Sanderson : ICC Art Gallery

Uma Nair

At the India International Centre Gallery was an exhibition that made Delhi’s ancestors grin with happiness. ‘Graphic brilliance vies with vintage vitality’. A delightfully laid out aesthetic extravaganza of the historic haunts of Delhi of the Mughal ages,
and with the brilliance of an architect called Gordon Sanderson was an eye-catching show. The exhibition examined the work of architect GordonSanderson, 1887-1915, who served as an officer of the colonial archaeological department from 1911 until his death in 1915. One, truncated, early twentieth-century life and work was used to show the interconnections of biography, archaeology, art, architecture, authority and scholarship in the British Empire. The exhibition included text panels and images drawn from colonial archives, private family records, and the extensive corpus of Sanderson’s architectural drawings composed in Britain, Egypt and India. The Grand Programme was curated by Dr Deborah Sutton, Department of History, Lancaster University. The design was courtesy of Siddhartha Chatterjee of SeeChange. Materials for the exhibition were provided by the Sanderson’s family, the National Archives of India and the Archaeological Survey of India.