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The title literally describes what this first media installation by Sundaram consists of. The cube-shaped house is constructed of walls of thick handmade paper with rusty metal connectors. When the paper was being made, the forms of construction tools and materials, such as a hack saw, a shovel and the rusty braidwork of iron wire, were pressed into it. In this humble self-made dwelling, of which you see millions in India, is a metal cube upon which sits a large dish of water with a glass bottom. Video images of burning gas flicker through it. Only the common basic elements of water and fire are present. The big boat next to it seems to be stranded on a dozen railway sleepers, the last useful leftovers of British rule. The deck of the ship is made of rusty, square plates with a steel frame railing, again with thick handmade paper in between. From the afterdeck we look through an old telescope to the foredeck where we see two monitors with various tapes looping. The top one is showing back views of women's heads with typical Indian hair styles. Clips of fixed, staring eyes fill the bottom monitor.
The transport of people who have been driven from their homes for political or religious reasons to a, for them, yet unknown destination has also been a constantly recurring tragic occurrence throughout India's history. With this work of art Sundaram again seizes on a politically loaded event, a position that in the past in India was not really expected of artists. Sundaram got his schooling as a painter at the M.S. University in Baroda and the Slade School in London. A traditional education from two different worlds, just like his well-known aunt, the Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, who tried to build a bridge between western Europe and India in the first half of this century. But for Sundaram the artist's life was not enough and he soon got involved in other eye-catching interests. So, in 1971 he became secretary of the Ad-hoc Committee of the Artists' Protest. His position is evident in his work as well. In the nineties it was very evident in the installation 'Memorial' (1993). A photo in The Times of India in January 1993 of a dead man on the streets of Bombay after a series of bombings was the occasion for this large installation. Sundaram has not been active as a painter for quite some years. He makes 'combines' out of various materials and experiments with sculpturing handmade paper that has been treated with various materials such as oil and fire. Sometimes he deliberately chooses not to work alone, but to engage in a creative collaboration with other people whose input is incorporated into the finished work. In the installation 'The Sher-Gil Archive' he goes so far as to show archive pieces 'sec' so he can leave out the artist's personal signature completely. In this way he undermines many existing concepts in current art. In this breakthrough of artificial borders between life and art, Sundaram's position shows a relationship with Joseph Beuys. For him as well the actual world is a place of meaning and the fabricated subjective world of the artist is not. He also shows this in his latest work, for September 1998: a huge installation in the Darbar Hall of the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, for which he claimed the space for three months as studio. The budget was too small to use the dome for video projections, but Sundaram refuses any foreign financial support because this is the first commission ever for an installation from the Indian government. It is an historical piece and is about the growth of modern awareness in Bengal from the middle of the 19th century to 1947, when India threw off its colonial yoke.
– Johan Pijnappel
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