April 03 - September 03, 2023

Vivan Sundaram’s installation Memorial (1993-2014) was on view at Tate Modern’s Blavatnik Building. Created in response to the violent conflict between Hindu and Muslim groups in Mumbai in the early 1990s, the work centers around a newspaper photograph of an unidentified victim lying on the street. With Memorial, Sundaram raised questions about erasure, collective memory, nationalism, and citizenship in post-colonial South Asia.

Link to event (Link)

Tate Modern
Blavatnik Building
Hopton Street
London SE1 9TG
United Kingdom

June 30 - August 30 2023

Vivan Sundaram’s work is included in Come tu mi vuoi / As you want me, Fondazione Modena Arti Visive’s exhibition of works from the FMAV collections curated by the class of ICON 2022 (Course for Curators of the Contemporary Image).

Link to exhibition (Link)

Fondazione Modena Arti Visive
Via Emilia 283
41121 Modena
Italy

February 07 - June 11 2023

Vivan Sundaram’s new work will be on view at the Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present. Conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, the biennial will feature works by more than 150 artists presented at 16 venues across the emirate. Sundaram is one of 30 artists commissioned to develop new work to mark the Sharjah Biennial’s 30-year anniversary. 

"Okwui’s proposition suggests a narrative that is dynamic yet recursive in an ethically accountable way. I present a photography-based project, Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2022), a choreography of bodies that have undergone violence, experienced incarceration, and lived through mourning. The sixth ‘station’ signifies a journey premised on the historical and rehearsed with activist resolve."
- Vivan Sundaram

Link to event (Link)

Sharjah
United Arab Emirates

December 23 2022 - April 10 2023

Vivan Sundaram’s work is on view at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-23. The biennale's fifth edition, titled Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, is curated by Shubigi Rao and includes 200 works displayed across Kochi.  

Link to event (Link)

Kochi-Muziris Biennale
Fort Kochi
Kerala, India

March 12 - August 14, 2022

Vivan Sundaram’s work is included in the exhibition Garmenting: Costume and Contemporary Art at Museum of Arts and Design, the first global survey exhibition dedicated to the use of clothing as a medium of visual art.

The exhibition is guest curated by Alexandra Schwartz, a New York-based art historian, curator, and adjunct professor in the School of Graduate Studies at SUNY | Fashion Institute of Technology. Schwartz remarked, “Despite the current ubiquity of garmenting as a visual arts practice, it has not previously been examined or theorized. This exhibition centers contemporary artists’ exploration of dress as a formal trope and critical tool, using the language of fashion to address fundamental aspects of subjectivity, including gender, class, race, and ethnicity."

Link to event (Link)

Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle
New York, NY 11001
USA

February 24 – June 5 2022

Vivan Sundaram’s work is included in the exhibition A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920 – 2020 at Whitechapel Gallery, a 100-year survey of the studio through the work of artists and image-makers from around the world.

Review in The Wall Street Journal March 16, 2022

Link to event (Link)

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St, London

December 2021

Pamela Singh, Nandita Raman, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and Vivan Sundaram are included in Face Time: A History of the Photographic Portrait by Phillip Prodger, published by Thames & Hudson, 2021.

Face Time is an esteemed curator’s introduction to the history and themes of photographic portraiture that masterfully combines some of the most famous portraits ever made with rarely seen treasures and curiosities.

Saturday, 18 September 2021, 5PM (IST)

The Shergil Sundaram Arts Foundation Lab will be hosting a book discussion, September 18th, 2021 at 5PM (IST), on "Portal: The Curious Account of Achintya Bose" by Shan Bhattacharya.

The book is a fictional "found archive" in a diary format containing the collection of Achintya Bose, a Calcutta-based owner of a photography studio.

Join the Zoom panel discussion of “Portal” by registering at the link below. The author, Shan Bhattacharya, will be joined by Shohini Ghosh, Rimli Bhattacharya, and Ranu Roychoudhuri.

Link to Zoom Registration (Link)
New Delhi, India

April 28, 2021, 12:00PM EDT
Online Event

Join Dr. Paul Sternberger and Associate Curator of Contemporary Asian Art Carol Huh for a conversation with Delhi-based artist Vivan Sundaram focused on the development of his multifaceted practice. The subject of the 2019 book, Vivan Sundaram is Not a Photographer by Ruth Rosengarten, Sundaram crisscrosses boundaries of genre and medium to produce powerful installations that are both shaped by and transcend photographic modes. How can we better understand the artist’s diverse world of methods and materials? How are the museum’s own photo holdings from Sundaram’s Re-Take of Amrita series best situated within his broader oeuvre? Following the discussion, the curators and Sundaram will take questions from the audience in this special live event.

Link to archived talk (Link)

December 17, 2018 – Partially Ongoing

Vivan Sundaram's work is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera" exhibition. (On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 921)

“Epic Abstraction” features large-scale abstract painting and sculpture from the 1940s through the early twenty-first century, drawn primarily from the Met collection. Abstract Expressionism serves as the springboard for a thematic installation that intersperses enduring icons with works by lesser-known artists and debuts new acquisitions. Many of the artists represented worked in large formats because they sought not only to have the scope to fully explore line, color, shape, and texture, but also to evoke expansive – “epic”-ideas and subjects, including time, history, the body, and existential concerns of the self.

Link to Event (Link)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York

February 1, 2020

Congratulations to Vivan Sundaram for being honored with the Vanguard Award at the Asia Society's Asia Arts Game Changer Award Gala on February 1, 2020. Asia Arts Game Changer Awards India is a signature gala celebration honoring the Asia Arts Game Changers during the week of the India Art Fair in New Delhi. The Awards pay tribute to artists and arts professionals who have made a significant contribution to the development of modern and contemporary art in Asia and who inspire a deeper empathy and understanding of the world through their work.

Link to Event (Link)
Asia Arts Game Changer Awards India
The Taj Mahal Hotel, New Delhi

September 6 – October 11, 2019

Photographic works by Atul Bhalla and Vivan Sundaram are featured in A Time for Farewells. Curated by Premjish Achari, the exhibit "[casts] aside the constraints of traditional notions and existing power structures, the artists of the exhibition present sculptures, drawings, videos, and photographic works that collectively imagine a future radically different from our present, in the hope that the act of imagining can be an impetus for change."

Link to Event Page (Link)
A Time for Farewells
Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College
370 Lancaster Avenue
Haverford, PA 19041
USA

February 22-March 24, 2019

Works by Atul Bhalla and Vivan Sundaram are on exhibit in the 2019 Chennai Photo Biennale, the second edition of this city-wide celebration of photography.

Link to Event Page (Link)
Chennai Photo Biennale
Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

June 29 - July 10, 2018

"The presentation at Haus der Kunst is the most comprehensive and wideranging survey of Sundaram’s work at a European institution. The display is conceived as a sequence of juxtapositions with a view to suggesting how formal and thematic concerns ricochet from one work to another. History, Memory, Archive: the three keywords that the artist has designated as the overarching concerns of his practice are the signposts, as it were, for articulating the overall structure of the exhibition, an open-ended framework for exploring the connections or disjunctures between these terms and themes." - Curator Deepak Ananth, Assistant Curator Anna Schneider

Link to Exhibition Page (Link)
Haus der Kunst
Prinzregentenstraße 1
80538 Munich

February 9 - June 30, 2018
 

Vivan Sundaram's first ever retrospective surveying his practice over five decades is on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India. 

Preparing for his Retrospective exhibition, Vivan Sundaram says: “This exhibition presents the themes I have engaged with, but it also proposes structures that hold things together in retrospect: via the work, the exhibition layout, and spectator itineraries. ‘Step inside and you are no longer a stranger’: the exhibition’s title reflects the conflicting dimensions of my practice.”

Step inside and you are no longer a stranger
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

January 19 - March 31, 2018

Works by sepiaEYE artists Sunil Gupta, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Pamela Singh, and Vivan Sundaram will be on view at the Kamloops Art Gallery exhibition Re Present: Photography from South Asia. 

Re Present: Photography from South Asia
Kamloops Art Gallery

22 October – 26 November 2017

Osamu James Nakagawa, Beatrice Pediconi, and Vivan Sundaram are exhibiting works at the renowned Noorderlicht Photofestival. 2017’s theme is NUCLEUS | Imagining Science, showcasing works that utilize and are inspired by science.

Noorderlicht Photofestival 2010
Groningen, The Netherlands

Wednesday, May 10, 2017
7:00pm – 8:30pm

As part of the South Asia Institute’s 2016-17 Colloquium Series, Vivan Sundaram will present recent installations in a conversation with Andreas Huyssens, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature.

This event is open and free to the public.

Wednesday, May 10, 7:00pm – 8:30pm
A Conversation with Vivan Sundaram and Andreas Huyssens, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature
2016-17 Colloquium Series
South Asia Institute, Columbia University
Knox Hall, Room 208
606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont
New York, NY

17 - 25 March, 2017

Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946 is a monumental installation intended as a work of public art to explore, dissect, and examine the “failure” of the Royal Indian Navy’s six-day insurrection against the colonial government. Within Sundaram’s ship-like steel and aluminum object is a performance space that plays a sound work by British artist David Chapman. Visitors can read newspaper reports, telegrams from the Empire, and books on the Insurrection from various view points and distances— compiled and conceptualized by Ashish Rajadhyaksha with Valentina Vitalli. This is a continuation of Sundaram’s “history projects” in which he uses historical events (“unresolved histories”) to explore their impact and the alternate futures they could have created.

Link to Event (Link)
Vivan Sundaram and Ashish Rajadhyaksha: Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946
Coomarswamy Hall
Mumbai, India

23 January 2017

Vivan Sundaram’s photo installation, Terraoptics reviewed in the January 23rd issues of The Hindu and The New Indian Express. Terraoptics (14 Dec 2016 – 10 Feb 2017) will be on view at Gallery Sutra, Fort Kochi.

Look for Terraoptics at sepiaEYE opening May 9th, 2017.

23 January 2017
“Pot-shards speak history” LINK 
Read Article (PDF)

“Capturing Earth’s Incandescence” LINK
Read Article (PDF)

October 14, 2015

The work of Vivan Sundaram was recently highlighted by Peggy Roalf for DART- Design Art Daily, a publication of AI-AP (American Illustration, American Photography). His vintage work from sepiaEYE’s exhibition “I need my memories. They are my documents.” is featured. Read the article here (Link)

September 12 – December 13, 2015

Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India has traveled to the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas from the San Jose Museum of Art. Matthew’s An Indian from India series as well as her video installation, Open Wound and works from Sundaram’s Re-Take of Amrita and an installation of Indira’s Piano were on view alongside works by Gauri Gill, Jitish Kallat, Pushpamala N., Raqs Media Collective are on view.

Link to Event (Link)
Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India
Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University
Kansas

April 19 – September 6, 2015

The Fowler Museum at UCLA presents Making Strange, an exhibition of 2 bodies of work by Vivan Sundaram: “Gagawaka” (wearable sculptural garments) and “Postmortem” (assemblages of mannequin parts and wooden props.)

Link to Event (Link)
Vivan Sundaram: Making Strange
Fowler Museum
Los Angeles

January 18 – June 22, 2014

The Crow Collection of Asian Art exhibit of Re-Take of Amrita features 35 photomontages from the series and a rare showing of the dual-track video installation, Indira’s Piano. The exhibition has been extended through to the 22nd of June, and has been reviewed by Sybile Girault of L’Oeil de la Photographie (The Eye of Photography).

Link to Article (Link)
L’Oeil de la PhotographieLink to Event (Link)
Vivan Sundaram: Re-take of Amrita
Crow Collection of Asian Art
Dallas

October 12, 2013 – January 5, 2014

The art walk in Liège brings together photography, video and installations made in this decade, supplemented by new works. The artists draw inspiration from India’s mythology and rich symbolism to create very poetic works. These often refer to the populations living alongside rivers and the way they deal with water scarcity and pollution. Curated by Gayatri Sinha, the exhibition will feature works by Atul Bhalla and Vivan Sundaram amongst others. The artists explore the theme in the European context of a city on a river. The walk takes place in and around the Grand Curtius, the starting point, on the banks of the Meuse River.

Link to Event (Link)
Art Walk: Water Europalia India
Liège