Vivan Sundaram, one of India’s pioneering video and installation artists, brings together 50 years of his work in “Step inside and you are no longer a stranger”, a show that opens at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi on February 8. The 74-year-old talks about archives and history, his political leanings and how the 1968 strikes and agitations in universities and factories in France shaped him. Excerpts:
Through your career, you have switched several mediums and themes. Is this changing aesthetic deliberate?
I am a child of May 1968, and the kind of freedom it gave. One did not need to have a particular style. I did not think, ‘I have to find my style and for the next 40 years I will have that stamp on my work’. Something in that historical moment urged me to continuously question and shift, both thematically, politically and linguistically, in terms of art. Connecting with people from different disciplines has always informed my work.
