Postmortem (After Gagawaka): Vivan Sundaram

Chemould Prescott Road is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition by Vivan Sundaram titled POSTMORTEM (after Gagawaka) which runs through January 3, 2015.

The artist reflects on the exhibition: “In POSTMORTEM (after Gagawaka), the body is ‘stripped bare’ and placed upfront. The mannequins are dissected and show their neutral attributes. In close-up, the gaze meets the hand’s touch; you see the hollow shell packed with body samples. Internal organs, displaced from their functional locations, find new couplings in the dismembered figure. The assemblage is playful, erotic, and violent.

The visual language of The Anatomy Lesson comes to us from almost four hundred years ago. Here, inanimate figures are cut open on the operation table, a basic ply board bench that is also a coffin, closet, frame and support. A series of postmortem procedures leads to post surrealist propositions. This exhibition made up of sculptural installations continues from his earlier series of installations of fashion garments made from discarded material (Gagawaka, Making Strange in 2012). Emanating out of this earlier series - the mannequins - the bearers of these garments began to gain another form that gave birth to this current series Postmortem (After Gagawaka).