Vivan Sundaram
Hair

Hair
Hair
Hair
ArtistIndian, 1943–2023
Titles
  • Hair
  • from the series Re-Take of Amrita
Date2001
PlaceIndia
MediumInkjet print
DimensionsImage: 15 × 12 5/8 in. (38.1 × 32.1 cm)
Sheet: 17 × 14 3/4 in. (43.2 × 37.5 cm)
Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Bob and Cindi Blakely in honor of Prabha Bala, with additional gifts from Milton D. Rosenau, Jr. and Dr. Ellen R. Gritz, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Daly, Joan Lu, and Conoco-Phillips, and additional funds provided by the Elizabeth S. and Marjorie G. Horning Asian Art Accessions Endowment Fund
Object number2011.847
Not on view

Explore Further

Department
Photography
Object Type
Description

The series Re-Take of Amrita represents Vivan Sundaram’s utopian desire to trace and reconstruct his family history, particularly the turbulent relationship between his aunt Amrita and her father. Amrita was the daughter of photographer Umrao Singh Sher Gil and Hungarian opera singer Marie Antoinette Gottesman. The imagined encounters between Amrita and Umrao Singh, often staged in a bourgeois family setting, were stitched together by Sundaram with the help of Photoshop.

The resulting images symbolize a collision between two sets of values, beliefs, and characteristics—his melancholy versus her energy, his emotional vulnerability and her emotional lucidity, and his firmly Indian identity with her cosmopolitan upbringing.


Provenance[sepia EYE, New York]; purchased by MFAH, 2011.
Exhibition History"Utopia/ Dystopia: Construction and Destruction in Photography and Collage," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 11 March - 10 June, 2012.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
Inscribed in black ink verso lower left: AP 1 [signature]


Signed in black ink, lower right below image and verso lower left: Vivan
Printed label on verso: Vivan Sundaram / Hair, 2001 / from the series "Re-Take of Amrita" /15 x 12.5 inch Archival Digital Pigment Print / Signed and dated in ink in the margin / Edition AP 1/3

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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