UK-based artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas takes as materials the whole system by which art is distributed, purchasing existing artworks from the margins of international art power and reconfiguring them for worldwide circulation. Through this evisceration of contemporary art’s globalising mission, cultural exchange is explicitly perverted by the underlying colonial trading patterns that it usually masks. Counter-manipulating imperial interdependencies of art and war, art is taken to be ecologically contingent within its networked reality.
6 September—12 October 2013
Christopher Kulendran Thomas
When Platitudes Become Form
Information
Christopher Kulendran Thomas (b. 1979, based in London and Berlin) works through collaboration and/ or exploitation to manipulate the processes through which art is distributed in order to set in motion the mechanisms of social change. Since completing his MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London, in 2012, solo exhibitions have included When Platitudes Become Form, Centre for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv and When Platitudes Become Form, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Thomas’ work will be included in the forthcoming historical survey Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789-2013 at Tate Liverpool.