Collective Art-Making:  Vivan Sundaram on the Kasauli Art Centre

Recorded on 02 October 2021

Set up by artist Vivan Sundaram in a small hill-station called Kasauli in 1976, the Kasauli Art Centre was a cultural and intellectual hub for cross-disciplinary creative practice and collective artistic production. It provided an alternative infrastructure for diverse cultural practices to interact, intersect and flourish for over fifteen years. It saw the coming together of some of India’s most eminent creative minds—people like Gulammohammed and Nilima Sheikh, Anuradha Kapur, Geeta Kapur, Urvashi Butalia, and many more—that have been instrumental in the shaping of India’s cultural landscape over the past fifty years. “One of (the Kasauli Art Centre’s) most enduring contributions was its nurturing of cross-pollination between the arts, where people working in visual art, cinema, music, literature, theatre, architecture, cultural studies, social sciences, and so on, could pursue an interdisciplinary approach,” wrote Sneha Ragavan of Asia Art Archive in India, in an article a few years ago. Questioning the idea that the artist is the singular author of their work has always been a part of Sundaram’s practice—artistic or otherwise. This ideology is apparent in his trajectory as a cultural worker, extending beyond the Kasauli Art Centre—which was shut down in the early 1990s—to his more recent work with the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (SSAF), an arts organisation set up in New Delhi in 2016. Under the stewardship of Vivan and his sister Navina, the SSAF is committed to initiating and fostering cross-disciplinary artistic and intellectual practices between people, institutions and public forums—presenting itself as an institutional successor to the radical Kasauli Art Centre.

In this special two-part episode of ASAP Cast, Vivan Sundaram speaks to Ketaki Varma about the cultural projects that have been adjacent and integral to his practice as an artist. In this first segment, he opens up about his student days in London; the origins of the Kasauli Art Centre and what made it unique; as well as why it closed in 1991.

^{(Featured Image: Indo-German workshop. Kasauli, 1983. Image courtesy of Vivan Sundaram.)}

To read more about some of the projects supported by the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation, please click here and here.