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Having known Vivan Sundaram these past fifteen years and observed a great deal of his work - always complex and innovative, always structured through a layered grid of references and history, and animated by metaphor and association closely enough, it occurred to me that the writing this time may perhaps derive its texture not from a surfeit of description and information, but somewhat like the work itself, from a submission to chance that may lead to something unexpected.

We began a written exchange that was more about dialogue, less about conclusions.

Vivan Sundaram: When I entered the area of installation art I found myself recalling my 1960s' experience of international art. A great deal of the art of the 1960's reconstitutes the structures and materials of the 60s with content that engages with the personal/political. Many feminists and artists from the third world seem to interpolate or pollute such structures with images and texts.

Kamala Kapoor:An international postmodern orientation, an openness to pluralizing approaches and knowledge has been internalized in the work of Vivan Sundaram, who turned to installation art and more conceptual work in the early 90s. The artist acknowledges his debt to western influences, notably the 'impoverishments' of arte povera and the works of minimalists such as Carl Andre, who work with the notion of interaction between opposites (solids and voids, appearance and transparency), leaving the field of interpretation open and allusive.

VS: The need to abstract, to work at the cutting edge of the formal: then with the political/tragic, with the event/subject.

KK: More about provoking thought and artistic experience, Sundaram's art is at the same time an affirmation of history culture, political realities and identity, both personal and regional. About elements that go a long way towards charging the relationship between his space and his subjective experience. With the degree of hybridization in art today, with increasing cultural crossovers, Sundaram's form of multiculturalism is committed to both its centre and its margins, to his own metaphors and metalinguistics, his work a critical conscience of his own artistic research. It is also a commitment to "that desire for empathic difference, difference not from other groups but within one's group that may serve as a breakthrough for a new kind of multiculturalism, a sensation of one's own being as sensuous and as sharp as the water traced on Helen Keller's palm."

VS: All through the 90s, I have used an array of materials and skills. The making or manufacture of the object with varied inputs. The collaborative nature of the artwork has special significance for me. For this show, I have worked on paper, wood, steel, glass, grease, liquids, latex and the electronic. I have worked with a blacksmith, Suraj Vishvakarma, who fabricated the steel framework for House/Boat, and with Chanan and Sadhan Singh, with whom I design and execute all the woodwork.

KK: While this may raise some hackles, I feel Sundaram's imagination in many ways recovers the creative potential of craft. Evident is a level of decision making, sensitivity to material and satisfaction in the physical hands-on experience of shaping and moulding substance and medium. There is a tarkhan in him as well as the aesthete, the semiotician, the artist. And while he may take the help of professional tarkhans to execute the ribcage of the hull or the curved arc of the prow, Sundaram's boat will ultimately take shape through the turnkey construction of his own concepts and practices. From choosing the wood with an understanding of its notches and grains to its final sanding down, the object-sculpture is the realization of his own particular idea-image.

VS: I have always loved carpentry In school I spent all my craft classes in the carpentry shop. The eccentric Umrao Singh used to have a professional carpentry table in his bedroom-study and I have childhood memories of playing with his tools. From the make-believe world of the child to the maker of objects and structures, to the material presence of things~their concreteness and their processes always foregrounded. I like the joints to be seen, a certain crudeness of manufacture, not the refinement of a master craftsperson.

KK: There is an almost a child like joy reawakened in the unexpected metamorphosis of materials, in work where increasingly labour-intensive objects are realized with the assistance of skilled workers and other artists and friends. Throughout the past few years of Sundaram's installation-making, his manufactured objects have shared equal time and space with found objects, video, film, sound effects, photographs, documents, personal memorabilia and much else.

VS: Although the works cover a six-year period and have been made for very different locations, they all deal with placement, dislocation and relocation. If rupture informs a great part of my work, the desire to suture and structure the dismembered parts engages me equally.

KK: is there also an intent to dislocate and contrast the literal and the metaphorical? At times the works have a built-in melancholy-for example, Memoriar and The SherGil Archive, their construction almost sepulchral, but in very different ways: political in the first, personal in the second. Intrinsic to both constructions are photographs-in the case of Memorial, just one-and documentation. Yet the works seem to transcend both their sources and dislocations in that imaginary space that dwells between physical fact and the moment depicted.

VS: I suppose it is true that a melancholy is lodged in the underbelly of my affirmative self-perhaps it is an inheritance. Sometimes it takes on the spatial qualities of distance, remoteness. Death, directly referred to or implied in the narrative, is a recurring motif. Installations carry in their presentations a death of the object or an afterlife fraught with uncertainties. I know how utterly sad and decrepit my works look when not on display while the dustiest of paintings after a quick cleaning acquire a glow. It is unlikely anybody will find a masterpiece of an installation in the attic. 

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