The vernacular under pressure from the digital: Vivan Sundaram’s Re-Take of Amrita

Abstract

ABSTRACTRe-Take of Amrita (2001–2) is a series of digital photomontages by Indian artist Vivan Sundaram, constructed using photographs from a family album authored primarily by his grandfather, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil. I explore the relation of two examples from Re-Take to its predecessor, Sundaram’s The Sher-Gil Archive (1995), as well as to its source in Umrao’s album, and in doing so, I also explore the relationship between album and archive. Sundaram’s aunt, Amrita Sher-Gil, became a famous modernist painter, mythologised after her premature death. Sundaram never knew his aunt. This series engages with the tragedy of Amrita’s death and her mother’s subsequent suicide: a double trauma that returns to Sundaram as a haunting. In the concept of “re-take,” a photographic act of correction through reiteration also suggests the pleasures and pains of revision. Enabled by digital capabilities, such reprises offer renewed psychic and narrative opportunities for Sundaram to probe the open wounds and disavowed desires within the life of this urbane, multi-talented, cosmopolitan Indian family. Through digital manipulation, I argue, Re-Take of Amrita, undoes the fatal teleology implicit in the indexicality of traditional vernacular and documentary photography, enlivening time past as the site of possibility and new aesthetic elaboration.