Making Strange:
Gagawaka + Postmortem

Photographs: Vivan Sundaram
Text: Rakhee Balaram, Andreas Huyssen, and Saloni Mathur
Publisher: Fowler Museum at UCLA
192 pages
Illustrations throughout: installations, objects & performances
Year: 2015
ISBN: 9780984755097
Price: $30
Hard cover, 8.5 x 11 in

This volume juxtaposes for the first time two striking bodies of work by Delhi-based and internationally recognized contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram. Gagawaka, the first project, consists of twenty-seven sculptural garments made from a bizarre assortment of recycled materials including foam cups, surgical masks, tire tubes, tampons, X-ray film, bandages, bras, foil pill wrappers, and drain pipes. These garments evoke a relationship both playful and subversive to fashion, haute couture, the runway, and the brand.

The second project, Postmortem, is a collection of haunting sculptural objects composedof mannequins, tailor's dummies, wooden props, and models of human organs and bones. Postmortem questions the spectacle of Gagawaka with a wider set ofcommentaries about the human body and social concerns related to aging, illness, and death.

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