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FOR THREE MONTHS THIS SUMMER, a series of paintings by Christopher Kulendran Thomas hung majestically on the walls of Kunsthalle Zürich’s upper gallery as part of a small but powerful survey of the artist’s recent work called “FOR REAL.” The paintings were all large oils and acrylics on canvas. Most of them were abstract and gestural, with scratches of blue, yellow, and green cutting through clouds of beige, gray, and black. Some featured thick black forms that appeared to be dissolving or soaking through their surfaces. Others included shapes evocative of a mountain, a bus, a contorted body, or an anguished face. The textures were heavy, but the brushwork was highly variable. Taken together, the works seemed to be moving simultaneously at different speeds, furtive and restless on one level, obdurate in their resistance to expectation on another.
The thirteen paintings lured viewers around the space, from the entrance of the gallery, counterclockwise, to the curtain blocking off a black-box-style enclosure in which another three paintings hung alongside two diminutive watercolors on paper. Three abstract steel sculptures shared the gallery, standing on either side of a large sheet of transparent glass on which was projected a twenty-four-minute video, all of it amounting to one installation, Being Human , 2019/2023. The paintings, which could have seemed decorative or extraneous, were illuminated by periodic flashes of light, their afterimage burned onto the retina as the room returned to darkness.
Kunsthalle Zürich’s director, Daniel Baumann, has described Kulendran Thomas’s paintings, both pointedly and provocatively, as “postwar,” noting their likeness to the works of Antoni Tàpies and Jean Fautrier. The description is pointed because Kulendran Thomas’s paintings did, in fact, directly follow and expressly respond to the staggering brutality with which a long-standing conflict was brought to a sudden and unexpected end. It is provocative because it raises an obvious but necessary question: Which war? It isn’t World War II, the Eurocentric position that has so rigidly defined modernism and the Western canon since 1945. What does it mean, then, for an artist to take on and thoughtfully consider the enormous complexity of another postwar, or the existence of so many postwars?
Kulendran Thomas is best known for his use of digital technology, specifically generative AI. His videos Being Human and The Finesse , 2022/23, both made in collaboration with the curator and producer Annika Kuhlmann, feature cameos by deepfakes of Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, and Oscar Murillo, each of whom speaks a little too perfectly about cultural authenticity and the evolution of our digital lives. One small section of The Finesse changes every time the video is screened thanks to an algorithm that live-edits seemingly random internet footage and matches it with lines spoken by Kardashian, or rather, with lines generated by another algorithm that has ingested huge quantities of her speech and speaking style as well as a large collection of philosophical texts. Kulendran Thomas’s artmaking tools are most often neural networks, algorithms, datasets, and digital files.
While Kulendran Thomas’s practice in the realm of machine learning predates the sudden ubiquity of (and global concern over) ChatGPT and other large language models, critics have dinged his work for being modish—not to mention overly clever, even cynical. In 2016, his contribution to the Berlin Biennale was a project called New Eelam , also realized in partnership with Kuhlmann. New Eelam consisted of an installation with the look and feel of an architectural model or a show home, with a video nested inside of it. The video outlined a proposal for cooperative housing for the Tamil diaspora. Given that the dream of an independent Tamil homeland, known as Tamil Eelam, had been definitively crushed by the Sri Lankan government in 2009, marking the end of a twenty-six-year-long civil war, New Eelam imagined reviving the idea of Tamil Eelam as a distributed housing network rather than as land, territory, or a nation with hard borders and diplomatic recognition. Critic Travis Diehl, not a fan, wrote in the New York Times that Kulendran Thomas wasn’t going to change the world or improve the living conditions of Tamil refugees but might just ruin contemporary art in its entirety “by making the most pretentiously mindless art possible.”
What does it mean for an artist to take on and thoughtfully consider the enormous complexity of so many postwars?
In an age of anodyne and often hagiographic art writing, who doesn’t love a biting critique? But in a way, to dismiss Kulendran Thomas’s work as awful, derivative, or unoriginal only proves its point. The artist made the paintings, over a period of three years, by developing an algorithm that was trained on a specific dataset: the work of the generation of Sri Lankan contemporary artists who were Kulendran Thomas’s peers, and who had been ripping through the Western canon and the legacies of Western modernism since the 1990s. After the civil war ended, they became the stars of the new contemporary art scene that emerged in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, as the government, having defeated the Tamil insurgency to the north, began to open up the country’s economy. All the elements of a booming contemporary art scene soon took hold—white-cube galleries, an international biennial, museum plans, a viable market, resident critics, lots of artists, and a few good magazines.
By the time the Sri Lankan economy finally buckled, in 2019, under the weight of rampant corruption, bad policies, and crippling debt, those artists had become mainstream. Kulendran Thomas fed images of their art into a neural network. Because that neural network had been pretrained on huge portions of the internet, it was able to detect the influences on those artists and their works: namely, the paintings of an earlier generation of colonial modernists who had come to Sri Lanka as British settlers, as well as the whole of Western modernism, which dominates the art-historical image matter that is most easily accessible and widely available online. Kulendran Thomas’s algorithm learned to recognize patterns and reproduce them. Thus, he could create a seemingly endless stream of images for paintings that didn’t exist but could easily fit the pattern (and the paradigm) of what had already been done. The sixteen paintings and two watercolors on view in “FOR REAL” were made by Kulendran Thomas in his studio, working from lo-res PNG files with a team of four or five assistants, some of whom are artists who otherwise make very different kinds of work. Together, they translated the digital images into massive canvases, making tens, hundreds, thousands of seemingly minor, handmade decisions along the way. The process relies on a kind of intuition, and it attempts an end run around questions of creativity, individuality, and self-expression. To call these paintings awful, then, is to admit we’ve learned to see and judge from a dataset that tells us they are all wrong.
Every work in “FOR REAL,” and virtually all of Kulendran Thomas’s work to date, is haunted by the ghosts of a Tamil revolutionary project that was violently obliterated. His postwar is never Europe in 1945 but Sri Lanka and more specifically Tamil territory in the aftermath of 2009. That is not to say that he romanticizes the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE. Nor that he necessarily critiques the failures of the wider Tamil resistance movement to achieve its goals. Like the Japanese Red Army, the early members of the LTTE, known as the Tamil Tigers, trained in Lebanon with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. All of them were testing the edges of the ultra-left’s turn toward armed struggle. All were prone to gratuitous violence and flourishes of occasional psychosis. Because they came to prominence in the 1980s, the Tamil Tigers entered the information age in ways that other far-left groups never dreamed of, and Tamils more generally had a long history of describing themselves as a network. But the clips from Tamil Tiger propaganda films that appear in The Finesse , featuring a sharp-tongued architect named Manmahal who shows up in variously belted workwear and military fatigues, are also obviously manipulated. And over time, deepfake Manmahal, like deepfake Oscar Murillo and deepfake Kim Kardashian, yields to the charisma of Kulendran Thomas’s real-life protagonists in The Finesse as well as in Being Human . These protagonists include the artist’s uncle, who ran a school and established a center for recording human-rights abuses in the de facto Tamil capital of Jaffna; the artist Ilavenil Vasuky Jayapalan, who among other things critiques the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s category of the human; and the dancer Asmina Thirunavukarasu, who reflects on embodied experiences of exile, ranging from embarrassment to impressive self-possession.
By their presence in the films, Jayapalan, Thirunavukarasu, and Kulendran Thomas himself, as a disembodied voice, begin to map the size and scope of the Tamil diaspora. Hundreds of thousands of Tamils have left Sri Lanka since 1983. The Tamil community in Switzerland alone numbers more than fifty thousand people. This fact gave a particular resonance to the run of “FOR REAL” in Zurich. (Earlier versions of the exhibition were staged at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin; it was scheduled to open at the V–A–C Foundation in Moscow in May 2022, but those dates were canceled after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.) So too the proximity to international Geneva’s high concentration of human-rights organizations. But the most compelling forms of systems thinking and networked knowledge in the show and in Kulendran Thomas’s work more generally pertain to his approach to collaboration and collectivity.
Not only does Kulendran Thomas partner with Kuhlmann on all his films, but through the spatial arrangement of works, he also creates a dialogue with older Sri Lankan artists such as Kingsley Gunatillake, one of whose sculptures appears in the installation Being Human . (The other two sculptures in the installation were produced, with assistance from another algorithm and a different dataset, by Kulendran Thomas “after Kingsley Gunatillake.”) Most significantly, he is part of a large and unwieldy group of Tamil-diaspora artists known as Aṅaṅkuperuntinaivarkal Inkaaleneraam, who work together to revive and re-create revolutionary modes of artmaking that were lost in the chaos of 2009 and rarely documented prior. (This could also be wholly fictional, but Kulendran Thomas wouldn’t be the first artist to fictionalize documentary modes of artmaking in the service of political critique.) Although the group is sometimes cast as a phantom, a mystery, or a dissident (gendered male), it exists in reality through a Discord channel and produced the towering steel-wood-and-textile statues, painted face masks, and ceramic wall works that ringed the lower-floor gallery of Kunsthalle Zürich, echoing the works above.
The exhibition comprised two parts, each built around a film, which Kulendran Thomas considers the first two installments in a trilogy. Ultimately, the operative structure of his ongoing project might not be an algorithm or a neural network at all but rather the poetic model of the myth. Indeed, Kulendran Thomas has his own mythology, and he tells it well. As a child, he suffered from a terrible stammer. He didn’t, and couldn’t, speak for years. It was only when he started making things that he learned how to communicate with the world through speech. He eventually went to art school and became a photographer. He received an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2013. As an artist, he still dodges the heroism of mark-making, of committing to a gesture. He equates it with the fear of speech he experienced when he was little. But he equally hates the idea of his work being taken as a ruse. “For me, it’s not a conceptual move. It’s a necessity,” Kulendran Thomas told me of the method he uses to make his paintings. “It’s the way I’ve found for negotiating my relationship to a particular history.” In this regard, he is less like Walid Raad, toying with fact and fiction, than like Mounira Al Solh, who ten years ago devised a character, a male alter ego named Bassam Ramlawi, to allow her to return to painting and delve into issues of class, status, and gender in relation to another postwar that ended in economic collapse, in this case the period of reconstruction following the end of the Lebanese civil war.
In the case of Kulendran Thomas, the distancing technique is an aesthetic “wrongness” that points to real violence: colonial invasion, ethnic conflict, international indifference to the annihilation of a minority group. “So many artists paint from photographs, essentially from digital images,” he said to me. “And loads of artists use computers to generate images. But maybe why some people find these paintings controversial is because they look like they’re coming from somewhere else. They look unfiltered, intuitive, expressive. But they’re more complicated than that. And perhaps what we call self-expression is more complicated, too. Maybe that’s what freaks people out.”
The idea of paintings that look like they’re coming from anywhere raises interesting questions. “These days, artists are highly incentivized by the art market to perform authenticity to our minority identities in the simplest, most legible ways possible,” he said.
It’s like contemporary art has reproduced the Victorian fair, with its parade of people from around the world dressed up in Indigenous gear. And the trouble with that, systemically, is that we end up with a pretty reduced set of possibilities for who we are. So I guess I kind of feel an obligation to inhabit the complexities of where I’m from in a way that can open up those ambiguities and contradictions and multiply those possibilities, rather than simplify them.
Presenting “self-expression” as a fiction is a way of trying to undo the relationship between modern art and political power. It is also a promising plot point in the unraveling of the Western canon, which is chimerical anyway. It has the potential to address the incredible financial investments that have been made to uphold narratives of stylistic development and linear progress. If modernism is just the dataset that we’ve all been trained on, then the valuation of works in the art-historical sequence of textbooks or in the permanent collections of major museums (and in the homes, storage units, and free ports of their board members, donors, and trustees) could prove to be just as fictional. The wrongness at stake here isn’t the embarrassing earnestness of a dozen or so terrible, garish, and overly large paintings but rather the legacies of subjugation, domination, and indignity that they rather ingeniously hold up for viewers, if they care to look and think about what they see.
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