The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Vivan SUIDAIAM Lives and works in New Delhi, India House-boat 1994 Installation at Oboro,Montr~al Kalamkhush handmade paper, steel, video, telescope For an artist who has taken the poetics of displacement as his exemplary theme what could be a more appropriate emblem than a vessel washed ashore? such as the one that Vivan Sundaram proposes to realise in situ for the Second Asia– Pacific Triennial. Becalmed rather than afloat, the hulk's seemingly stranded condition might itself invite the viewer on an errance such as the one embarked upon by the artist himself; a wayward passage from the 'outskirts of the East' (to borrow Joseph Conrad's revealing phrase), to the shores of the modernist metropolis and beyond. The 'views' that might unfold would also attest to the shifting frames from which the prospect has come to be sighted/sited: from the bounded space of easel painting with which Sundaram began (in the mid- 1960s) to a progressive dismantling of pictorial limits, culminating with an annexation of space that can no longer countenance the idea of a boundary .. .Even when working within the parameters of oil painting Sundaram was wont to perturb the medium's limitations, notably, by the introjection of spatial disalignments in the suite of pictures that propose the picture plane as a shattered pane, or the refractory shards of a damaged world. Indeed, fragmentation, and the reconfiguring of fragments according to an aesthetic of montage, has provided Sundaram with a particularly sharp-edged instrument with which to allegorise the contradictions of a post-colonial situation. Riven as the picture plane was to become in Sundaram's work, it now seems inevitable that he should eventually go beyond the frame, annexing both wall and floor in a de-territorialisation that is as much of media as it is in keeping with the restless mobility of his interventions. Indeed, the 'fall' into literal space was preceded by a suite of pastels collectively entitled 'Journeys' -offshore views of Chinese junks and spice boats in an apocalyptic waste, freighted with their cargo of colonial spoils, and adrift in the waters of History, as in Navigating the Occident 1987. A work whose subtitle, Split oar, becomes emblematic of an aesthetics of caesura, alluding both to the disclosure of a critical disjuncture in the Western representational regime that Sundaram had attempted in his pictorial work, and auguring the breakthrough into a space no longer confined by the frame. It is as if that familiar trope of Romantic painting, 'the open window and the storm-tossed boat', had been shorn of the heroic individualism that it once betokened; just as, correspondingly, the vanishing point had come to be revealed as the locus of occultation of Europe's Other. Sundaram's subsequent forays have inevitably taken the opposing shore as their vantage point. The dynamics of the gaze, mobilised by his work in two dimensions, are now accompanied by a phenomenological investment of the body in the act of perceiving the unstable topos of the flatbed picture plane. Land shift 1991, the revealing title of a multimedia work, demands a physical and mental 'tilt' on the part of the spectator in order to fully apprehend the transcoding of the (supposed) cognitive transparency of the cartographic mode into an image of a shell-shocked landscape, such as the one left in the wake of the so-called Gulf War. The desert trail in the aftermath of conflagration finds a complement and a contrast in the meandering course of A river carries its past, a 1992 multimedia work (engine oil, burn marks on handmade paper) that Sundaram made while Artist-in-Residence in Cleveland, England.The flotsam of the colonial past (the river Tees was once a major conduit for the needs of Empire, just as it is now the hub of an important shipbuilding industry) comingles with the commerce of the present, in a configuration that imaginatively spans the changing historical prospect of the site. 102 I A RT I s T s: sou T H AN o sou TH - EA s T A s I A The desire to anchor meanings in History's tide: such is the ambition of all of Sundaram's work. Characteristically, this entails going against the current, as in the recoding of modernist tropes with a view to recovering their lapsed utopian potential, or more sombrely, a meditation on the waning of this possibility. Thus, for example, the melancholy tour of modernist emblemata (from Malevich to minimalism) offered by the installation entitled Memorial 1993, a work triggered by the photograph of a dead man lying in the street, a victim of the communal riots that followed the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya (in northern India) by right-wing Hindu extremists. A commemoration of an anonymous subject of history via a rememoration of the lost possibilities of figuration, the passage through what have become the memento mori of the modern, re-sited in the shadow of a barbarous public event. But the itinerary can also take a private, autobiographical turn as in an installation entitled The Sher-Gil archive, Budapest, 1995, that evokes, through family photographs and other fragmentary memorabilia, the poignant destiny of Amrita Sher-Gil. The work of Sher-Gil, a Paris– trained painter of Inda-Hungarian parentage, instantiates the inaugural moment of pictorial modernism in India. The private source of this archive (Sher-Gil was Sundaram's aunt and the photographs of her which he has redeployed are those taken by his grandfather, an amateur photographer) comes nevertheless to be transcribed in a more impersonal history: that of the twilight of an aristocracy (of spirit and of class) in the context of the Indian subcontinent's transition to a post-colonial state. Sundaram is among those artists working in India today most acutely aware of the contradictions and vicissitudes of that transition. The revisiting of the past has been undertaken from the perspective of the future, for it is there that the (political) wager of his art lies. Hence the appropriateness of an anticipatory mode with which we began; the vessel he proposes to realise already awaits its launching. DeepakAnanth,Lecturer in Art,Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Caen,France