The Kasauli Art Centre was founded in 1976 by Vivan Sundaram at Ivy Lodge, his family home in the Kasauli Hills. It was established as a Registered Society with K.G. Subramanyan as president, B.N. Goswamy as vice president, Vivan’s father K.V.K. Sundaram as treasurer, Vivan as secretary, and Gulammohammed Sheikh, Romi Khosla, Geeta Kapur and Anuradha Kapur as members. From 1976 till 1984, the visual arts workshops were supported by a grant made by the Museum of Fine Arts, Panjab University, in return of which each artist contributed a work each to the Museum collection. This exhibition opens with correspondence related to this collaboration and details about the administrative and financial aspects of the early workshops at KAC.
The major works in this gallery are primarily from the early years of KAC in the Panjab University collection. Vivan recalls, “We invited artists who were not necessarily like-minded. Later, a kind of core developed – a certain way of thinking in terms of our painting and articulation…. there was a context. A register was beginning to form in different ways – a specificity of the local, a political content.” (Vivan Sundaram, interviewed by Belinder Dhanoa, Kasauli Art Centre 1976-1991, published by SSAF-Tulika Books, 2023)
The documentary film ‘Summer Guests: A report on an unusual encounter in the Himalayas’ made during the German artists visit to KAC in 1984 as part of an international exchange, describes “Normalcy in the Kasauli art camps: weaving, ceramics, painting, sketching, drawing, site-specific sculptures. The plan to make a meeting place for national and international artists came from Vivan Sundaram. Inspired by the ‘68 students’ revolution in Europe, it was his conviction that the individual artist must also engage himself in a collective. When he inherited the house in Kasauli in 1975, he realized the idea of stepping from the private into the public sphere.”
All the archival documents in this exhibition are from the papers of Vivan Sundaram that he assiduously filed across the years. A compulsive archivist, Vivan was also the resident photographer and almost all the photographs reproduced in this exhibition were taken by him.
Video interviews with artist-participants at Kasauli Art Centre
Installation view of the exhibition, (back right) painting by A. Ramachandran, Untitled, 1976.
(Front right) Video interviews with artist-participants at Kasauli Art Centre, (back left) letters sent to Vivan Sundaram by Gieve Patel and Ranbir Kaleka in 1976 and 1979; photograph of the Artists’ Workshop in Kasauli Art Centre, 1976.
Photographs of artists and families taken during the artists’ workshops in 1978 and 1980 at Kasauli Art Centre, (back right) painting by Gulammohammed Sheikh, Kin, 1979.
Paintings by Sudhir Patwardhan, (from left) Crane, 1978 and Worker, 1986.
Photographs of artists and families at Kasauli Art Centre, 1977–1980, (back left) painting by Paramjit Singh, Afternoon, 1976.
Artists and families at Kasauli Art Centre in 1976, a letter from Arpita Singh to Vivan Sundaram, 1976, (back right) painting by Shamshad Husain, Untitled, 1981.