Great Indian Bizarre

"I am not interested in being original." Probably the reason why Vivan Sundaram has repeatedly chosen to be unconventional and ...

"I am not interested in being original." Probably the reason why Vivan Sundaram has repeatedly chosen to be unconventional and used photography as a reference in his works! But this is the first time that something fascinated him enough to go behind the camera. "In 1997, I was involved in a sculptural project for which I had to visit the Sunday market at Red Fort. I found it so engaging that I started taking photographs, initially with people in it," he draws curtain from his ongoing photo-exhibition Great Indian Bazaar at Gallery Chemould. First exhibited at the Second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997 and now ready for next month’s showing at Galerie Foundation for Indian Artists in Amsterdam, these images are top-angle views of second-hand goods laid out on the ground.

"I am a little more on my own territory when I say it’s not very easy to take a good picture with people in it. What pumps verve into a frame are inanimate objects and still life," he says, giving an insight into his first-ever snapshotsdepicting the debris of a consumer society, national and foreign products inadvertently mixed together. "These used objects, imaginary juxtapositions of multihued images, carried personal histories. And suddenly the hands and feet of the seller and buyer appeared on the edge of the frame. They were both present as well as absent in this little rustic warehouse," says Vivan. And soon he was clicking with extraordinary fascination.

The outcome? Hundreds of small frames where eye automatically converges on old shoes, combs, toothbrush, undergarments, computer chips and sewing machines — the poverty level of consumption. "My photographs don’t deal with the design element of street fanfare. They are observations of trivia as a disordered spread, which clearly show that discarded rubbish is up for sale." It’s as if Vivan has fascination for ruins, to document a consumer society which has symbolically been buried.

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"No. This is just imagery as I define it," he explains. After two decades of dependence onphotographic images, I felt it’s time to show what the world really looks like," he clarifies his stand. His trip with photographs started in 1991 in a work called Enclosing the Gaze — a stone column about 6.5 feet high and 2,000 kg heavy. On one side of the column, Vivan put a perspex into the mirror and on it he stuck pictures. The viewer could just see the back of the photographs on which he wrote quotations by Roland Barthes. The viewer could also see photographs reflected in the mirror.

"Photograph allows all these inversions which can’t be imagined in drawings or paintings. It has this throw-away quality about it," he elaborates. Vivan’s other major photo-relation project is where he pierced a Babri Masjid demolition photograph with nails — his way of representing a hateful moment. From a hateful moment to a hateful society. "And when the time came, these photographs had to be presented. When I used them as reference, obviously I didn’t present them in traditional format as a framed picture. Nowthey had to be framed." Looking for them at the Red Fort Bazaar, a seller insisted he bought them in all those lurid colours. "How could I? But it suddenly started working on me."

The show sets up a formal correspondence in the gallery to the display of goods in the bazaar. The huge circular heap of flashy red frames on the ground is the artwork, with metal frames stacked in a two-metre high column adding the much needed touch. The walls have offset printing plates with texts by Prabhat Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik and C P Chandrasekhar. "This way of exhibiting doesn’t put any kind of demand on you. It just makes you relax. It makes you stop and look at something you would normally pass by without noticing."