Hair

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.