Very short intro
Krishan Rajapakshe is a Berlin based artist whose practice begins and ends with drawing, a line he treats as a structural condition of thought rather than one medium among many. From that ground the work moves into printed editions, layered textile environments, radio, and collective formats that turn space into something to be gathered in. Radio and broadcasting run through the work as a method rather than an occasional output, where he treats radio as an acoustic form of drawing and listening as a political act, and publishing and the communal kitchen carry that same method in their own way, the kitchen held as a site of artistic and knowledge production in its own right. In time all of these practices turn into knowledge production, taking shape as curriculum and as a pedagogical method. He is cofounder of Khaya Practice Studio and Zine Library and of RadioWBF Community Radio, both in Neukölln, and cofounder of the Community Summer School run in cooperation with Nachbarschaftshaus Kreuzberg.
Long version
Krishan Rajapakshe is a Berlin based artist whose practice begins and insists on drawing. Everything emerges from the line and eventually returns to it. For him drawing is not one medium among many but a structural condition of thought, the place where fractured bodies, unstable architectures, and political residues take provisional form. The line does not illustrate experience so much as construct a field in which subjectivity, desire, and space are negotiated.
From this ground the work migrates into printed editions, layered textile environments, radio, and collective formats that activate space. Installations behave like expanded drawings, navigable compositions in which viewers meet shifting orientations and unstable territories. Fiction and lived reality stay deliberately entangled. Masks, fragments, and spatial interruptions work as structural devices rather than symbols, letting the work ask how authority settles into everyday perception.
Rajapakshe explores the politics of desire, space, and subjectivity under conditions shaped by migration, economic rupture, and inherited systems of power. Rather than representing trauma directly, the work registers its spatial and bodily residue. Authority and rhetoric are questioned through fragmentation, interruption, and the reordering of visual and acoustic hierarchies.
Radio and broadcasting run through the work as a method rather than an occasional output. He treats radio as an acoustic drawing, structured through rhythm, interruption, and layered speech, and he treats listening as a political act. Publishing carries the same method, letting the drawn fragment circulate beyond institutional containment and building alternative archives and modes of distribution. The communal kitchen carries it too, held as a site of artistic and knowledge production in its own right, a temporal composition where collective presence and embodied exchange turn into spatial practice rather than representation. Each of these holds equal weight, a different way the same drawing field extends outward into method.
He is cofounder of Khaya Practice Studio and Zine Library, a self organised space for publishing and reading, and cofounder of RadioWBF Community Radio, both based in Neukölln. He is also cofounder of the Community Summer School, run in cooperation with Nachbarschaftshaus Kreuzberg. Over time all of these practices turn into knowledge production, taking shape as curriculum and as a pedagogical method, and each one works as a living infrastructure, an extended territory of the same drawing field that informs and sustains his work. Across these intertwined movements Rajapakshe approaches art as an infrastructural field rather than a fixed object. By blurring the boundaries between image and environment, fiction and lived condition, surface and body, the work asks for new ways of seeing and listening. Drawing remains the organising force, continuously redrawing the territories through which bodies gather, narratives circulate, and authority is perceived.
