A fragile inheritance: Radical stakes in contemporary Indian art

Art History

A fragile inheritance: Radical stakes in contemporary Indian art

Professor Saloni Mathur | University of California, Los Angeles

This lecture will explore three recent projects by the Delhi-based artist, Vivan Sundaram, a leading figure of the post-1968 Indian avant-garde and a veteran of critical art practice in the subcontinent.

In the first of these projects (Trash, 2008), the artist embraces garbage as a medium. In the latter two (Gagawaka, 2011/12 and Postmortem-After Gagawaka, 2013), he constructs wearable sculptural garments made from recyclables and found objects, and surrealist-like assemblages composed of aged mannequins and anatomical models.

These three projects together highlight the lightness of fashion, consumerism and haute-couture alongside the heaviness of social concerns related to illness, aging, death and the urban environment under threat.

As such, I suggest they demonstrate the unique breadth and maturity of Sundaram’s work, and sketch a model of radical practice that responds, more urgently than ever, to the specific conditions of the present era.

Saloni Mathur is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (UC Press, 2007), editor of The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora (Yale University Press/Clark Art Institute, 2011), and co-editor (with Kavita Singh) of No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia (Routledge, 2014).

Her new book, A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art, is scheduled for release by Duke University Press in September 2019.