Christopher Kulendran Thomas: Safe Zone

Christopher Kulendran Thomas uses artificial intelligence technologies to examine the foundational fictions of Western individualism and the complex legacies of imperialism. He is an artist of Eelam Tamil descent, who spent his formative years in London after his family left escalating ethnic violence in their homeland.

His exhibition Safe Zone combines painting and television—two historical mediums of soft power—across two major bodies of work. One is a 24-channel video installation that continually auto-edits American television footage first broadcast in the moments before the world-changing events of September 11, 2001. The other is a series of expressionistic paintings that imagine scenes from an undocumented massacre on the beaches of Mullivaikkal, in what is now Sri Lanka, that was perpetrated in the wake of the ‘War on Terror’ following 9/11.

At the centre of the exhibition is Peace Core (sphere), 2024, a video work of infinite duration produced in collaboration with Annika Kuhlman. The rotating sphere of screens uses a purpose-built AI algorithm to endlessly re-edit and remix that fateful morning’s television footage and its accompanying sound.

The accompanying 12 paintings are composed using a neural network trained on the work of generations of some of Sri Lanka’s most well-known artists who were influenced by the European modernisms first brought to the island by British settlers.

Despite their seemingly different forms and subjects, the video installation and paintings are deeply interwoven—linked through ongoing political ripples and questions of image circulation and suppression, whose history is told, and which narratives are remembered. The exhibition brings together two ground zeros—one that was witnessed by billions in real time and another that occurred in its aftermath but went unwitnessed by the outside world.