Karthik Pandian

Karthik Pandian was born in Los Angeles, California, United States, in 1981. He studied art semiotics and comparative literature at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, where he earned his Bachelor of Art (BA), at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, United States, where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in 2008. Pandian has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010), Bétonsalon, Paris (2014), and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2022), among others. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the LA Biennial at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2012; the Triennale at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013; and the Whitechapel Gallery, London, U.K., 2015. Pandian's projects have been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Institut Français, and the Durfee Foundation, among others. In 2011, he received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. He has worked as an art educator for school and family programs for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2003-2006), the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2002-2006), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (2004-2006), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2006-2011). From 2010 to 2011, he was an instructor at the Department of Fine Arts, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. From 2011 to 2015 he was an Assistant Professor, Harper Fellow, at the Department of Visual Arts, University of Chicago and from 2015 to 2017 he was on the faculty of Video, Visual Arts, at Bennington College, Bennington. Since 2017, he has taught as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge. Karthik Pandian lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.

Karthik Pandian is interested in seeing and is concerned with our conditionality through the historically shaped gaze. Engaging with avant-garde aesthetics, he works three-dimensionally with moving images, whether in the form of 35mm light image installations, film, video and performance. He explores the relationships between early human cultures and our modern society, critically questioning the treatment of ethnicities, architectures and artifacts of the mythical past and the influence of history on our present.