Vivan Sundaram

Born 1943 in Simla, India – Lives and works in New Delhi, India

Vivan Sundaram studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, India, and at the Slade School in London. In 1966, he organized his first solo exhibition in New Delhi. Others soon followed, in New Delhi once more, then Baroda, Bombay, Calcutta, Bangalore, Madras, London, Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Vivan Sundaram is a conceptual artist working across various media: painting, sculpture, photography, installations and video. His work testifies to the political and sectarian turmoil endured by his country while evoking popular culture, problems of perception, memory and history. Inspired by surrealism and Fluxus, he constantly questions his artistic practice and relentlessly combines classical and modern, traditional and new. His recent projects are eminently participative, involving photography, found objects, videos and spatially enlarged pieces. In 2008, for example, the Trash series explored the aesthetics of waste and hinted at a fascination for modernity through recycled objects and the modernist process of bricolage.