Retake of Amrita (Installation View)

Vivan Sundaram's showcase at the Government College of Fine Arts during Chennai Photo Biennale 2019. Retake of Amrita, is a series of black and white digitally manipulated images based on the photographs from Sher Gil's family taken by the original photographer Umrao Singh, Sundaram's grandfather. In Sundaram’s computer-assisted interventions, these vivid personalities are transported backwards and forwards in time (as though death were permeable), to places assembled from several places. The uncanny encounters are as fabricated as the new facets in the lives and persons of his forebears. He writes: “Umrao Singh and Amrita re-possess their bodies, their desires, their will to foreground their (narcissistic) individuality.”