KK: An assembled structure, layered with the riddles of experience and perception, of contingencies of location and .context, of implications of function and its subversion, of entry and egress, of the paradoxical properties of enigma and clarity, of participatory, innovative modes of viewing and more hermetic ones. The form itself, liberated from logical, spatial order, appears autonomous, remote from the utilitarian world, a relic in a rite long forgotten, its atavistic elements harkening back as if to some primal source,
"Carrier",1996, 152 x 400 x 225 cms, acrylic paint
on wood, video, cloth, at The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia.
(Click on the Image above for an enlarged view)VS: In Carrier, the boat functions as shelter, This is an ancient notion, civilizations have used it as form and metaphor. On upturning the boat its bottom becomes a covering, a roof. By propping it up on oars, the static object gains a dynamic energy. The raised shell becomes a kind of launching pad on which are strapped spears, harpoons, arrows, oars and paddles, worn on top of a giant insect. With linear incisions, drawings and low relief carvings on the roof of the Carrier, the ideal first view is from this end, where the viewer does not know exactly what the object is.
"Carrier", Front View
(Click on the Image above for an enlarged view)KK: Elevated on wooden oars, its function arrested, rests a turned-over wooden boat. Almost a leitmotif that has sailed through a great deal of Sundaram's work these past fifteen years. The boat, always formulated anew, has in the past come to rest at even unlikelier beachheads; against a riverside tent in one instance and atop a tall column in another. In its heart, this artist's work has always contained a sort of cultural hypothesis filled with images of journeys and voyages, of discoveries and adventures, of migration and exile. The boat thus becomes a metaphor, its limitless variety and pervasive presence a source of poetic strength. This one, lovingly crafted, an archetypal symbol, its outer surface encrusted with segments/motifs, resembling some prehistoric crustacean form of life, an anthropological subversion of sorts, is now a 'shelter', a place for 'congregation'. The video monitor under the arched dome of the inverted boat projects an image of Shubha Mudgal, the well-known classical-turned-pop singer; the song is a mellifluously rendered Kabir 'doha'.
"Carrier", Side View
(Click on the Image above for an enlarged view)VS: The playful interface of the television monitor as icon and the singer as icon, appearing behind a thin half-drawn curtain, as is done for idols.
KK: Operating as it does at several levels of meaning including that of archaeological excavations, it is as if the work, with its intriguing conflations of images and time, reveals strata of our culture's televisual, cinematic, literary representations-even as it tests its case in the prehistoric. The disparate references testify to a yielding nostalgia, a refined historicism, a quintessential romanticism, a self-conscious artistic position. An allegorical work in which the objects of consciousness are located in the imaginative spaces of poetry.
© Arts Indian Atelier 1999-2000