He is one of India’s leading artists, and has worked extensively within and outside the art space to promote freedom of expression, to battle communalism and to extend democratic rights.
Vivan Sundaram was educated at The Doon School, the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda, and at Slade School of London. In London he met the legendary British-American painter R. B. Kitaj, under whom he was trained for some time.
Sundaram works in many different media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, installation and video art, and his work is politically conscious and highly intertextual in nature. His works in the 1980s showed a tendency towards figurative representations, and dealt with problems of identity. His works constantly refer to social problems, popular culture, problems of perception, memory and history. His latest installations and videos often refer to his artistic influences, among them are Dadaism, Surrealism, as well as more recent Fluxus and the works of Joseph Beuys.
