Wiels | EN

At WIELS Kulendran Thomas presents a series of small paintings and one very large one, together with a 24-screen video work, all of it newly commissioned. Abstracting the work of early Sri Lankan modernists like Justin Pieris Deraniyagala and George Keyt, who are credited with bringing cubism to the island, Kulendran Thomas’ paintings are composed using a neural network trained on the colonial art history that was first brought to Sri Lanka by European settlers. They are then hand-painted and depict scenes from the beaches of Mullivaikkal, Sri Lanka – perhaps from a debauched party, perhaps from a brutal massacre.

Painted figures emerge from the darkness with a ghostly presence, illuminated by the warm glow of a spherical video work titled Peace Core (2024). Made together with long-time collaborator Annika Kuhlmann, Peace Core features television footage that was broadcast in the United States during a period of several minutes one particular morning many years ago. The work draws from the editing style of early ‘corecore’ videos on TikTok, in which arbitrary footage and music is combined for emotional affect, projecting meaning into meaninglessness. But the television footage featured in Peace Core is anything but meaningless – and it’s continually algorithmically auto-edited into a hypnotic meditation, synchronised with an ever-evolving soundtrack composed using AI tools that keep remixing forever the sounds and music that were broadcast that morning.

Far away from Peace Core’s seemingly anodyne American morning TV, Tamil Eelam – Kulendran Thomas’ family homeland – had been self-governed for several decades as a de facto independent state. But Eelam was wiped out in 2009 by the Sri Lankan government who were enabled by the global geopolitical shifts of the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ in which totally unrelated independence movements around the world were re-labelled as terrorists following the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Peace Core could be seen as a never-ending performance that infinitely extends a final suspended illusion of the end of history. Bathing in the warm light of this historical singularity is an exhibition that draws overlooked connections between the cultural legacies of the West and the violence that has followed in its wake, straddling three event horizons – one that was seen in real time at the twilight of the broadcast era, another that occurred in its geopolitical aftermath but went largely unreported for years, and a third that we face now at the dawn of a technological convergence in the era of artificial intelligence.

Curator: Helena Kritis

Co-commissioned by WIELS, FACT Liverpool and Artspace Sydney