Graham Foundation grantee and artist Karthik Pandian will reflect on the series of 16mm films and sculptural exhibitions that he produced out of his research at the Cahokia Mounds, a complex of pre-Columbian earthen edifices that dot the landscape east of St. Louis, IL, and the ancient Midwestern modernism he found buried there.

Karthik Pandian’s practice seeks to unsettle contradictions -- universal and contingent, sacred and profane, proximate and distant -- at the heart of the monument. Concerned in particular with the way in which history lurks in matter, Pandian 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 often 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.

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. His work has been the subject of numerous published writings, including a feature in Artforum and a catalogue essay by anthropologist 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.