PHOTOINK is very pleased to announce the inclusion of The Estate of Vivan Sundaram's work at the Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present. Conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, the biennial presents works by over 150 artists and collectives, installed in 5 cities across the Emirate. Vivan Sundaram is one of 30 artists specially commissioned to make new work to mark the biennial’s 30th anniversary edition.

For SB 15, Sundaram presents a 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—a life pursued. History acquires an allegorical mode, yet the narrative rewinds history and Enwezor’s telling phrase, ‘thinking historically in the present’, offers itself as a clue. A life premised on history and rehearsed with activist resolve. Enwezor’s proposition suggests a narrative that is dynamic yet recursive in an ethically accountable way. In this composite work, Sundaram introduces different types of embodied encounters. The wounded body with proof of torture; mourning bodies in the realm of shadows; body as miasma floating on a city lake; familial bodies in the mode of a charade; and, at the end, the iconic body that dares to represent the historical present—of a place, a nation, a territory, a people. Each constellation is different in scale and form of address. In the ‘station’ titled Shelter, the incarcerated body reclaims a ‘way of being’ that allows history to survive in a seized present. The discards at the last ‘station’ are Objects that invite citizens to revere the concrete.

The first ‘station’ is titled Suture. The torsos of male bodies as seen from the back, truncated self-portraits bearing surgical marks, frames that show the bruises of torture. Crudely knotted twine provides the suture. Extended digitally, it replicates barbed wire or a rough script; when stretched, it becomes a scrawny wing. There is at times a deep glow, a radiation, emanating from the flesh. In other images, the sensuous-to-touch body shifts to cold marble incised with geometric forms. Most of the torsos are headless: the curve of the shoulders, the mound of the neck, the shape of a hunched human. Those with headgear are flagellated victims turned resolute.

Penumbra, a collaborative project with photographers Anita Khemka and Imran Kokiloo, and their daughters Azah and Zaara, represents the second ‘station’. Wearing black tights, the girls perform a charade with their salwarclad father. Almost inadvertently, the hide and seek, their playful postures, take on the mood of mourning. Their bodies mould and merge with their father’s body as he lies motionless—as if dead. The looming shadows cast by the three figures are a part of the ensemble, like ‘extras’ in a play. A rich tone of grey veils the scene; it fuses a family performance but foreshadows the darkness of our own present.

The third ‘station’, Performers in the Vale, is also a collaborative work with photographers Anita Khemka and Imran Kokiloo, and their daughters, Azah and Zaara. Studio enactments of the father and two daughters are digitally transported to different locations in the city, and the montage offers both seamless narratives and surrealist disjunctures. These are rehearsals for playful irony and subtle violence: a cul-de-sac and a wide avenue offer cinematic locations for a father playing dead with his performing daughters. The father with a daughter slung on his back appears in the graveyard and in the city centre. Melancholy pervades. It shrouds a beautiful historic city.

The large work in Lake Sublime, the fourth ‘station’, is a water carpet stamped with miniature details. A man’s head and back, defaced by digital slicing, float on the water and make the surface dense. The negative shapes—body parts, things, birds, bits of script—are dropped into the water and appear as wreckage. The entire work, composed of delicate fragments, carries a musical air. Two accompanying works, including a light box, show fleshy forms emerging like aliens from the lake.

The fifth ‘station’, titled Shelter, is an immersive space. There are eight life-size photographs of a man incarcerated. An iron structure, a compound object—inside this the tall actor, Harish Khanna, performs his constrained existence. His attire, his stance, his gaze, his gesture amplify the subjectivity that is sought to be destroyed. He asserts his identity through complex manoeuvres, turning the cell’s iron-hold into a context for testing struggle, despair and political poise.

In the sixth ‘station’, titled Objects, three of the iron structures that were built to incarcerate the actor and that are imaged in Shelter now lie discarded in a narrow storeroom. The viewer glimpses the material basis of oppression in the State apparatus; the objects hold their own as junk sculpture and memory cells.

Text: Courtesy Geeta Kapur