Christopher Kulendran Thomas

Kulendran Thomas employs tactics of appropriation and disruption to manipulate the contexts and processes through which art is distributed and encountered. The ongoing enterprise When Platitudes Become Form, begun in 2012, interrogates the cultural and economic boom in Sri Lanka since the brutal end to the civil war in 2009. Juxtaposing artworks purchased from leading contemporary galleries in the country with consumer goods, such as Nike sportswear, produced in newly economically active areas, Kulendran Thomas’s objects critique certain easy-to-consume aesthetic formulas of the contemporary art network he operates within, and ask searching questions of accountability and acknowledgement relating to the agendas of globalisation.