The business of curating a retrospective is a tricky one, and doubly so when dealing with an artist whose oeuvre is as prolific and protean as Vivan Sundaram’s. “Step Inside and You Are No Longer a Stranger” was organized in such a way that its 180 examples of drawings, paintings, sculptures, collages, photomontages and installations—created over a period of five decades—synthesized into something that surpassed the usual exhibition experience and felt almost like a playground, navigable according to the whims of the eyes, mind and emotions. While this is a testament to Sundaram’s refined aesthetic sensibilities—well illustrated in the simplicity of examples from his “Bad Drawings for Dost” series, such as the fragmented, linearly rendered body parts of Wedding Anniversary (2005)—the exhibition was far from superficial. 

Sundaram’s work is often deeply political, though inflected always with a touching sense of humanity, and his provocations in this regard are not made explicitly, but subtly, as an extension of his materials and aesthetics. In 12 Bed Ward (2005), for example, a dozen rusted bed frames lie beneath an equal number of naked light bulbs in two parallel rows, the worn soles of many pairs of shoes stitched into them where springs, topped with mattresses, would usually be. The installation has an immediate visual impact, but beneath this is a staggeringly complex and emotionally charged layering of implied actions, images and questions: what does it mean to be in a hospital, and one so dimly lit? To lie on an unmade bed? To be touched by the worn soles of many feet, for these feet to be disembodied, and for the act of being stepped on to be inverted thus? Where do institutions, power and bodies meet?

Thanks to the generous space allowed to the retrospective, there was room for another large-scale installation, created over a decade earlier, that was equally affecting. Concerned with the politics of the concept of “home,” House/Boat (1994) could well be read anew in the wake of multiple tragedies involving refugees drowning while attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. An array of square tiles made from steel—four deep and again rusted —stretches across the gallery floor to a point where it rises at an angle into the form of a boat’s bow, slanted as though in a stormy sea and flanked with only paper gunwales. At the uppermost point of the raised vessel are two stacked black and white television monitors, showing an extreme close-up of a face and other images, and on the flat, stable ground opposite is an old, mounted telescope. As in 12 Bed Ward, implications and absence-driven questions are rife, and they operate on concepts of distance, precarity and an unequal gaze: who belongs in a space like this, and how are we, the audience of their tragedy, positioned in relation to them? As with many of Sundaram’s large-scale installations: for an emotionally devastating image, just add people.

Before turning toward conceptual art in the 1990s, however, the artist worked prolifically in the medium of paint, and the exhibition does much to acknowledge this. Only one among many examples, Ten Foot Beam (1983–85) uses the wooden spar of its title—strapped to the back of a walking man—as an effective compositional device, drawing the eye between what appear to be birds, trees and a receding landscape, depicted in eerie perspective that graduates between comforting and sinister moods largely as a function of contrastingly warm and cool shades. More striking still in its use of colour and chaotic composition is the frenetic painting Safdar and Moloyashree (1989)—seemingly a reference to Jana Natya Manch, perhaps India’s best-known street theatre group, two of whose members lend the work its title. 

Despite the variety of different hues in these two-dimensional works, there is nonetheless a dampening that prefigures the tones of rust and earth that define many of Sundaram’s sculptures and installations. Permeated by such a palette, “Step Inside and You Are No Longer a Stranger” does well to reflect the affective and political core of the artist’s oeuvre: a down-to-earth concern with humans and the environments through which they move.

Ned Carter Miles is ArtAsiaPacific's London desk editor.

Vivan Sundaram’s “Step Inside and You Are No Longer a Stranger” is on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, until June 30, 2018.

• India