Christopher Kulendran Thomas in conversation with Michelle Kuo

Michelle Kuo is the Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She will be talking with Christopher Kulendran Thomas about his current exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich.

This event is part of Zurich Art Weekend

This talk takes place at schwarzescafé, on the first floor of Löwenbräukunst. It can also be followed online via livestream here.

Christopher Kulendran Thomas is an artist, of Tamil descent, who spent his formative years in London after his family left escalating ethnic oppression in Sri Lanka. Seeing, mostly from a distance, how an ascendent contemporary art scene in Sri Lanka blossomed from the ashes of ethnic cleansing on the island, he began examining the structural processes by which art produces reality. Now working with advanced technologies across myriad disciplines, the artist’s studio is a fluid collaboration that brings together technologists, architects, writers, journalists, designers, musicians and activists from around the world. Solo exhibitions have been held at 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 Front Triennial, Cleveland (2022); Bi-City Biennale, Shenzhen (2017); the Gwangju Biennale; the Berlin Biennale; Dhaka Art Summit (all 2016); and can currently be seen in the Timișoara Biennial.

Michelle Kuo is The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, where her exhibitions include New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century (2019), Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman (2020), Amanda Williams: Embodied Sensations (2021), Refik Anadol: Unsupervised (2022), and Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023, with Stuart Comer). In addition to helping conceive the Museum’s collection display and acquisitions program, Kuo co-leads initiatives on mid-century art history, and on digital art and blockchain technologies. She has written and lectured widely; her publications include More than Real: Art in the Digital Age (2018), Acting Out: The Ab-Ex Effect (2011), and a forthcoming volume on the postwar organization Experiments in Art and Technology.