Making Strange. Vivan Sundaram

Making Strange brings together two striking bodies of work by Delhi-based contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram, founding member of the Sahmat Collective and one of the leading artists working in India today. The first project, Gagawaka, is comprised of twenty-seven sculptural garments made from recycled materials and medical supplies to evoke a playful yet subversive relationship to fashion, haute couture, the runway, and the brand. Gagawaka represents Sundaram’s own fictional brand and line of “strange” haute couture with highly inventive garments fabricated out of foam cups, surgical masks, x-ray-film, hospital bandages, foil pill wrappings, and more.

Gagawaka is presented in dialogue with Postmortem, a collection of haunting sculptural objects comprised of mannequins, tailor’s dummies, wooden props, and anatomical models. Postmortem questions the spectacle of Gagawaka with a wider set of commentaries about the human body and social concerns related to aging and illness. These two projects by Sundaram will be presented together for the first time in North America.