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At WIELS Kulendran Thomas presents a series of small paintings and one very large one, together with a 24-screen video work, all of it newly commissioned. Referencing the work of early Sri Lankan modernists like Justin Pieris Deraniyagala and George Keyt, who are credited with bringing cubism to the island, Kulendran Thomas’ paintings are composed using a neural network trained on the colonial art history that was first brought to Sri Lanka by European settlers. They are then hand-painted and depict scenes from the beaches of Mullivaikkal, Sri Lanka – perhaps from a debauched party, perhaps from a brutal massacre.
Figures painted using a photo-reflective emulsion emerge from the darkness with a ghostly presence, illuminated by the warm glow of a spherical video work titled Peace Core (2024). Made together with long-time collaborator Annika Kuhlmann, Peace Core features television footage that was broadcast in the United States during a period of several minutes one particular morning many years ago. The work draws from the editing style of ‘corecore’ videos on TikTok, in which arbitrary footage and music is combined for emotional affect, projecting meaning into meaninglessness. But the television footage featured in Peace Core is anything but meaningless – and it’s continually algorithmically auto-edited into a hypnotic meditation, synchronised with an ever-evolving soundtrack composed using AI tools that keep remixing forever the sounds and music that were broadcast that morning.