Vivan Sundaram was an Indian contemporary artist. He worked in many different mediums, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, installation, and video art, and his work was politically conscious and highly intertextual in nature.
Vivan Sundaram’s photomontages reconstruct his family’s narrative, sourced from his aunt’s paintings and grandfather’s photographs, who were both well-known, successful artists. Amrita Sher-Gil, Sundaram’s aunt, is considered the first professional female Indian artist and is one of the country’s earliest Modernists. The artist’s grandfather, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, was a scholar and amateur photographer, now seen as a pioneer of Indian photography. Umrao’s wife, Marie Antoinette Gottesman was a Hungarian opera singer, and the family spent much of their life in Europe. Using this unique family history with accompanying visual material, Sundaram creates rich black and white images that mingle generations and decades in a single image.