Christopher Kulendran Thomas (duplicate): ft-ckt-Mullivaikkal-0017: st-17-cfg-6.5-seed-9836098058-xy-00-01.png, st-17-cfg-6.5-seed-0006026423-xy-n01-01.png, st-17-cfg-6.0-seed-9127589654-xy-n02-01.png, st-17-cfg-6.0-seed-6217023673-xy-n03-01.png, st-17-cfg-6.0-seed-2839189540-xy-n04-01.png

Kulendran Thomas' practice subtly seeds doubt into the ideas of authorship, freedom, and cultural legitimacy that have long structured artistic value. Where a violent history remains undocumented, algorithmically generated images serve as blueprints. Rather than painting that contested history from documentary evidence, Kulendran Thomas instead imagines it through an engagement with the visual language of the colonial history that led to that violence – a visual language often seen as synonymous with artistic freedom but also deployed as part of broader ideological campaigns of soft power.

Like all of Kulendran Thomas’ paintings, the works presented here are composed using a neural network trained on the work of successive generations of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated artists influenced by the European modernisms brought to the island by colonial settlers. Embodying the Western idea of the individual that is encoded into that canon, layered hybrid compositions – uncannily familiar and yet alien – are brought to life through deliberate brushwork, with painterly gestures that slip across art historical timelines. The many stages of this complex process, done collaboratively with the artist’s studio team in Berlin, reanimate the digital fragments with a very human tactility.

Here, the painting is a contested document: both a cultural artifact shaped by art history and an engagement with the political, technological, and aesthetic forces that have contributed to its construction. Spanning not only painting but also video and installation, Kulendran Thomas’ practice subverts the essentialist ideas at the core of identity politics – the kind of politics that ripped apart the artist’s family homeland. Merging automation and authorship, Kulendran Thomas’ exhibition questions the stability and legitimacy of both. His paintings do not seek a singular cultural voice but operate through hybridity and tension, reflecting a diasporic condition of fractured belonging.