Vivan Sundaram was born in Simla, India in 1943. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India in 1965 and received a Commonwealth Scholarship to complete a Post-graduate diploma at the Slade School of Art in London in 1968. Between the late 1960s and late 1980s Sundaram was most concerned with painting; however, his practice has since shifted to installation art. The move was not dramatic, but a mindful transition to enable a greater degree of freedom in the conceptual realisations of ideas that still maintain a strong link to narrative representation.

For the installation The Sher-Gil archive Sundaram worked with a wide range of material, primarily archival, that belonged to his family. Sundaram assumes the role of director, where the authorship of the artworks lies in the orchestration of the components. This work also recognises the dynastic as much as the individual in a tense, often elliptical, partnership. The work moves between a set of 54 black and white photographs taken by Sundaram's grandfather, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, and other archival texts including letters by Amrita Sher-Gil (Umrao's daughter and Sundaram's aunt), reliquary boxes containing memorabilia, woollen kurta coats, and etched glass dating from 1924. Citing his family archaeology in an allegorical journey, Sundaram constructs an 'alternative museum'.(1)

The work revolves around memory. Umrao Singh Sher-Gil was a keen amateur photographer who systematically documented himself well into old age. At the same time he, more or less secretly and equally obsessively, photographed his immediate family. Sundaram has re-photographed the prints that he made from his grandfather's negatives and paired them with a series of portraits of Amrita Sher-Gil. These parallel trajectories show the gradual aging of a patriarchal figure and the slow maturing of a very young woman who died tragically at the age of 29. Amrita Sher-Gil is herself an almost mythological figure in Indian modern art history. Born in Budapest, she spent the first eight years of her life in Hungary and then returned to India where she spent the next eight years in Shimla. In 1929 she went to Paris to study painting at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and returned to India in 1934. The small and precious collection of paintings she made during her short career remains at the centre of Indian modernist painting. Amrita's letters to her parents paper the walls of this installation and eloquently document her struggle with identity and nationalism.

By constructing a work of art as an archive, Sundaram is able to draw in other public histories from the early 1920s to 1941, the year of Amrita's death. The journey that is constructed forms the basis for considering other journeys and migrations. The collision between public and private domains is a strategic and deliberate manipulation by Sundaram, who explores his unique position in this installation.

The self portrait and portraiture appear in various guises within The Sher-Gil archive. In its most exposed form, the images of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil are consciously constructed portraits - confident images of an aristocrat and scholar. The letters of Amrita Sher-Gil form another axis from which self portraiture operates, albeit in written form. Grafted onto this work is Vivan Sundaram's own deliberate immersion into his family history. The portrait of the artist is configured as an invisible presence, as a sieve through which the mass that is familial history has been sifted and isolated. In the teak boxes, among the woollen folds of the large jackets and as autochromes (an early and rare method of colour photography) of the now dead ancestors, the connections between these objects and their allegory are in fact a disjointed one. For this is a reassembling of a 'body' of memory and, as with any 'body' that looks at itself, to see it as a whole is impossible. There are whole areas of this memorial text which have been left aside and unexposed to a public gaze. Sundaram describes this editorial process in terms of how reality itself is perceived. Art historian Charles Green has said: 'When one talks about reality one often assumes that it is actually something you can see. Things that can be concretely and specifically described. You can interpolate into this view of reality the notion that there is something embedded which is not visible, that there are entire histories embedded in the texture which one sees or does not see'.(2)

1. Keseru, Katalin. 'The Sher-Gil Archive'. Vivan Sundaram: The Sher-Gil Archive. Mucsarnok's Dorottya Gallery, Budapest, 1995, p.2.

2. Green, Charles. 'The nervous system'. World Art, no 18, 1998, p.58.