“one of those figures then died”: South Asian Art, c. 1993

In 1993, a year of widespread communal conflict in South Asia, the Indian artist Vivan Sundaram made Memorial, an installation that “embalmed, incarcerated, buried, exhumed, and resurrected” a photograph of a Muslim man murdered on a Bombay street. As Ashish Rajyadhaksha, a film historian and Sundaram’s friend and collaborator, put it in the catalog accompanying the exhibition, with Memorial dies, equally, the promise of the figure in postcolonial Indian painting. This talk uses a close description of Sundaram’s installation to ask what this figure is, why it died, and what that death has to do with the year 1993.