VS: Made the following year after Memorial, now further distanced from the aftermath of the 1992/93 riots, House/Boat nevertheless carries traces and marks of the tragedy The two containers are a direct reference to monuments/homes destroyed, and the call by the fundamentalists for departure: to leave the land, live in exile.
"House/Boat", 1994, at OBORO, Montreal, Canada
(Click on the Image above for an enlarged view)KK: The installation situates itself in a metaphoric space - territories of erasure and displacement pockmarked by civil collapse and moral calumny The references are to the ethnic violence of a recent past not yet forgotten, its iconographies however are limned with possibilities of redemption.
VS: House/Boat can be seen as a set of very enlarged models, almost the real thing. House, the cube - white and minimalist from inside. But the space is occupied by a black box on which is placed a vessel with water. Through the transparent base the viewer sees the flames of burning furniture in a video loop. This notional act of destruction can also be read as the hearth being kept warm. The food will continue to be cooked for family and community the inhabitants will not been driven away
"House", 1994, 210 x 210 x 210 cm, Kalamkhush handmade paper,
steel, wood, glass, brake grease, acrylic paint, video
(Click on the Image above for an enlarged view)KK: The issues raised here are also of enclosure, visibility concealment, dislocation: of the kind of paradoxical expressiveness that occurs when things are brought together out of context and alignment. The main thing is the idea and how to crystallize it. If it involves indirect experience-as in an image seen on a monitor - or even secrecy as in withholding specific information creating discrepancies between what is given and what is meant, so much the better. The overt and the metaphorical can coexist, the associative and the allegorical stimulus can elude simple interpretation by setting up shades of meaning.
VS: The boat propped up on railway 'sleepers', a container not for departure, with the floorboard extending out to receive the migrant/minority/passenger/viewer The shift from three-dimensional to two-dimensional sculpture: the square metal sheets function as the base of the boat, bringing perspective into sculpture. Carl Andre spoke about this. The playful input of the monocular eyepiece positioned to look in towards two video monitors wedged into the prow end of the boat. One shows in close-up the face of a woman. She enacts words (in silence) that can read as a rude text. In the monitor above there are playful objects, a woman's hairdo. I have no clear explanation why I decided to have these video images inside the boat. The boat as feminine? A journey to come across the unexpected person/serendipity?
"Boat", 1994, 700 x 250 x 180 cm, Kalamkhish handmade paper,
steel, wood, video, at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
(Click on the Image above for an enlarged view)KK: Possibly the medium of video afforded the kind of condensation of space, the movement and layering of image, the fluidity of gesture, the quasi-narrative quality required by the artist who wanted to "interpolate on the face as landscape, a journey"
VS: The paper walls were made in the Gandhi Ashram handmade paper factory in Abmedabad. The use of handmade paper for sculpture and objects has been going on ever since I moved away from easel paintings in Collaboration/Combines. The interface between surface as sculptural relief and painting between the framed picture and the three-dimensional object. The painting's flatbed plane is space for information and mark-making; as freestanding sculpture the paper walls provide space to enter, walk into and over the object. For circumambulating, moving to the zone of architecture.
KK: Though Sundaram has distanced himself from painting, having reached presumably something of an impasse/saturation point in that genre, the visual complexities of his own earlier paintings and their preoccupations with material and space seem to seek renewal and regeneration in his three-dimensional work. Colour, a key structural component then, now drains away almost completely leaving behind a great deal of white and to a lesser extent mineral and organic colours-of wood, oil, charcoal, steel-that are intrinsic to material. Traces of minimalistic reductivity and absence, these colours exist in themselves, serving at most as vehicles of an exercise in aesthetic self-analysis, but otherwise non-allusive. Stained and soaked down on membrane-like surfaces of handmade paper and parchment, light and porous as skin, these disseminations of signs are deciphered as if in the very moment of mark-making. The Kalamkhush is stretched across an iron framework for the house, and the boat.
The former extends the iconographic lineage of a shelter, a refuge, a habitation, its vessel holding molten liquid, an archaic symbol suggesting both sustenance and mysterious alchemical transmutations. The beached boat, "its flanks left open by an invisible battle", has immense congruence, a fluidity of idea and narrative that connects to its recurrence as image through the last two decades of this artist's work. Its construction a model that expands possibilities.VS: The ensemble can be read as that of a cross - the dysfunctional boat hoisted up awkwardly, its body lying on heavy blocks of wood piled one on top of the other, carrying the marks of nails that once held down the rail-tracks.
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