Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ work explores the complex legacies of imperialism. A British artist of Sri Lankan-Tamil descent, Christopher has been using artificial intelligence technologies over much of the last decade to examine the foundational fictions of Western individualism. His new exhibition, Safe Zone, features two bodies of work that manifest the historical mediums of soft power: a series of paintings that metabolise Sri Lanka’s colonial art history and a video work that auto-edits American television footage.
At the centre of this exhibition is Peace Core (2024), a new video work of infinite duration produced in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann. This rotating sphere of 24 screens transmits a continuous stream of television footage, broadcast in the moments before TV channels cut live to the unfolding events of September 11 2001. Peace Core’s purpose-built AI algorithm stitches over 24,000 clips into an ever-evolving sequence, accompanied by a soundscape that continually remixes the sounds and music broadcast that morning on American TV. The work draws on the editing language of early #corecore, an internet aesthetic combining seemingly unrelated videos and music to evoke a shared emotional response to the nature of contemporary existence.
Nearly a quarter-century later, many of the clips from chat shows, news, music videos and commercials still resonate. On the surface, Peace Core conjures the allure of seemingly simpler times. Yet, the perpetual remixing of sound and image, whilst on the one hand infinitely extending that illusion of innocence, also creates new meanings, informed by our knowledge of the tragedies that followed.
The exhibition draws overlooked connections amongst the global geopolitical shifts triggered by the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The ‘War on Terror’ that followed led governments around the world to reclassify unrelated independence movements as terrorist organisations. In one part of the world, this provided the Sri Lankan government with justification for ‘counterterrorism’ measures in the Tamil homeland of Eelam, previously the de facto self-governed state that Christopher’s family is from. These measures led to a massacre in 2009 on Mullivaikkal beach, where aerial and ground assaults on a designated “safe zone” for displaced Tamil civilians killed countless thousands.
Illuminated by the glow of Peace Core is a series of new paintings composed using AI tools to imagine these events. Each of these works is painted by hand from a digital file. The neural network used to generate these PNG files is trained on the work of successive generations of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated artists, who have looked to the colonial art history of the Western canon first brought to Sri Lanka by European settlers. The largest painting in the exhibition shares its dimensions with Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. While Picasso’s masterpiece depicted the widely reported horrors of the massacre in Guernica during The Spanish Civil War, the events at Mullivaikkal remained largely undocumented due to the expulsion of foreign journalists. With no outside witnesses to the atrocities in Mullivaikkal, Christopher imagines them through a networked collective consciousness of other events represented across art history, rendering the resulting paintings in the visual language of the colonial history that could itself be seen as a pretext for that violence.
Bringing together multiple eras of art and communications technology, Safe Zone utilises the intricately nuanced mediums of soft power to confront how narratives are valued, circulated or erased from history. With the rapid acceleration of technology in the 21st century, this exhibition focuses on multiple turning points: one that was seen universally in real-time at the twilight of the broadcast age, another that transpired in its wake but was largely unseen by the outside world, and the third that we face now at the dawn of the era of AI. Safe Zone invites us to pay attention to how the effects of momentous events continue to ripple across time.
Event Date: Friday 21st February 2025 - Sunday 11th May 2025
Location: FACT Liverpool
Categories: 2025 | Arts | Exhibition | Free | Gallery | Liverpool
