The title of Christopher Kulendran Thomas' exhibition at WIELS, Safe Zone (a collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann), refers to an illusory state of mind. On the one hand, the moment of “innocence” before 9/11, the event that shifted Western history and gave license to the contemporary forms of colonial geopolitics, including the so-called “War on Terror.” On the other hand, the title refers to the designated “no-fire” zone for displaced Tamil people escaping from an imminent extermination during the Sri Lankan civil war. In 2009, after thirty years of prosecutions for attempting to gain recognition of their home territory, Tamil Eelam, an estimated 100,000 Tamil civilians were directed to a beach in Mullivaikkal in the Northern part of the country, under the premise that it was safe, declared a no-fire zone. Instead thousands of civilians were killed by shelling from the Sri Lankan Army. The Mullivaikkal massacre was the culmination of the civil war, as well as one of the most horrific genocides in recent history, and it was enabled by the so-called “War on Terror” that followed 9/11, which provided the Sri Lankan president with a premise to reclassify the Tamil liberation movement as a terrorist organisation that the government could then annihilate.
This year, on its 15th tragic anniversary, Tamil Refugee Council's founder Aran Mylvaganam claimed that the current Genocide in Palestine by the Israeli government mirrors the very long Tamil extermination in his article for redflag.org. There might be an obvious parallel between the reckless and vicious war crimes perpetrated and the systematic deceiving instructions regarding the safe zones but, as opposed to the Palestinian Genocide, the Sri Lankan Tamil struggle was not seen by the outside world. The media ignored it at a time when smartphones were too novel and inaccessible to the broader public, which positioned journalists as the only source of information and point of access to remote events. However journalists were not allowed into the country and the United Nations was required to leave Sri Lanka before the massacre occurred.
I
Kulendran Thomas' family background as Tamils from Sri Lanka clearly informs his work. Yet, this history ultimately acts as a premise to tackle broader issues around global dynamics in art and politics, as well as notions of authenticity, appropriation and collaborative forms of authorship. The exhibition at WIELS feels like a continuation of topics the artist has returned to over the last decade, during most of which time Kulendran Thomas has been using AI technologies as an inherent part of his work from its conception through to its production.
In contrast with his previous exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon (Berlin, 2019) and previous shows, in which he purchased artworks from Sri Lankan artists and implemented those as components in his own installations, creating a holistic constellation that visually concatenated different cultural and political realities, for WIELS these concatenations are digitally executed by trained language models to produce more refined results conveying similar logic, a procedure that already started for his shows at KW (Berlin, 2022), ICA (London, 2023), and Kunsthalle Zurich (2023).
In Safe Zone, two historically related events that don’t differ so much in nature are presented to point at qualitative differences in the perception of relevance regarding geopolitical matters. But these two events are not the end message in themselves. Instead, by counterposing these two realities Kulendran Thomas and Kuhlmann found a way to point at the malleability of perception in relation to what the media want people to pay attention to in order to coordinate a population to support or sympathise with specific operations.
In one of the rooms, a multichannel “ball” of screens, slowly spinning, depicts footage from the TV shows broadcast on various US channels on the 11th of September 2001, before the attacks on the World Trade Center towers. This multichannel video work Peace Core, 2024, presents a rolling stream of TV which, at any given moment, could include Matt Lauer's NBC Morning Show or Regis & Kelly or endless commercials or MTV music videos. This endless amount of material is filtered and edited by automated algorithms that continually recombine the footage, edited together anew every time. The soundtrack composition follows a similar “ metabolistic logic,” where unfathomable amounts of sounds and music from that morning’s broadcasts are combined and continually remixed into an ongoing vaporwave soundscape. One track, Return to Innocence, keeps recurring; it is a song by the German musical group Enigma, released in 1994 by Virgin. Its infinitely remixed variations make it fit into a range of musical genres of the first decade of the 2000s. Like the song, the exhibition title also refers to that “moment of innocence”, in this case before a shift in the global perception of a terrorist threat or institutional safety, which was fallacious, since many operations were going on, dragging countless innocent victims to disaster without any break. Still, this state of stability was the image that the Western media was aiming to convey to the public following the Cold War period. That artificial feeling disintegrated like the Twin Towers and opened up ways for governments to unapologetically operate out of any shade and with mass public support.
In the second room, a big rectangular painting floats diagonally in the room. Made up of three canvases mounted together, the painting depicts a horrific sequence of tragic events around the Mullivaikkal massacre condensed in one image (ft-ckt-Mullivaikkal-0017:st-20-cfg-7.5-seed- 0088045765-xy-01-01.png,st-20-cfg-7.5 seed-1436179468-xy-02-01.png, st-20-cfg-7.5-seed- 8188555546-xy-03-01.png, 2024). Both events represent terror attacks against the civil population. One got immediate international attention, and the footage that came out of it became iconic and groundbreaking regarding what it unleashed politically and socially. The other, though causally related, remained widely unknown as the media internationally ignored it. The two realities co-exist in both rooms as they coexist in the world, each in a different location, with its own entails. Yet, in the exhibition, they are brought to the same level of relevance, demanding the same level of attention from the viewer, which is a subtle homage and declaration of intentions by the artist.
II
The Mullivaikkal painting inevitably recalls an iconic painting that became an antiwar emblem, as it was inspired by another catastrophic civilian massacre that occurred in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The unfathomable horrors of the bombardment of Guernica were immortalised by Picasso in his 349.3 cm × 776.5 cm painting The Guernica, a pacifist call honoring the civilian victims of the massacre in the Basque town by the German Condor Legion and the Legionnaire Italian Aviation in the Rügen Operation against the Second Spanish Republic. Cinema critic José Luis Alcaine has the theory that Picasso’s painting, which concluded on June 4th, 1937, was inspired by an expressionist scene of Frank Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms, which itself was inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s eponymous novel. Hemingway was introduced to Picasso by Gertrude Stein, and they were good friends. These facts may feel anecdotal, yet they illustrate the interplay of influences across media and people regarding creative endeavours.
Priest Alberto Onaindía claimed that the eternal law from God that keeps people from murdering the innocent was stepped on in Guernica. What he described as a “horrendous crime against the civilian population” and described the scenes as “terrific, Dantesque, unbearable, apocalyptic” was atrocious in itself. Still, moreover, it was an instrument of propaganda. The fascists never admitted the unprecedented act until the death of Francisco Franco in 1974. The Fracoist media never claimed authorship and accused the republicans of terrorism and only after the end of the dictatorship they admitted the truth. In the meantime, the British journalist George Steer rejected their theory and reported the events to the London Times. He claimed the nationals ran the destruction via air raiders in a three-hour-long bombardment of “the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of cultural tradition.” His book was never published in Spain.
III
Kulendran Thomas' painting shares its dimensions with Picasso’s Guernica, as well as a similar compositional logic. The background story, not only regarding the massacre, but also the instrumentalisation of the event by the media and the genocidal regime also matches both events. In addition to propaganda, Guernica was chosen as a terrain for military experimentation by the Red Baron's young aerial army, as he confessed himself during the Nurnberg trials. He wanted to test what his planes were capable of and to use them more efficiently during WWII.
In many cases, civilian systematic extermination is mediated in manipulative ways to make people believe that certain acts are justified or even necessary. In the case of Mullivaikkal, mediation was non-existent for a while, and it was a propagandistic strategy in its own right. In fact, Walter Lippmann claimed that some men (or women) impose and others accept a particular standard of secrecy at different times and for different subjects, because propaganda in the strict sense of the word, is impossible without some form of censorship. In his book Public Opinion, Lippmann claims that there must be some barrier between the public and the event in order to conduct propaganda. “Access to the real environment must be limited before anyone can create a wise or desirable pseudo-environment.” Furthermore, Lippmann claimed that some things are concealed because publication is not "compatible with the public interest" and other things. After all, it is believed to be none of the public's business. The frontier is blurred because the notion of an affair's need for privacy is elastic.
Already in the 1920s, Lippmann claimed that propaganda had already become “a regular organ of popular government” and was steadily increasing in sophistication and importance. Its special importance is the “manufacture of consent,” which is the title of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consensus (1999). The propaganda function is a very important aspect of mass media's overall service. Mass media’s practical definitions of worth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model or system, which will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy. An effective propaganda system would manage to keep the media, intellectuals, and public “unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone.”
In his book co-authored by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky categorises victims of conflicts as either worthy or unworthy victims, as perceived by the media coverage–a qualitative difference often biased by governmental prospects. The way they are spoken about, quantified and the amount of coverage they receive is directly related to the agendas of the governments. “While the coverage of the worthy victim was generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage and demands for justice, the coverage of the unworthy victims was low-keyed, designed to keep the lid on emotions and evoking regretful and philosophical generalities on the omnipresence of violence and the inherent tragedy of human life.” Chomsky is talking about propaganda systems that depict people in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas the ones in their own territory of interests remain unworthy. The media, intellectuals, and public can remain unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone, which is evidence of a highly effective propaganda system.”
IV
Kulendran Thomas' projects usually bring together a set of collaborators, starting with curator and producer Annika Kuhlmann as a longtime collaborator, and extending to technologists, architects, writers, musicians and activists from around the world. The collaborations that these projects are conceived through are not necessarily synchronised or symmetric but rather an example of how to approach authorship in a decentralised, posthuman form. In his early projects framed with the title When Platitudes Become Form, Kulendran Thomas was influenced by Harald Szeeman's 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern. These early iterations experimented with artworks as exhibition-making and as collaborative processes. Back then, Kulendran Thomas started including works by contemporary Sri Lankan artists that he implemented into his own works, reframing them and making them circulate in foreign, globalised circuits, bringing attention to canonical forms of representation implemented either by subtle forms of globalisation, as well as by traditional colonial impositions.
This logic has persisted till the day in Kulendran Thomas' work, now implementing AI agents into the game, collaborating not only with other artists but also AI entities trained with online information, which represents a different kind of cannon for which certain narratives prevail over others. In the case of Peace Core, the footage is algorithmically edited and recomposed differently every second, so no viewer sees the same sequence as the rest. In the case of ft-ckt-Mullivaikkal- 0017:st-20-cfg-7.5-seed-0088045765-xy-01-01.png,st-20-cfg-7.5 seed-1436179468-xy-02-01.png, st-20-cfg-7.5-seed-8188555546-xy-03-01.png, the language models are trained with Sri Lankan artworks and practices and the compositions that come up by the models are in a way nourished by other artists and perpetuating the canon of art organically, since the works that the models are trained with are works by artists that have absorbed the Western artistic influences.
This notion of co-creation has become increasingly problematic in the era of AI than ever, although it is not novel at all. In the case of Return to Innocence, for instance, the Amis chant (Weeding and Paddyfield Song No. 1), which is the most catchy and identifiable element of the song, is in fact a sample of Amis couple Difang and Igay Duana, whose performance of the song was recorded by the Maison des Cultures du Monde and later distributed on CD during an exchange program in Paris in 1988. The producer of the song, Michael Cretu sampled the CD in addition to other voices and instruments, including a sample of Led Zeppelin drum beat of the song When the Levee Breaks and Virgin Records got sued at a later point by the duo for misappropriation of their work. As Kulendran comments, “It takes from all these different genres without being involved in them.”
V
The question of where the boundary is between an influence for a new work and a literal illicit appropriation of intellectual property remains open. Or what may be the “right” way of reframing a work or its parts in order to put it into circulation in a different context. In Kulendran-Thomas' work, where all the names of the collaborators are credited, there is an attempt to give away a certain amount of creative agency in order to co-author the work with other human and non- human entities, each differently biased. Kulendran Thomas’ work ultimately exposes the interplay between contexts and traces the dominance of the Western imperialism in determining a cultural canon abroad, which sometimes comes back as an exotic element to implement in the dominant context. In those cases it is hard to define where something started when the first iteration of something occurred, or what is influencing what, but what is certain is that there is a legal, moral and creative blurriness in the way AI agents create works and that this work tackles the fact that is is as challenging to define an ethical framework, as it is to determine whether the boundary between influence, collaboration and appropriation is.
Safe zones don’t exist; they are ultimately a state of mind or a temporary privilege. Threads and dangers are often illusory and often way too real, as it is the instrumentalisation of victims to sustain political projects. The revolution will be televised as far as it is considered convenient, and the narratives that are conveyed by the mainstream media are increasingly proven partial and incomplete. Safe Zone presents two tragic historical events in history that were perceived and mediated very differently. Still, the point Safe Zone has to make is that the realness of the elements and characters is not as relevant as how the stories and histories are told and how the agenda behind the storytelling can affect the public’s perception of the very notions of history and truth.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas is an artist, of Tamil descent, who spent his formative years in London after his family left escalating ethnic oppression in Sri Lanka. Now working with advanced technologies across myriad disciplines, the artist’s studio is a fluid collaboration that brings together technologists, architects, writers, journalists, designers, musicians and activists from around the world. Kulendran Thomas’ work is represented in major collections like that of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Kunsthalle Zürich (2023); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2022); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2019); Institute for Modern Art, Brisbane (2019); Spike Island, Bristol (2019); and Tensta konsthall, Stockholm (2017).
Gabriela Acha is a writer based in Berlin.
