Ajay Kurian: Welcome to the 12th NewCrits Artist Talk. Tonight we're honored to have the artist, Sagarika Sundaram. In just a few years, Sagarika has commanded quite a bit of attention, and rightfully so. She began showing in around 2020, and since then has been in a variety of international group shows. She's created three outdoor installations, and had a solo show reviewed by Roberta Smith, who in her review insisted that this work behind us, deserves to be in a museum. People took note. Sagarika currently has work in the Bronx Biennial, and at the Russell Wright Design Center in upstate New York, and more shows on the horizon.
She was born in Kolkata, India. She studied graphic design at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, and got her MFA at Parsons School of Design. Saga and I met at a South Asian artist gathering during the pandemic and have become close friends since then. She's always voraciously learning and absorbing basically everything around her and her love of making extends into her love of life in general. It's my pleasure to welcome Sagarika Sundaram.
The song you chose was Rufus Wainwright's The Art Teacher. So, I think my first question is who are your favorite art teachers?
Sagarika Sundaram: My favorite art teachers? I mean, I’ve had so many good teachers and not all of them were art teachers. But the most significant art teacher I had was at a boarding school in India when I was 11 through 17. Through those years we basically practiced batik, which is resist painting on cloth. My batik teacher, Manoranjan, just took me very seriously. Or he took my whims very seriously.
Ajay Kurian: How old were you?
Sagarika Sundaram: We started doing Batik when we were in 6th grade, but then it got more serious in 9th through 12th grade when we had to make a larger piece to submit for our exams. Those pieces took two years. We had to make a cartoon, transfer it onto the cloth, plan colors and dyes. Typically, students would only be allowed a certain number of colors, because that was him mixing the dyes. But I was always like, No, no, I want this in-between shade, please. He was always very sweet.
Ajay Kurian: He treated you like you were an artist.
Sagarika Sundaram: And he didn't speak English very well. He was Bengali and he studied in Shantiniketan, which has a very interesting history as an art school in India and actually brought Batik to India from West Bengal.
It was started by Rabindranath Tagore who said the post colonial was to look east and we should make alliances. He was really oriented towards the east, Japan and Indonesia, and made many trips. I don't think he would have predicted it would have ended up in my school in southern India, which is quite far away. So my work in Batik was a result of this sort of post colonial orientation.
But as I was saying, Manoranjan couldn't speak English very well, but he wrote my recommendation letter for American art schools. It was such a beautiful letter. I just didn't know that he thought all the things that he wrote. I still have it and it was just really meaningful to me.
Ajay Kurian: It's a nice bond between students and teachers. I think there's a lot of times where teachers don't know what students feel and a lot of times where students don't know what teachers feel. So it's nice when it's reciprocated in a way that you get to feel it for real.
Sagarika Sundaram: I still keep in touch with him on WhatsApp. We sort of reconnected you know in 2000. I asked him to take me through the Batik process again.
Ajay Kurian: What was it about the Batik process? Because you were saying it was like a post colonial orientation, but I imagine there's also something on a material level that's like grabbing you.
Sagarika Sundaram: When you make a Batik you start with a white piece of cloth, then you transfer your drawing onto it, and then you build color backwards. So you start with the lightest shade. You wax off the white, you lock that off with wax, then you dye it in yellow. Then you wax the yellow, lock that off and you dye successively green, blue, and so on. At that point it's caked with wax. The last dye that you dip the fabric in is black, which runs through all the cracks in the negative space and that's when the image really emerges. You really work blind and I just developed a tolerance, excitement and anticipation for that surprise.
Sagarika Sundaram: So this [points to screen] was my 10th grade art project, which is about six foot by four foot. It's based on a painting by Gauguin and I love the title of that work: Who Are We? Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going? I recomposed a section and added the figure at the bottom, a woman with her back towards me. I feel like the handwriting I developed doing Batik is still very present in the work I make today.
Ajay Kurian: What do you mean when you say handwriting?
Sagarika Sundaram: Layered color, multi colored, hot and cold, but also these kind of strokes that overlap to create a kind of crosshatch of some sort. I mean my work now is very abstract. The people have disappeared and I don't know if they will return. I think they might. We'll find out.
Ajay Kurian: We all have work from high school that some of us feel good about, some of us don’t. You can obviously feel good about this. This is well beyond most 10th graders.
Sagarika Sundaram: It's funny, my parents fight over this work. They're separated, but they fight over who gets to have it.
Ajay Kurian: This deserves a custody battle. What's the title? Did you keep the title?
Sagarika Sundaram: I didn't title it anything.
Ajay Kurian: You said that the original title was in your mind, was that a moment when you were thinking about where you were going?
Sagarika Sundaram: No, because the next artwork I made after this was in 2017.
Ajay Kurian: Holy shit. What happened after that?
Sagarika Sundaram: I studied at a school called the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and I wanted to study either art history or art. I really didn't know the difference between design and art at that time. I felt very lucky when I got in because only 60 people get in every year and that is crazy odds in India. So I was like, look, I don't really have a choice here. I'm lucky. I better go here. This is about as good as it's going to get. I met an Indian artist before I joined NID, and he said it's tricky studying design, because you will be shaped in a way where the art will be beaten out of you. And I did have to do a lot of unlearning. I had to have a fallow period before I made my way back to art.
Ajay Kurian: Definitely back. So in that period, you're studying design, you're moving, you're working. You went to London after that and you were working kind of a corporate design job.
Sagarika Sundaram: Yeah, NID was very multidisciplinary and I loved the structure because there were no real walls between departments. You were very encouraged to end up in the textile department or the product design or exhibition design and spend late nights hanging out and having those in between conversations. If we weren't at the Sunday market under a bridge or exploring, they were like what are you doing with your time here? There was a real commitment to being fully present.
Ajay Kurian: I don't know if art schools are fully like this anymore, and I don't have an MFA, but my experience of art school is one where you can do kind of anything. That was sort of the beauty of it. You get to have downtime but you also get to explore things in a way that allows for like a really deep curiosity. The way that you talk about NID, it sounds like a really glorious time
Sagarika Sundaram: But I complained about it a lot and I was desperate to leave. I felt like I had to fight for my education. I did one semester at MICA in Baltimore and I was so relieved to find that the system around was in place and working so that I didn't have to advocate for myself all the time.
But what I did miss was the attention to context. I was studying design in a way where we were really looking at how to do design research. How do invite yourself to somebody's home so you can start making sketches of their home in a way that is respectful? To create a kind of intimacy where you can walk away with insights that fuel your work. That empathy was really useful.
George Nakashima also spent a lot of time at NID and a whole system was set up where there were these workshops and they were kakas, which is the Gujarati word for uncle, where extremely skilled craftspeople would work with designers to help build furniture, books, animation, films, editing, whatever it is, whatever discipline it was. And I thought that relationship was also really beautiful. I made many books for ex boyfriends, crying, Deepankbhai, please help me sew this book. It was very sweet and it was a special time.
Ajay Kurian: We're going to return back to context later. What is so exciting and so strange to me is that you're working this corporate job, you’re in the design world, and that's when you start teaching yourself. That's when you get completely immersed in textiles. Were you thinking back to this?
Sagarika Sundaram: Professionally I studied graphic design. I felt like I needed to do something reasonable, legitimate and I also wanted to work outside of India. But because I have an Indian passport, I felt like the only kind of company that had the capacity to hire somebody with my immigration status was a big company with an HR department. So I ended up in small shops and big companies like Pentagram Design. I also worked at a company called IDEO in San Francisco, which is known for coming up with the whole ‘design thinking’ as a discipline.
Then I ended up at an agency, back in London, as a strategist. Because as a designer, I was moving shapes and boxes around and it wasn't really satisfying. I thought I wanted to be part of the conversations that were more intellectual. But in that part of the work I wasn't allowed to be involved in the creative side of things and I felt that integrating my interests and expertise was limiting.
London was really wonderful to live in for four years, because I felt like there was a culture of adult learning. I signed up for a bunch of classes. I was very methodical after a certain point about what I signed up for, you know, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 in my calendar. One of the classes I took was drawing flowers. One of the exercises was to look at a flower for two hours and draw it very big and then draw it very small. I just needed a palette cleanser, from all of the very logical and corporate work that I was doing. I needed to find my creativity again. And I started from the very beginning.
Ajay Kurian: You believed in it strongly enough to have you travel all over. But it's not like you're going to the local art class.
Sagarika Sundaram: I think it started off as the local art class. I was very un-snobby about where I learned from. I took weaving classes at this place called the Hand Weaver Society. Pretty much everybody in my class was above the age of 40, mostly women.
I took some classes at CSM, it was very eclectic. I learned how to make felt on a lady's kitchen table at a three hour felt making class.
Ajay Kurian: Do you stay in touch?
Sagarika Sundaram: I wrote to her when I had my solo show, and I was like Hey, I just want to let you know this is what I've kind of ended up doing. I didn't hear back from her. But, I did think of her.
Ajay Kurian: I hope she's happy. I hope she's happy for you.
Sagarika Sundaram: I did tell my Batik teacher, Manoranjan, and he was very happy for me.
Ajay Kurian: I'm sure he was. That's very special. The relationship between Batik and the felt making process that you have currently seems quite parallel. It's a reverse process. Can you talk more about that?
Sagarika Sundaram: Sure. The way I build these compositions, made from mostly wool and silk, is I work backwards, a bit like glass painting. I lay in reverse, kind of a reverse negative, and build backwards until I lay the backing, which is usually white or grey. Sometimes I've done double sided works. Along the way, I build pockets that are like separations. I use resist to create disconnections. In that sense, the image is being created in reverse. The wool is dry and I comb it to create color blends.
I work with wool from the lower Himalayas. Sometimes it depends on the breed of the sheep, some are more curly and it's like a different kind of brush, you know? Some kinds gives me lines, some gives me ground.
In a way similar to batik, it’s a two part process where there's the wax and then there's the post wax. So I have to soak the dry composition in soapy warm water and then rub, roll and mesh the fibers fuse into a cloth. This is a very old way of making fabric and many people make felt when they're in kindergarten, especially if you're from Scandinavian countries. Once it's dry, that's when the cloth is made.
Ajay Kurian: And then there’s the process of cutting afterwards, how calculated is that whole process?
Sagarika Sundaram: It's been both calculated and also organic. Sometimes I lay resists, pieces of plastic in between layers of wool, which are separators. Sometimes I've laid them organically, just cutting shapes and making a composition while working on the floor. These days I've taken to making paper models to figure out how I want the work to break open. Other times I will have an idea and it'll change in the actual work.
I allow it to grow and the color compositional part of it is very intuitive. So it's really related to what I have dyed and available around me at that moment. Whether I want to pull back and make something just in two or three colors and challenge myself. But there's also a different kind of challenge with the polyphony of using many, many, many colors, which is also very exciting.
Ajay Kurian: Sometimes it can be very sculptural and off the wall. Other times it can feel like a painting, but a painting that's sort of opening its body up. When you get to a point where there's a level of complication and sophistication that requires a lot of compositional thought. How do you think about sabotage when you continue to grow in this process? How do you find ways to continue to excite yourself so that the process doesn't become rote? So that it doesn't become something that you know you can execute?
Sagarika Sundaram: I think that's exactly it. Sometimes people are like Oh, that's so great, make that one again. But I'm like, I did that idea.
I might come back to it in another way, but right now I have another thing. I might have the idea made on paper, but then when I show up at the table or the floor, it changes. It's just based on what comes out of my hand. And then I'm in completely uncharted territory. It takes time for me to sit with it and see what the next step is.
With the green and white one we just saw, I wanted to make it asymmetrical and see how far I could push the openings, you know?
Ajay Kurian: This is an incredible piece. This was my favorite piece in the show. These are all images from her solo show at Paolo Gallery in 2023.
Also I should say now, if you do have a question that feels relevant to the conversation, feel free to just raise
your hand and say it mid conversation.
Audience Member: This is all felt?
Sagarika Sundaram: Yes, but there’s wire inside this one. So the Himalayan one comes in a spool, like a long thin tape and so that I use for line.
Ajay Kurian: In terms of dyeing and how you think about color, you’ve said that you use all natural dyes. Tell me more about your dyeing process?
Sagarika Sundaram: I mean, I don't like to be dogmatic. I don't like to use either just natural dyes or synthetic dyes. It's important to me that the residue from my dye is non toxic, and that the impact is minimal. Currently, because I'm optimizing, I want to achieve lightfast dyes.
Natural dyes are really wonderful, but they age. They shift in sunlight and they give you a different palette of tones. So right now I have my dye lab set up in a bathroom at home. The dyeing process is like making kimchi, you have to prepare your materials. It's a whole other kind of procedure. It's like grinding your own paints, you know.
I’m happy with acid dyes that are non toxic and these dyes were recommended to me by a farm upstate who donated alpaca fiber to me. They raised their animals in a way that sequesters carbon back in the soil and have a really committed a sustainability. So that’s what I've been working with.
But this piece here uses indigo dye, which is like a fermentation process. It uses madder, which is a root that you get an extract from. It also uses an acid yellow dye. So I'm just mishmashing and playing.
Ajay Kurian: Certain artists have different opinions about this, but when it comes to sustainability and thinking about an artist's practice, there's a certain level of toxicity that we exist in. Which has, at least for me, become a part of the work from time to time. There’s the burden of having to say, Oh, well, I need to be the most ethical when there's these massive corporations that are doing the most harm.
It feels like such an unnecessary burden for an artist sometimes when whatever processes we use are a drop in the bucket. That’s not to say I think we should do harmful things. However, having it be a mishmash and having it be something that you trust in the process; I’m glad that it’s not an ethical wall that you have to climb.
Sagarika Sundaram: I mean, natural dyes use a lot of water. So it really depends and it's context specific.
People always ask me, do you use natural dyes? It's like a leading question and I'm so sorry to disappoint you. I think with sustainability, I'm trying to move in the direction where I don't hold myself to some impossible standard of perfection.
I think because I didn't do a traditional arts education program, I kind of ended up finding my own way. I just don't want to wear a gas mask and work.
Ajay Kurian: I totally understand that. It's not the most fun way to work. In terms of arriving at being an artist and understanding yourself as an artist, there’s is something that you said that I really thought was a nice quote: “Technique translates into a language, and it comes down to asking good questions in that language”.
If I'm at a point where my questions show up in the work consistently, and in a way that leads to more questions, that’s when I feel ready to say I'm a dyer, or weaver, or painter, or filmmaker. It applies across media. I think that's a really good way to know if you're in it or not.
One of the reasons why I was also interested in, your sense of sabotage, limitations, and handwriting; For people who don't have those things yet, for people who don't have a sense of what their handwriting is or whether or not they are what they say they are. Your story is really interesting because it feels like there was an internal drive that got you there. But what was it like to find those things for yourself? And how did you know that that's what was happening?
Sagarika Sundaram: I think my process was making a thing, looking at it, and really trying to see what it said to me and what it led to. What was the next thing that was connected to that thing? What is the next thing I can try that builds on this? It could be a question that is directly or indirectly connected. And then I just kept making things.
I think because I had previously worked on the computer, using my brain and writing for 10 years, I was so committed to just generating things with my hands. In my MFA, I wanted to just not think too much. I wanted to just make. It just was like pulling a ribbon out of a hat or something and now there's a whole tree of different pathways and nodes.
Ajay Kurian: This is something we were talking about recently. You’ve been exhibiting and it's a nice thing to be known for something, but it can also be difficult.
Because if you do contain multitudes, which I think we all do, how do you not have some kind of dissatisfaction with the limitation of being a textile artist? It's no shade to textile artists, or anything like saying that that's a limitation that you have to surpass. But if you have other things that you want to do, how are you working with those feelings right now?
Because now you're being perceived. Now there's Sagarika, the person, and then there's Sagarika, the person with the website, and the shows, and the things.
Sagarika Sundaram: I'm not gonna lie, it is a question for me too. One of the things of having another career before I came to art, is that I think it gives me some distance. Seven years ago I was not the textile person, so these things are really sort of arbitrary and can change very quickly. But it's also okay to take time and just rest where you are.
Sagarika Sundaram: I have some video experiments, you know, things that are cooking or just marinating. I think there's also no wrong answer.
So many artists spend 20 years in one thing, then 20 years in another thing.
Ajay Kurian: You mentioned video experiments. I think that's interesting in that the things that you've done so far, especially with textiles, you're time traveling. You're talking about something that has a history of thousands and thousands of years, where you're part of that history and legacy. There's ways in which you can determine standards for yourself that a part of that. Whether you want to upend those standards or whether you want to build from them.
When you're working with a medium like video that has not even a hundred years of history, how does it feel thinking through what that world looks like and what those standards look like for yourself?
Sagarika Sundaram: I don't know yet. I'm still working it out and I think I have to see as I make and look at things. I did a video performance. They've all been performance based and some have involved the felt works. When I was a kid, I wanted to direct music videos.
I watched a lot of MTV and Channel V's, what we got in Asia. So, I think for my next video thing, I want to keep the camera still. I've realized I'm moving it around too much and my cuts are very quick, almost like I want music and percussion to lead the narrative. But I want to break out from that. So that's kind of where I'm at, but I think I just need to make more to find those standards.
Ajay Kurian: It's a fascinating place to be in, because these are questions that we all solve for ourselves in a variety of different ways. It's not like there's a right answer but it's an exciting moment to witness things that you've developed that now feel like they're yours. Then to embark on this new territory. It's an exciting thing.
Sagarika Sundaram: One of the things that I've discovered is when I talk to people and show it to people, I touch the work a lot and I'm closing and opening flaps. So I modeled one set of photos like a stop motion of the folds opening and falling down. I love stop motion animation and I watched a lot as a kid. Especially those with origami. I did a lot of origami with my father growing up. So I think somehow it all comes in and shows its face.
Ajay Kurian: Is there something about stop motion that feels like it's between living and dead? Is it the uncanniness as opposed to filming something that's just moving?
Sagarika Sundaram: I think there's something very playful and cartoon like about stop motion. There's that childlike aspect of it that I like.
Especially now that I'm making work that breaks open, I always like to see work that breaks, and doing things with breaking things or connecting things. I think that break in the frame, between one motion and another, the next step, actually defines the space between the two points. There's a lot of tension there.
Ajay Kurian: In my head, those are two very different kinds of breaking. One is a unity that you're breaking. The other is that you have a conception of what motion, or live action, or smooth experience, and then that's being broken. And so it's it's giving you the semblance of movement, but you know it's broken.
Sagarika Sundaram: But within that movement you can really be playful about the ways you can create kind of things disparate sort of connections that flow in one kind of visual sequence, especially if it's a drawing.
I tend to look at things in very open ways, you know?
Ajay Kurian: It seems like you're very comfortable trusting what's guiding you.
Sagarika Sundaram: I suppose so.
Ajay Kurian: It's a beautiful thing. When we first met and when you were starting to show, and this is probably like exposing the patriarchal aspects, but I was thinking Sagarika needs help and I'm going to show her whatever I can and introduce her. Then little by little I was like, I'm the fucking fool here. She knows exactly what she's doing, she’s absorbing everything she needs from every single person and then doing what needs to be done.
Your intuition and your ability to trust your intuition is a very special thing to see.
Sagarika Sundaram: Thank you. I do think I've shown in some questionable contexts.
Again, I'm pretty new to the context of art. I've been making work for five years but this pedigree of shows, I felt like that's not what is available to me right now.
If I have a place to show, that means I'm going to make two more works. If I want to make those two more works, water finds its level, it’ll find a place, it'll find a way to live beyond, this is just very temporary, you know?
Ajay Kurian: You believe in the work enough because you think that context will help the work. Whereas if you believe the work first, then it's just about finding the thing that you have available to you.
So we, we've talked about context and it's come up a few times. There was an essay that you sent to me by the novelist and poet, A. K. Ramanujan, called “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” and it was really fun to read that. Our relationship to identity is vastly different.
I grew up largely around white people. You grew up around brown people. But there were things that really resonated in that piece for me and context is one of them. I'm gonna try to remember without looking at my notes.
Inconsistency is one part of an Indian way of thinking and a lack of universals is another. Kind of in tandem with that is in thinking about kind of the Western canon, there are cultures that are happy being context-less in that they want to remove context.
So within Western philosophy, we find that like, Immanuel Kant for example, are trying to find ways to find a universal that has no context. Whereas, in an Indian way of thinking, it's deeply, deeply contextual.
There's so many caveats and so many different systems that kind of continue to break it down. You sent this essay to me and we never talked about it. What did that essay do for you? Did it feel resonant? How did it sit with you?
Sagarika Sundaram: The person who sent me that essay was my essay writer for my catalog by Jayanthi Rao. She's an anthropologist, an academic, a very interesting person.
I love talking to her. And I just wanted to share it with lots of people because I just had an impulse to discuss it and see if what he was talking about made sense. I also love the way he starts it. He really defines, is there an Indian way of thinking? Is there an Indian way of thinking? Is there an Indian way of thinking? Is there an Indian way of thinking? You know, he just goes through defining Indian. If we were kind of to cut short that process, how are we defining Indian?
You and I are very from different kind of contexts, but we're still connected through our South Indian-ness, through our diasporic-ness.I think it just broadened my way of thinking about what India is or the subcontinent or South Asia.
You know, the word for felt in Gujarat and Kashmir is Namda and the word for felt in Iran is Namad. And I just always think about the Silk Road and this connection of trade. How even my physical therapist who's from Ukraine loved Bollywood growing up. So that kind of frame, I think could be broadened to include like even going through Bangladesh, Burma, and all through Angkor Wat. When I visited Cambodia and all the way to Bali, Indonesia. Then you see, kind of through Indian, or South Asian kind of culture showing up in Spain. And then in Guyana, through migration, and Trinidad, and all of the Caribbean.
So, I mean, is there an Indian way of thinking? I sent that to you because I wanted to really examine how different kinds of South Asians felt about it. It’s also a question at NID, is there an Indian way of design? Charles and Ray Eames were invited by the Ford Foundation to come help and see how design could help industry in the 60s. So they wrote this book, this famous report called the India Report. And they found this pot called the Lota, which they said was the quintessential that kind of summarized everything about Indian culture.
They said, one of the things you should do is set up a design school. So then at that school it was very much a question, like, what is Indian design? Is it contextual design? Is it empathy? Is it talking to people? Is it using Indian script? Obviously not as superficial as that, but what is the difference?
Especially with graphic design, which is so new and defined by the Bauhaus and the post industrial. Of course you can say it predates all of that, but we're studying with the kind of canon that is rooted in the West.
When I went to Baltimore, I was like is there something different here? If you think about contextual thinking, I'm from India, so I will refer to India. If you ask somebody for directions, they are not going to tell you a zip code or a cross street. That is just nonsensical. You will be told, take a right from this place and then a left from this place and a U turn from this roundabout and you'll be given a landmark. It's very contextual.
In that same way, who you are is also very contextual. It’s based on your caste location, based on your gender, based on your what time of day you were born, what time of day it is, what season it is. Even with music, certain ragas are played in the morning versus the evening. Art is consumed in certain context or between lovers and so it's all contextual. It was kind of cool to affirm that and also have him compare the way he does to Kant and Wittgenstein.
Ajay Kurian: Wittgenstein was the one that stood out in the Western comparisons because he is the most contextual to me. He's the one that is constructing a system and then the process of reading the book is realizing that the system itself falls apart and that there's a different kind of ether that's in the system itself that gives it a life and not a dead system.
When we think about our histories, our context and the ways in which we grew up and the things that we absorbed, I know that there's so many times in which the ways I'm placing myself is through a Western vocabulary and through Western art history and through Western philosophy.
Sometimes when I'm reading things like this that you sent, it gives me what's almost like an artificial foothold. It's something where I see in myself and it becomes a call where I'm like I can answer that call. Even if it’s a little made up because it brings out something that I need to see in myself. And so even with Charles and Ray Eames, when they see this particular vessel, it's calling something out to them to answer. Something that they need to answer for themselves. It of course reflects a little bit on India, but it reflects on them and it reflects on what story they need to tell and what needs to come out of them.
It's fascinating to see the ways in which you navigate these histories. I wanna make sure I pronounce this particular rasa correctly, but there are nine RAs or essences or flavors in Eastern Indian aesthetics. This is the one that stood out to you and the way that I've seen it translated is disgust. I'm not sure if you've interpreted it that way and I feel like you probably have much more to say about it than I could say.
Sagarika Sundaram: This all comes from an interest in looking at art and aesthetics outside a Western framework.
So I'm looking at texts, and this one is specifically relates to performing arts, dance and music, and was written in the year 200 B. C. I think. But it talks about a kind of underlying running through all music, visual art, dance, performance, everything. The rasa theory.
Where the goal of any artwork is not to generate an experience, but it's to generate rasa. Rasa means juice or essence. So it's to create a kind of unified experience where the juice, nectar, bursts out and we all feel it. And we can all taste it, you know? So it's a very sensorial goal which I really love as an ideal.
There are nine rasas and nine is a recurring number that runs through lots of different kinds of frameworks. Food, jewelry, architecture, nine planets, and then the nine rasas, or tastes, or essences.
You can evoke different feelings from within artwork, you can evoke love or beauty. Each rasa has a spectrum, so I think bhibatsa also has a spectrum. Bhibatsa rasa is basically an artwork or artistic experience that generates a feeling of disgust. I think I'm deliberately being a little provocative, but yes, I do think that some of these works, when I look at them, they are a little bit scary looking.
Ajay Kurian: You described it as like a, almost like a ferocious eroticism.
Sagarika Sundaram: Yeah, I’m interested in exploring what place that has in the work and letting that grow. As much as I'm laying the framework on it, I'm also questioning. But it's a very underexplored Rasa, the disgust, because people don't want to really kind of experience disgusting things.
Ajay Kurian: What's most exciting to you in the studio right now?
Sagarika Sundaram: Well, one thing I can't say yet, but it's another medium so that's very exciting and it'll be ready in 2026. I've been asked to make a work for a wall that's 11.5 feet by 36 feet, it’s going to be a fatty.
I'm going to make it at one third the size and then open it up into three times its width. So right now, I'm breaking that down and planning. I have a maquette and I want the work to be installed differently every time. I's these three panels that hinge together, but are made as one. I'm trying to create a sense of different shapes that you can walk in and out of. So compositionally, I haven't cracked that yet. So that's the next step for me.
Ajay Kurian: I want to open it up to the audience. I think now is a good time to see if anybody has questions out there. I know this is a moment when everyone's like I had questions but I don't know what they are anymore. So, breathe, they'll come to you. Also, we'll be hanging out so you can ask afterwards as well. But are there any immediate questions that come to mind?
Audience Member: Working with textile sometimes gets framed in a feminist context and women’s work, is that something you think about or respond to?
Sagarika Sundaram: I think that's the main context here that's definitely in the work. There's like so much textile history that has not been tapped into yet, that I think a lot of scholars are catching up with right now.
But people in the non-West have lived in those contexts for a long time. For example, textile is not always women's work in places like South Asia, when it was a cottage industry. The pre colonial Indian economy was very lucrative and was exporting to Japan, to Indonesia, to Haiti, to all sorts of places. So it was an export economy, and that means that it's an industry. That means it's professional. And where there's money, men take over.
The part that women did was hand spinning, and that is the lowest part of the textile process. Even now, it’s sometimes not even accounted for. It's not even on the books. So there is a feminist context and a kind of invisible labor. But there's also these other contexts of trade, exchange and hierarchies.
In the area of China where Uyghurs currently live, they still work with textiles but with cotton. These are sometimes connections I make. It’s not an academic connection, but if I think about the loom, that was a precursor to the computer. Mainland China had silk and the loom, which was literally the 3D printing of that time. But in the kind of area where pastoral nomads live, sheep growers, people who are considered lower, that's what they wore. People wore felt hats, shoes, coats, saddles. Everything was made out of felt.
It's a renewable resource. It's cheap. It's easy to make. That hierarchy between silk and wool, in Movies like Star Wars, poor people are always wearing felt and hemp and the rich people, kings and queens are wearing silk and brocade and stuff.
So, I think there's so many ways in which it's not been cracked open yet. I think people are doing the research, reading the books. The slave trade entirely ran on Indigo and there's so many more contexts. Quilting is really prominent over here and of course it has a very specific and important context, the enslavement and women who were working and creating communication between themselves.
I would really be interested to see how communities who quilt over here connect with communities who have those traditions in Japan and in India. What are we doing really when we take these things into the gallery is my question, and kind of objectifying them and vitrifying them and now we value it. We devalued it before, or we didn't think about it as valuable, and now we value it. I don't even know if I have the language for it yet, but it doesn't really feel right to me. Because these things are just so within the contexts of communities.
Audience Member: Can you talk about what’s happening in this work we’re looking at?
Sagarika Sundaram: So they've got wire running through it like a set of ribs, but it’s almost like a rug. It’s heavy and the wire is holding the shape and it also runs around the circumference. This red and white work, was a maquette for this yellow and white work, which I built to have a skeletal system inside. I'm very interested in the void, creating presence through absence.
Ajay Kurian: What would a context with Robert Morris be an interesting context?
Sagarika Sundaram: Absolutely. When I went to the Guggenheim and saw his work it made me think very much. Beuys also comes up a lot and he created a whole mythology around being embalmed. That's a very interesting way he went about it. Just the way he was responding, the way one wants to be immersed in this material and completely swaddled in it.
Ajay Kurian: That's a great person to bring up, because I feel like then you have these neutral materials being contextualized within a post war vocabulary where fat, butter and felt become these protective sheets to hold the body after the war. Which is specifically Germanic and in that context identity is pulled out in that way where it's like this is German work.
Sagarika Sundaram: Thank you. I love that you brought that up, architecture.
I think those were one of my first artistic experiences.
I grew up in Dubai in the Middle East and I read a lot about architecture and city planning. Thinking about these people who created these huge visions on such a grand scale where the viewer was meant to be completely immersed. I'm very inspired by architecture.
So much of my thinking comes while I'm handing something off. Right now I have somebody helping me doing the backing. But when I did the backing myself, it gives so much character, so I know that it's taking something away. I'm just watching and waiting. I also have help now with the dyeing, color making. But even when I make the color, it inspires me to use it. I like to feel connected to the work. If I one day have a space where I can do everything in one space, it would be that much easier for me to be present across all stages. I need to set up a little factory, like a cottage industry situation. That's my dream.
Ajay Kurian: I want to thank everybody for coming out, and more importantly, I want to thank Sagarika for joining us. This is our last talk of the summer. We’ll start up in September again, but if you want to stay up to date with any New Crits Talks or other things we're doing. We have some exciting things to announce over the summer, so get on our mailing list and we will keep you in touch. Otherwise, have a great summer and hang out!
Sagarika Sundaram: Thank you everybody!
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