Faculty: Karthik Pandian

Collegiate Assistant Professor
Harper Fellow
kpandian@uchicago.edu

Karthik Pandian's practice seeks to unsettle the contradictions at the heart of the monument. The universal and contingent, sacred and profane, proximate and distant confront one another in his work. Concerned in particular with the way in which history lurks in matter, Pandian often uses 16mm film to excavate sites for fragments of political intensity. The sculptural works that support, enshroud and sometimes obscure his film projections are produced from materials drawn from his site research and assume the form of architectural constructions. Through moving image, sculpture and syntheses of the two, his work imagines freedom in relation to the impositions of architecture.

Karthik Pandian has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; and Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (with Mathias Poledna).

His work has been the subject of numerous published writings, including a feature in Artforum and a catalogue essay by Michael Taussig. Pandian's exhibitions have been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Durfee Foundation amongst others. He received his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA and his BA from Brown University, Providence, RI as well as studying at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany.