The Choreography of Doubt – the art of Christopher Kulendran Thomas
By Hammad Nasar
Amongst the new series of paintings Christopher Kulendran Thomas is preparing for his first showing in India is one that looks like an abstracted rendering of an inverted figure. It is painted in a blur of cadmium yellows and oranges, and framed between roughly applied vertical swathes of pink, and uneven blotches of yellow; underlayers of aquamarine spilling out on both sides. The point of view is unusual. The face, looking outwards, is on the ground; the neck and upper torso is twisted with propulsive energy. Both sets of limbs are bent in seemingly unnatural directions. In fact, there seem to be extra limbs emerging from the bottom of the figure, near the top of the painting. Could they be attached to another figure we can’t see? What force has propelled these bodies into these shapes? There is much that is familiar about the composition, but I struggle to place precisely what. A glance at the title reveals a string of letters, numbers and symbols that hint at a series of data operations. A cloud of doubt descends on what the painting may represent.
In an earlier video installation, The Finesse (2022), developed collaboratively with the curator and producer Annika Kuhlmann, viewers are sandwiched in between two banks of moving images. On one side is a slow-pan of a dark, threateningly lush forest. Opposite it an elliptical film projected on a series of mirrored screens. The reflective surfaces bring the viewers and the forest into the frame. The Finesse attempts to tell history from ‘the losing side’ of the Sri Lankan civil war. Its main talking head is a charismatic Tamil architect in battle fatigues, filmed on seemingly archival footage. She speaks with otherworldly eloquence on building a cooperative society on the liberating promise of communal ownership of both physical and technological architecture, including the then nascent World Wide Web. Her declarations are interspersed with footage of: the media furore over the OJ Simpson trial (which happened at the same time); an AI-generated Kim Kardashian talking about technology, media and her experience of that trial as a child (her father was OJ Simpson’s lawyer); and intergenerational conversations amongst film’s real-life (rather than deep fake) protagonists trying to make sense of the history of Tamil struggle, and how communication technologies shape reality. Parts of the film are continuously algorithmically generated; no two viewings are exactly the same. The Finesse is a hallucinatory landscape; full of reflections, palimpsests, deep fakes and sharp truths about the fictions of history.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas choreographs doubt.
His paintings give this doubt concrete form. The pools, daubs, scratches and thickly caked textures on his canvases punctuated with expressionist gestures may look like acts of human intuition but are really acts of translation – computer generated images painted by humans – that question the very notions of authorship and creativity. In his moving image works AI-generated avatars – a bit too articulate, too on point – propose and undermine the narrative power of the worlds we consume through media. His work demands our vigilance towards what and who we can believe.
The artist’s conceptually ambitious work, in materially diverse forms (paintings, videos, immersive installations), have earned him a reputation as one of contemporary art’s most imaginative users of digital technology, in particular of generative AI. But rather than AI’s affective possibilities, I see the attraction in AI’s utility in helping him unpick the systems that underpin value and beliefs in cosmopolitan centres of power; and the means (canons, historical narratives, legal precedents…) through which they enter wider circulation via the entangled flows of capital, labour, goods and cultural meaning. In Kulendran Thomas’s work, the use of AI goes beyond questions of representation to address those of production and creative agency.
His paintings are a ‘metabolization’ of Sri Lanka’s colonial history, while his video installations are anchored in the other histories that are wiped out by those narratives; engaging the lost histories of the revolutionary movement for a Tamil homeland (Tamil Eelam). That armed struggle, led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (or the Tamil Tigers), sparked a 26 year-long civil war that saw the brutal killing of tens of thousands of Sri Lanka’s Tamil population before finally ending in 2009. The artist’s own family, who ended up in London during this period, were among the hundreds of thousands of displaced Tamils now living in diaspora. The artist’s seemingly narrow focus on Sri Lanka’s Tamil communities seems not to be fuelled by a nostalgic desire for ‘return’. Instead, this very specificity allows Kulendran Thomas’ work to be more broadly propositional – to function as thought experiments made manifest as art. Art that ask us to re-examine that which we take for granted – the nation, international law, the archive and mechanisms of power; an orchestration of doubt that confronts the perceived certainty of the status quo.
My first physical encounter with Kulendran Thomas’s work was at his ambitious solo exhibition, Another World, at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (2022-3), where alongside The Finesse, he also showed Being Human (2019). The film was projected on a translucent screen that lit up occasionally to reveal a room displaying modernist paintings and sculptures on both sides of the screen. In the film, viewers follow the Norwegian-Tamil artist, Ilavenil Jayapalan, on his journeys around Sri Lanka. In Jaffna, he visits the building that housed the Centre of Human Rights in Tamil Eelam (established by Kulendran Thomas’s uncle). In Colombo, we see traces of the biennial and the art spaces that mark Sri Lanka’s post-civil war entry into the global circuits of contemporary art. We also hear from AI-synthesised versions of Taylor Swift and Oscar Murillo on the search for authenticity. The work allows us to wrestle with the relationship between art, wider popular culture (music) and human rights at a time where ideas of ‘authenticity’, ‘sovereignty’, and ‘human’, that shape their interaction, are themselves in play.
In a room adjacent to Being Human hung a series of modernist paintings. Their titles, the same string of numbers, words and symbols from above that hint at the process of their construction. They are produced from digital PNG files output by a neural network trained on Sri Lanka’s colonial art history. The network analyses the collective work of some of the most successful contemporary painters in Sri Lanka, whose work is steeped in this history, and develops new images based on extrapolations of their art historical inspirations. The resulting image is then painted by hand in Kulendran Thomas’ studio. Each painting, the artist explains, is the result of a series of individual and collective decisions that transform a flat image into a three-dimensional object with depth, texture and seemingly intuitive expression.
In speaking about the series, Kulendran Thomas references his own fraught relationship to painting. He shares how, despite years of speech therapy, he was only able to overcome the stammer he suffered as a child when he started making things, which gave him the confidence to then ‘reverse engineer’ the mechanics of speech. The parallel between finding his voice and his personal victory over the demons of painting through his human-machine ‘reverse engineering’ is a striking, and perhaps unprecedented, parallel. But that framing of novelty disappears when you consider the direct parallel between the AI-assisted composing of Kulendran Thomas’s paintings and the paintings of his contemporaries, produced through the analogous process of absorbing and extrapolating a colonial canon (albeit through art education rather than training a neural network). Which effort is more authentic? This fluidity between human and machine processes – this sense of doubt as to what the boundaries between them are – is foundational to Kulendran Thomas’ work.
The artist’s most recent exhibition (also in collaboration with Kuhlmann), Safe Zone (2024-25) at Wiels in Brussels, presents three bodies of work: a giant painting that shares the dimensions of Pablo Picasso’s iconic rage against war, Guernica (1937); Peace Core (2024) a spherical constellation of video screens; and a series of smaller paintings for which Peace Core is the source of illumination. The footage in Peace Core is from the news, advertisements and chat shows that played on American television in the moments before the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. The same few minutes of television are continuously algorithmically remixed in the style of early ‘CoreCore’ videos on TikTok; arbitrarily combining footage and music for hypnotic aesthetic and emotional affect.
The paintings for the Wiels exhibition are produced through the same machine learning-based process described above, with Kulendran Thomas now adding also older references to his neural network such as George Keyt (1901-1993) and Justin Deraniyagala (1903-1967); artists credited with bringing various European modernisms, such as Cubism, to Ceylon. These paintings exhibit a figural abstraction that privileged what the Guyanese-British artist Aubrey Williams (1926-1990) termed the ‘human predicament’ – engaging figure, place, myth, ritual and pattern. The paintings show scenes of human activity from a beach, Mullivaikal, in northern Sri Lanka. This narrow strip of land, declared a ‘safe zone’ for Tamils during the civil war, was the site of the war’s rapturously violent conclusion in 2009; where the UN estimates between 40-70,000 civilians were killed by the Sri Lankan armed forces’ indiscriminate shelling. The United Nations were required to leave Sri Lanka before that atrocity occurred, and foreign journalists weren’t allowed to enter the country. So, unlike the genocide at Guernica which was reported widely and immediately, there were no outside witnesses to what transpired on the beaches of Mullivaikal.
Viewing Kulendran Thomas’s frenetically painted mélange of twisted ochre, burnt umber, brown and orange limbs and torsos, without knowing the context they sit in, it is not clear whether the violent energy is coming from the horror of murderous slaughter, or the ecstasy of a bacchanal. Either way this is violence that is unseen. It is imagined by synthesizing representations through art history of other things at other times in other places – by the neural network in the production of the work, and by each viewer in its reception. As such it is rendered and received in the visual language of the colonial history upon which that violence itself is predicated.
For Kulendran Thomas the primary reference to ‘war’ in any art historical descriptor such as ‘postwar’ is not World War II but Sri Lanka’s civil war. With Safe Zone, the artist also invokes the spectre of America’s rage-filled response to September 11, that birthed the so-called ‘War on Terror’ – a capacious umbrella that ended up providing cover to oppressive regimes everywhere to persecute minorities and independence movements by re-labelling them as terrorists. The Mullivaikal massacre was one such battle in the narratively expanded ‘War on Terror’. But in 2024 it is impossible not to see the reflections and refractions of the genocidal violence in Gaza, another narrow strip of land whose inhabitants have been labelled ‘terrorists’ and ‘human animals’ as they are bombed and starved to death while they film and share their own destruction on social media (and which the Western world’s news media largely ignores), as part of the same story.
The paintings Kulendran Thomas is preparing for his exhibition in India continue from where he left off at Wiels. But what will Mumbai make of these works? What will it see in their compositions?
Perhaps people will find echoes of the falling figures and frozen faces in works by Tyeb Mehta (1925-2009) echoed in Kulendran Thomas’s canvases, like the one I started this text with. This would not be surprising. India shares much of Sri Lanka’s legacy of a colonial art history. This same history, and the trauma of Partition and its continuing aftermath, informed Mehta’s work, as well as that of many other artists in India’s art history. Familiar points of reference for the neural network.
In this exhibition Christopher Kulendran Thomas infects the myths of individual expression and freedom that underpin the cultural foundations of the European colonial project with seeds of doubt. That he has chosen to do so through one of the few cultural traditions (painting, with its canonical structures of value) that has passed more or less unchallenged from colonial Europe to shape questions of image and identity in postcolonial South Asia, is an act of quiet mischief. That the platform for this project is the art market, is borderline audacious.
