TRIBUTE | Vivan Sundaram (1943-2023): Rebel, writer, thinker, artist

Sundaram’s persona and works led to a major radicalisation of artistic concepts. There was the “Place for People” exhibition that defined the painterly moment in 1981—in many ways the best known oil-on-canvas works by several of Indian art’s major hall-of-famers: in addition to Vivan it had Jogen Chowdhury, Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Sudhir Patwardhan and Nalini Malani, almost all turning their gaze inwards, to themselves, their private spaces, their families and loved ones. Such a void became, to borrow from Vivan’s key work, the “Long Night” series, a zone, a site for struggles around a new form of political subjectivity. Deepening meaning This author was a participant-eyewitness to what was perhaps Vivan’s last work of explicitly “political” monumentalism: the 2017 installation and sound work “Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946”, a massive piece that also became the centrepiece of his 2018 retrospective. “He was moving at once between monumentalism and minimalism: at one moment outward towards public art and at another inwards, into inner spaces of depression, even death.” Several of the original links with the mills and docks remain strong: they provided the rationale for the work’s first install in Mumbai’s Coomaraswamy Hall, and for the events that took place inside the hull.