used to make garments, and the work crossed over into fashion and performance in GAGAWAKA: Making Strange (2011) and Postmortem (2013). In 2012, Black Gold, an installation of potsherds from the excavation of Pattanam/Muziris in Kerala, was made into a three-channel video.

A project on the artist Ramkinkar Baij, 409 Ramkinkars, was co-authored with theatre directors Anuradha Kapur and Santanu Bose in 2015. In 2017, a public art project on the uprising of the Royal Indian Navy and Bombay’s working class, titled Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946, was co-authored with cultural theorist Ashish Rajadhyaksha and sound artist David Chapman. A 50-year retrospective exhibition, ‘Step inside and you are no longer a stranger’, invited by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, showed from February to June 2018. A solo survey exhibition titled ‘Disjunctures’, invited by Okwui Enwezor and curated by Deepak Ananth, showed at Haus der Kunst, Munich, from June 2018 to January 2019.

Most recently, Vivan Sundaram was one of 30 artists specially commissioned to make new work to mark the Sharjah Biennial’s 30th anniversary edition. The ongoing Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present (February to June 2023), conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, includes Sundaram’s photography-based project, Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022), signifying a journey with periodic halts that release pain, regain trust, behold beauty, recall horror, and discard memory.

Sundaram has had solo shows in many cities of India, as well as in London, Paris, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Budapest, Copenhagen, New York, Chicago, Dallas, and at the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles. He has exhibited in the Biennales of Havana, Johannesburg, Kwangju, Taipei, Sharjah, Shanghai, Sydney, Seville, Berlin, and in the Asia-Pacific Triennial, Brisbane.

Vivan Sundaram has been an initiator and organiser of varied and inventive projects as an extension of his artistic practice. He has had a long-standing identity as an artist-activist engaged with artist groups and collectives, and has used different artistic strategies for collaboration and activism – some of it straightforwardly political/ left oriented. As founding member of the Kasauli Art Centre, he organized artists’ workshops and seminars at the Centre from 1976 to 1991. He contributed variously to the Journal of Arts & Ideas (1981–99) as a member of its editorial collective from its very inception. 

As a trustee of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT), he initiated and conceived art projects and curated exhibitions. In his own words, “… my politicization in the May 1968 student movement took on a specific ideological orientation by association with comrades from the CPI(M), though I have never been a member of the Party. On the art front, there was the setting up of the Kasauli Art Centre in 1976 – its informality and hospitality as well as active exchange and organized discourse.  As a founding trustee of SAHMAT from 1989, I have been part of some head-on politics in the period especially from 1990 to 2003.  I have curated on behalf of SAHMAT, many small and big exhibitions – installed and roving shows – that were exhibited across the country and that engaged with the public domain through innovative formats.” 

Vivan Sundaram is the editor of a two-volume book, Amrita Sher-Gil: a self-portrait in letters & writings, published in 2010; and managing trustee, with his sister Navina Sundaram, of the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF), set up in 2016.

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Indian artist Vivan Sundaram passes away, leaving behind an enduring legacy of socially conscious art

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Apart from his academic work, of which The Share of wages in National Income and Terms of Trade and Class Relations were two outstanding examples, he was a columnist at various times for Now, Economic and Political Weekly, and The Telegraph. As an essayist in Bengali he brought out several volumes and was a recipient of the Sahitya Academy Award. He was also an advisory editor of Social Scientist, a journal with which he was closely associated. A person of impeccable courtesy, indomitable courage, and absolute integrity, he was a friend, philosopher and guide for all progressive causes and was part of the Sahmat family. We deeply mourn the passing away of Ashok Mitra.

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