Christopher Kulendran Thomas
Safe Zone
In collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann
Christopher Kulendran Thomas has been using Artificial Intelligence technologies over the last decade to make genre-defying work that examines the foundational fictions of Western individualism. His paintings metabolise the colonial art history that came to dominate in Sri Lanka after his family, who are Tamil, left escalating ethnic violence there. Often these are shown with immersive video installations that remix propaganda and counter-propaganda into a cyclonic vortex of speculative scenarios. Safe Zone combines painting with auto-edited television footage to confront the historical mediums of soft power.
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.
This work began as a way for me to process my relationship to the conflict in Sri Lanka, and its colonial pretext, through my relationship with art itself – what art does and how it proliferates.
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.
To me the AI tools I use are just that – tools. Making art about AI – that simply illustrates or fetishizes the technology – would miss how genuinely transformational these technologies are – which is both subtler and more profound than the ‘look’ of generated content.
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.
I think the widespread ubiquity of AI technologies is bringing about a shift in perception that will transform some of the foundational institutions of our civilization, including our linear conception of time, the historical myths that our nation states are based on, and the Western idea of the ‘individual’ as the basic unit of society.
Curator: Helena Kritis
Co-commissioned by WIELS, FACT Liverpool and Artspace Sydney
