Midhun Mohan (b. 1984 – d. 2023) was a contemporary artist from Kerala whose multidisciplinary practice spanned painting, digital media, and cinematic imagery. A graduate of the University of Calicut, his works drew on local histories, folklore, and maritime exchange, weaving cultural memory with speculative imagination. His practice gained prominence through exhibitions such as Lokame Tharavadu (2021) and Sea: A Boiling Vessel (2022–23). In the Flotsam series, he reflected on oceanic histories and global trade, while works like Kappiri – The Eternal Slave invoked African diasporic memory. Widely admired for visual agility and empathy, his legacy continues to shape Kerala’s contemporary art discourse.
Midhun Mohan’s practice comprises of a richly layered visual world shaped by his deep sensitivity to aesthetics, philosophy, politics and spirituality. Moving fluidly between visual, digital, haptic, and archival forms, he treated mediums as tools to be reconfigured rather than boundaries to be preserved. His work frequently explored maritime travel, the circulation of ideas and objects, and the violent histories of colonialism, diaspora, slavery, marginality, and myth. Against hegemonic narratives, Midhun offered sharp, often satirical counter-narratives. For him, “pixels were the proletariats of the digital surface,” carriers of emancipatory and liberating potential. Yet he remained troubled by art’s limits, its struggle to express those philosophical and spiritual experiences he felt were still, in many ways, “unpresentable.”
Image: Midhun Mohan, Installation view of Amphibian Aesthetics at the Ishara House, Kochi, Kerala, 2025-26. Photography by Biju Ibrahim
