"Postmortem (after Gagawaka)" an exhibition of Installation, Sculpture & Garments by Vivan Sundaram at Vadehra Art Gallery, D-53 Defence Colony > 5th November to 4th December 2013

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Time : 
5th November : 5:30 pm - Opening
5th November to 4th December : 11:00 am - 7:00 pm (Sundays Closed) - Exhibition on View

Entry : Free

Place : Vadehra Art Gallery, D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024
Venue Info : www.vadehraart.com | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Lajpat Nagar(Violet Line)'

Event Description : 'Postmortem (after Gagawaka)' By Vivan Sundaram.

The exhibition, GAGAWAKA: Making Strange, 2011, was a venture into fashion: sculptural garments made from found objects and trash. In POSTMORTEM (after Gagawaka) mannequins and garment are stripped bare. The body is upfront, it offers itself with neutral attributes. The firm support in dissected, its internal structures exposed. Scrutiny at close quarters draws the gaze, the hand’s touch; the exterior and the hollow shell of the dummy are draped and packed with medical body-parts. Internal organs, displaced from their functional location, find new couplings in the dismembered figure; the assemblage is playful, erotic, and violent.
The visual language of the ‘Anatomy Lesson’ comes to us from four hundred years ago. Vivan Sundaram splices open inanimate figures, the operation table is a basic ply-board bench converted into coffin, closet, frame and support. A series of postmortem procedures leads him to post-surrealist propositions. The viewer trips over a thing that is ‘real’ in an obtuse and obscene sense. The body, thrice dead, revives as ‘sculpture’. Contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram works in many different media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, installation and video art, and he was among the first Indian artists to work with installation. His work is politically conscious and highly intertextual in nature, referring to social problems, popular culture, problems of perception, memory and history.

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