CHRISTOPHER KULENDRAN THOMAS

Kulendran Thomas’ paintings metabolise Sri Lanka’s colonial history, compressing mutliple art historical timelines onto a single canvas.

“The pools, daubs, scratches and thickly caked textures on his canvases punctuated with expressionist gestures may look like acts of human intuition but... in this exhibition Christopher Kulendran Thomas infects the myths of individual expression and freedom that underpin the cultural foundations of the European colonial project with seeds of doubt. That he does so through one of the few cultural traditions (painting, with its canonical structures of value) that has passed more or less unchallenged from colonial Europe to... postcolonial South Asia, is an act of quiet mischief.”

— Excerpted from the exhibition essay by curator and writer, Hammad Nasar

Read the full essay here

Christopher Kulendran Thomas is an artist of Tamil descent, who spent his formative years in London, after his family left Sri Lanka during the escalating ethnic oppression there. Through immersive film installation, painting and sculpture, Kulendran Thomas’ practice explores lost histories, alternative possibilities and Sri Lanka’s colonial art history. He uses advanced technologies across multiple disciplines and often through fluid collaborations with architects, writers, technologists, designers, musicians and activists from around the world.

His work is part of important public and private collections including that of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Recent solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held at WIELS, Brussels (2024) Kunsthalle Zürich (2023); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2022); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2019); Institute for Modern Art, Brisbane (2019); Spike Island, Bristol (2019); and Tensta konsthall, Stockholm (2017). Kulendran Thomas’ work has been included in the 5th Timișoara Biennial (2023); the 2nd Front Triennial, Cleveland (2022); and the 7th Bi-City Biennale, Shenzhen (2017); as well as the 11th Gwangju Biennale; the 9th Berlin Biennale; and the 3rd Dhaka Art Summit (all 2016).