Kavitha Balasingham
1994
KAVITHA BALASINGHAM
(b. 1994, Kent, United Kingdom)
Kavitha Balasingham’s practice engages the absurd, the uncanny, and the speculative as frameworks through which questions of belonging, displacement, and material transformation are explored. Her works function as provisional worlds where the logic of cartoon physics, portals, and imagined narratives destabilise familiar notions of space and reality. Drawing together humour, nostalgia, technology, and estrangement, she constructs environments that are simultaneously playful and unsettling, allowing objects and materials to oscillate between recognition and ambiguity.
Working across sculpture, installation, and expanded material practices, Balasingham transforms everyday materials into hybrid forms that resist fixed categorisation. Organic and synthetic elements frequently coexist within her work, producing tensions between the natural and the artificial, permanence and transience, rootedness and mobility. Her installations often evoke fictional or dreamlike landscapes populated by provisional structures and animated forms, where sensuality, absurdity, and the grotesque operate alongside moments of tenderness and wonder. Through these juxtapositions, she examines how ideas of home, identity, and otherness are constructed and negotiated. As writer Anna Souter observes, her work brings forth a productive tension between the organic and the synthetic, exploring the relationship between belonging and displacement through recurring references to land, soil, and the material conditions of home-making.
Balasingham received her MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London (2022), having previously studied Painting at Turps Banana, London (2018–19), and completed a BA in Mixed Media Fine Art at the University of Westminster (2017). Recent exhibitions include To the Sweetest Girl I Know at Turner Contemporary, Margate (2024); Two For Joy at San Mei Gallery, London (2023); Hall of Mirrors at PLOP Residency, London (2023); Full to Bursting at Staffordshire Street Gallery, London (2023); The Place of Complete Surprise at Sadie Coles HQ Shop, London (2022); and Make It Up! at Ateliers de Marseille, France (2022). Her work has also been presented at East Side Projects, Birmingham; The Other Art Fair, London; L.U.P.O Gallery, Milan; and //GALERIE 102, Berlin, where she undertook a residency in 2022. She is the recipient of the Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice Award (2024), the New Futures Award at The Other Art Fair (2023), an Arts Council England Project Grant (2022), the Goldsmiths MFA Junior Fellowship, and the Gilbert Bayes Sculpture Grant. Alongside her studio practice, she is the founder and curator of the ongoing Ghost Show exhibition series in London.
Balasingham lives and works in London, United Kingdom.
