Exhibition

  • Karthik Pandian & Andros Zins-Browne: Atlas Unlimited (Acts V—VI)
    Karthik Pandian and Andros Zins-Browne
    Artists
    Yesomi Umolu
    Curator
    Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago
    Feb 01, 2019 to Mar 17, 2019
  • GRANTEE
    Karthik Pandian & Andros Zins-Browne
    GRANT YEAR
    2018

Karthik Pandian and Andros Zins-Browne, Atlas Unlimited Acts V-VI, Logan Center Exhibitions, 2019, Chicago. Photo: Grittani Creative, LTD.

Drawing on their research into the Street in Cairo attraction constructed for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, visual artist Karthik Pandian and choreographer Andros Zins-Browne developed a practice of "architecture-as-event," that is, an architecture entwined with its duration through labor and performance. Through publications, exhibitions, and public events involving a range of migrant and artistic communities, they interweave parafictional narrative into the labor of construction. In the exhibition, fragmentary sets depicting squares, monuments, tents, and border walls from Tahrir and Palmyra, to Myanmar and the Rio Grande, are presented in a state of flux as a cast of performers erect, maintain, and dismantle them. In an era beset by conflicts over identity, migration, and borders, Atlas Unlimited proposes a reflection of our itinerant realities, a moving set for the performance of contemporary life.

American artist Karthik Pandian has held solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Bétonsalon, Paris; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; and White Flag Projects, St. Louis, among others. His work was featured in the inaugural Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum and La Triennale: Intense Proximity at the Palais de Tokyo, as well as in group exhibitions such as Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 19152015 at Whitechapel Gallery; Film as Sculpture at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; and the 4th Marrakech Biennial, Higher Atlas. In 2016, he premiered his first stage performance, Atlas Revisited, a collaboration with choreographer Andros Zins-Browne at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY. Pandian holds an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design and a BA from Brown University. He lives and works in Cambridge, MA where he teaches video, installation, and performance at Harvard University.

Andros Zins-Browne is an American choreographer who lives and works in Brussels. After receiving a degree in Arts Semiotics from Brown University, he went on to study at the dance school PARTS in Brussels and the fine arts department of the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His work consists of live and hybrid environments at the intersection between installation, performance, and conceptual dance, exploring how bodies and matter can interact until they take on each other's properties. Zins-Browne's performances, crossing between stage and exhibition spaces, include Centre Pompidou, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London; Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; DeSingel, Antwerp; Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Troy, NY; Kaaitheater, Brussels, and the Impulse Festival, Düsseldorf where he received the Goethe-Institute Award for The Host. His solo Already Unmade, a commission by the Boghossian Foundation, has recently been performed at the BOZAR Museum, Brussels, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.