Retake of Amrita (#40)

Contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram is a co-founder of the Sahmat Collective—an artists collective that promotes freedom of artistic expression and fosters creative collaborations across class, caste, and religious lines to counter political intolerance in India. Sundaram works across a variety of media to explore notions of memory and history, including his own history. The digital photomontage Retake of Amrita is a composite image that encompasses three generations of the artist’s family, collapsing the time and space that would otherwise separate them.

Removed from their respective places in history, the objects and the people populating the photomontage share one point of anchorage: the artist. The resulting work becomes a self-portrait of sorts, constructed through the lens of his grandfather’s archive. The image recasts the artist’s ancestral identity and is a meditation on what it means to belong to a family.