Six Stations of a Life Pursued: Vivan Sundaram

The work was exhibited at Sharjah Biennial 15 in 2023 as one among a distinct set of thirty artists’ projects that were close to the concerns of the curator-to-be, the late Okwui Enwezor, who had titled the Biennial Thinking Historically in the Present. After Enwezor’s passing in 2019, Hoor Al Qasimi, Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, continued with his title and curated SB15 with an inspired vision.

Vivan did not live to see his work installed at Sharjah. The present exhibition is special in all ways. It is offered by the galleries that have represented Vivan over the years: Chemould Prescott Road (Mumbai), PHOTOINK (Delhi) and Vadehra Art Gallery (Delhi). 

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Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022) signifies a journey with periodic halts: to release pain, regain trust, behold beauty, recall horror, discard memory. Each constellation of images is different in scale and in its form of address.

Through this journey, history acquires an allegorical mode even as the narrative rewinds history; we are led towards ‘thinking historically in the present’. A life premised on the terrain of history and rehearsed with activist resolve: this proposition suggests a narrative that is dynamic yet recursive in an ethically accountable way. 

In this composite work, Vivan introduces different types of lived encounters. The wounded body with evidence of torture; mourning bodies in the realm of shadows; familial bodies in the mode of a charade; body as miasma floating on a city-lake; and the incarcerated body that struggles to reclaim a ‘way of being’ and represents the historical present of a place, a nation, a territory, a people, a person. The discards at the last ‘station’ are the props constructed for the photo-shoot. Concrete objects that embody wreckage and memory whereby we may comprehend the exacting materiality of human life.

Excerpt from Geeta Kapur’s text in the forthcoming publication, Vivan Sundaram: Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2025)