VIVAN SUNDARAM'S SHOW, TRASH, COMPRISING AN INSTALLATION, DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS and video works, was mounted from the 21^st of April to the 17^th of May, at Chemould Prescott Road and Project 88, Mumbai.

How does our act of discarding objects frame our desire to order the world? And what do the dystopias we seek to disown reveal about the utopias we aspire to belong to? Sundaram explored the compulsions of inhabiting a city made of abject material even as his works addressed Issues crucial to these questions.

Stark cots with beds made of shoe soles were installed under bulbs hanging menacingly from the ceiling in 12 Bed Ward (2005) at Chemould Prescott Road. Anchored in the ill-auguring atmosphere of a space that looked like a cross between a hospital and a concentration camp, the beds indexed tortured absent presences - persecuted prisoners, exploited labourers, mutilated riot victims, afflicted rag-pickers. The installation was significant for a variety of reasons - not only for the effective way in which it interrogated the politics of hate and discrimination in a landscape of loss but also for presenting a kind of anti-spectaclular art that came close to positing an avant-garde response to the abiding culture of waste we find ourselves in the middle of. The show came across as a kind of antidote to the glamorous works of art that we have been at the receiving end of, for quite some time.

Vivan Sundaram. 12 Bed Ward. Installation. Dark room, steel, old shoes, string, wire, bulbs.
Dimensions variable. 2005. (Installation view at Urban Manners, Milan).
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LORENZA MERCURI AND RAM RAHMAN.

How does the anti-spectacle perform its function of generating a convincing critique, given our visual and socio-political contexts? Among other acts of re-orientation, it extends some of the syntactical maneouvres of the spectacle so as to subvert its expectations. The sense of scale, for instance, can be re-invested to de-trivialise the issues that the spectacle seeks to peripheralise. Sundaram dwelt on modernity and its discontents by discovering minatory patterns in the consumer items culled from dumping grounds and by carefully imposing a design on the sorry mess. In the suite of digital photographs Barricade (2008) and in the digital photograph Prospect (2005-08), you could see towers made of Coke and Kingfisher cans; bent pipes and slotted angles looming over armies of used tooth-brushes, plastic spoons and combs which stood next to crushed milk bags, blistered wrappers and indeterminate auto spare-parts; stacks of paper rubbing shoulders with tubes and coils; and oil cans perched over a sea of electronic circuits. Where in 12 Bed Ward Sundaram recycled objects, in Barricade he re-employed them so that they could simulate the act of reclaiming their status as commodities - would they succeed in recovering, in part or in combination, their exchangeability quotient? Sundaram's digital photographs recorded this movement of trash salvaging its objecthood - rubbish and its re-enactment and garbage and its re-gurgitation, with a Spiderman doll thrown in for good measure, framed a sly anti-paean to the dynamism of Capitalism and a clever anti-ode to Consumerist society and its commodity-fetish. Interestingly, many of the constructions in Barricade managed to look like new age shrines even as they critiqued the excesses of Found Art and Commodity Sculpture.

In 12 Bed Ward, however, the mood was appropriately sombre (as a work that interrogated the spectacle, it did away with its seductive gloss but retained its air of mystery). While in Barricade Sundaram mock-attempted to aestheticise the landscape of debris, in 12 Bed Ward he created an atmosphere of bleakness by using 'poor' materials with economy and presenting the work with austere severity. (Performance artist and actor Rehaan Engineer used 12 Bed Ward as the setting to direct an extract from Howard Barker's Und: Radhika Mittal played a disoriented Jewish woman in a Nazi camp desperately trying to make sense of her hopeless situation. Barker's Theatre of Catastrophe found a perfect location in the Ward.)