Curated by Alice Cicolini for W+K Exp
“While paintings of the contemporary Gond art movement are now internationally celebrated, its three-dimensional expressions remain surprisingly neglected. Thus this solo exhibit - the first to focus on a Gond sculptor - is long overdue. Sukhnandi’s engaging, bold and earthy sculptures will astonish and captivate many Indian art devotees.” John H Bowles, art critic and author of “Painted Songs & Stories: The Hybrid Flowerings of Contemporary Pardon Gond Art.”
Sukhnandi Vyam’s work gives visual expression to the musical bana tradition among the Pardham Gonds of eastern Madhya Pradesh, transforming oral storytelling to formal sculpture, losing none of the power to stimulate the imagination that the words, set to music on the bana, contain. Sukhnandi Vyam was born in 1983 in the eastern Madhya Pradesh village of Sonpuri, and works as a sculptor within the Bhopal-based contemporary Pardhoan Gond art movement inaugurated by the pioneering artist Jangarh Singh Shyam (1960 - 2001). Both Sukhnandi and Jangarh belong to the Pardhan Gond tribal community, which serves as the traditional keeper of their people’s cultural heritage and lineages - remembering family genealogies, and transmitting legends, sacred myths and oral histories through songs and storytelling.
In 2002 Sukhnandi won the Madhya Pradesh State Government Award for an unusually elaborate wood-carved ritual mangrohi wedding totem, and his wooden sculptures were extensively featured in Udayan Vaipeyi’s authoritative book Jangarh Kalam (produced by Vanya Prakashan of the Madhya Pradesh Tribal Welfare Department.)
Notable in this age of industrially manufactured art, Sukhnandi has wrought his magic using the most basic of tools, under a blue tarpaulin-sheet studio outside a two-room home shared with his extended family. Whilst he works within a traditional lineage, the exhibition aimed to challenge preconceptions of Vyam's practice as in anyway dated or kitsch. By placing the work in a contemporary gallery context Alice's goal was to question why artists working in this way are not viewed as part of India's 'modern' visual arts landscape - either at home or abroad.