Vivan and Tapan were friends.

They came together in 1997 when Vivan started to work on his massive project at the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta: History Project as Vivan later called it. The enormous installation opened in September 1998. It dealt with the history of Bengal from the nineteenth century to the Independence of India, including the Bengal Partition. And it occupied the entire Durbar Hall from floor to ceiling. Numerous colleagues and scholars helped in conceiving the project and offering research materials. The South- Eastern Railway was persuaded to install a railway track from the entrance to beyond the middle of the Durbar Hall where an iron wagon was stationed. A huge scaffolding was mounted so as to inscribe lines from Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das on the 80-foot domed ceiling of the Hall. Vivan included much that was suggested by Calcutta’s intellectuals, yet he transformed everything by formal means surprising everyone at the end.

Among Vivan’s many assistants was young Tapan Bhattacharyya, an engineer in Doordarshan. He helped with everything, from stringing up reprinted covers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengali magazines, to installing an erudite ‘library’ with mock book-bodies, to participating in preparing 500 box files with names and pictures of distinguished Bengalis from across two centuries on their spines.

While Tapan liked Vivan’s democratic mode of functioning and his courageous decisions, it was Tapan’s curious stock of information that attracted Vivan. He spent time at their home and also befriended Tapan’s wife, Rupa. There was another link: Tapan’s strange watercolours and gouaches that few persons or galleries accepted but which Vivan especially liked. Vivan’s desire to see a full show of Tapan’s works in a public space persisted and he decided to mount an exhibition featuring the two of them: Tapan and Vivan.

In 2013 Vivan staged his idiosyncratic exhibition, Postmortem. It was shown in India and abroad, but it mostly stumped the viewers. Vivan’s fibreglass models with exposed anatomies could be puzzles for biology students. They were further decorated, fractured and reassembled. In the Postmortem repertoire of small and large sculptures all meaning was cancelled, nothing complied with an aesthetic.

Tapan’s gouaches are inhabited by figurines with strange mutations. They are often without hands or feet, yet they are ambulatory – walking, swimming. With noses truncated or protruding, the characters register their aberrations with startled eyes. Tapan’s works make up an absurd repertoire; a mismatched species that exists in the hidden spaces of his mind.

I decided to realize the plan of Tapan and Vivan showing together. I have chosen the smaller objects from Vivan’s Postmortem, putting Tapan’s drawings with them.

Reena Lath and Abhijit Lath of Akar Prakar took up the idea. And here is the show.

Geeta Kapur

My art speaks of the irreducibility of imagined forms. The figures that fill my frames recall creature forms, but reject likeness. They occupy the surface with an unrelenting tenacity, never melting away into dimensions that one could re-configure in the world outside the frame. Sometimes they are still, suspended in an amniotic stupor, almost unwilling to be born. At other times they seem afloat in a forgotten dream that never trails off. Having broken free of remembered forms, they shadow a dismembered world pieced together with the remains of visual habits and aesthetic traditions.

Tapan Bhattacharyya

Vivan Sundaram (1943–2023)

Vivan Sundaram was born in 1943 in Simla. He studied Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda (1961–65) and at the Slade School of Art, London (1966–69). While in London, in May 1968, he helped set up a commune and lived there until 1970. In 1981, Sundaram participated in the seminal group exhibition, Place for People; from 1990 he made installations that include sculpture, photographs and video. These are: Memorial (1993, 2014), The Sher-Gil Archive (1995), History Project (1998), Re-take of ‘Amrita’ (1999–2002), Trash (2008), Gagawaka (2011), Black Gold (2012), Postmortem (2013–14); also the collaborative projects 409 Ramkinkars (2015) and Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection ’46 (2017). A retrospective exhibition, ‘Step inside and you are no longer a stranger’, was held at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi in 2018. A solo survey exhibition, ‘Disjunctures’, invited by Okwui Enwezor and curated by Deepak Ananth, was held at the Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2018. His last exhibition was at the Sharjah Biennale, titled Six Stations of a Life Pursued (2023). Sundaram introduced and edited a two-volume book, Amrita Sher-Gil: a self-portrait in letters & writings (2010). He organized artists’ workshops and seminars at the Kasauli Art Centre (1976–91); he was a founding member of the Journal of Arts & Ideas (1981–99) and of SAHMAT, the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, in 1989.

Tapan Bhattacharyya (b. 1954)

Tapan Bhattacharyya was born in the year 1954. He is a self-taught artist and learnt about artistic practice from artists Ramkumar and Vivan Sundaram. The important exhibitions that Tapan has participated in are: Annual Exhibitions at Birla Academy of Art and Culture; ‘New Wave in Bengal art’, at Akar Prakar, Kolkata curated by Pranabranjan Ray; at ITC Kolkata, organised by Akar Prakar; Group show at Gallery 88, Kolkata; 'Genocide in the land of Gandhi', organised by SAHAMAT, Delhi; 'Ideas-Idols-Icons', Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata; organised by Calcutta Metropolitan Festival of Art at Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata; SAHAMAT, to mark 50 years of Independence at Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi; Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Oberoi Grand, Kolkata; Biennale, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal; at Chitram Art Gallery, Kochi; ‘Young Faces In Contemporary Art’, organised by Birla Academy, Kolkata; 'Victory over Facism' in Gorky Sadan, Kolkata; 'A Homage', 125th Anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi by SAHAMAT, New Delhi. Among travelling exhibitions: 'Manab Jamin’, in protest of Babri Masjid demolition, Calcutta Information Centre; ‘Indian Eclectics’ Sponsored by French Embassy and Sanskriti Prathishthan, New Delhi, Festival of France in India.