Partner and director of Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design workshop in New York City.Prem Krishnamurthy and Tina Kukielskiex (Executive director and chief curator of the New York non profit Art21), will serve as Co-artistic directors of Front International. The second edition will be held from July 17 to October 2, 2021.
Prem Krishnamurthy is based in Berlin and New York City. His multidisciplinary work foregrounds contemporary and historical intersections of art, design, architecture, and writing; the politics of display and installation methods; as well as experimental institutional formats, exhibition models, and collaborative frameworks.
Krishnamurthy was a founding principal of design studio Project Projects, winner of the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award, and is currently a partner and director of Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design workshop in New York City focusing on visual identities for cultural organizations and brands. Through his professional practice and teaching over the past fifteen years, he has championed graphic design’s significant role in structuring narratives that shape a shared social context. Having led strategic identity, exhibition, publishing, and interactive projects with artists, architects, museums, and non-profit institutions, he is a member of the Creative Team for the Carnegie International, 57th Edition, 2018, responsible for developing all editorial and design throughlines for the exhibition, publications, and communications.
As an independent exhibition maker, Krishnamurthy is an Artistic Director of Ministry of Graphic Design, the inaugural Fikra Graphic Design Biennial in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; co-curator of the 13th A.I.R. Biennial, New York; “Endless Exhibition Maker” at the new Kunsthal Gent; as well as curator of experimental projects and programs such as Container Artist Residency 01 and Design and Empire [working title]. He has collaborated closely with polymathic figures Brian O’Doherty (a.k.a. Patrick Ireland) and Elaine Lustig Cohen and has developed exhibitions, publications, and projects with Åbäke, Amie Siegel, Barbara Bloom, Céline Condorelli, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, Judith Barry, Karel Martens, Katharina Grosse, Klaus Wittkugel, Maryam Jafri, Mathew Hale, Omer Fast, Sarah Oppenheimer, Wong Kit Yi, and many others. He has staged exhibitions at the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; Para Site, Hong Kong; Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University London; and P!, the “Mom-and-Pop-Kunsthalle” that he founded and directed in New York’s Chinatown from 2012–2017. In 2018, P! launched K,, a yearlong “workshop for exhibition making” in Berlin-Schöneberg, established in collaboration with KW Institute of Contemporary Art.
Krishnamurthy has co-edited books such as The Death of the Artist (Cabinet Books, 2018), Speculation, Now (Duke University Press, 2015), and Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment (n+1 publishing, 2012), and has written for various magazines, exhibition catalogues, and artist publications. His interactive memoir/monograph/manifesto, P!DF, was first released by O-R-G in 2017.