Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Being Human (2019) in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann. HD projection on glass, aluminium and steel. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Being Human (2019) in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann. HD projection on glass, aluminium and steel. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Being Human (2019) in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann. HD projection on glass, aluminium and steel. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has been yet another turning point in the history of the internet and our reliance upon it. Galleries and arts institutions are looking anew at how we might use technology for expanded curatorial methodologies. This screening and discussion with the artists takes Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Annika Kuhlmann’s film installation ‘Being Human’ (2019) as a launch point to discuss the networked image and experimental modes of practice.
Shot in Sri Lanka, the film traverses documentary and fiction. It features Kulendran Thomas’ uncle (a family hero who founded the Centre for Human Rights in Tamil Eelam), as well as various guests of the Colombo Art Biennale – a well-known painter, a famous pop star and a young Tamil artist (some of them algorithmically synthesized characters) – who take the viewer on an elliptical journey around the island, from the fallout of the Sri Lankan Civil War to the biennale founded in its aftermath.
Examining the idea of creativity as a humanist fiction, the film itself is made through multiple systematic and machinic processes, with characters generated using neural networks running on purpose-built computers. Exploring the interrelationship between contemporary art and human rights in an era of globally uneven technological acceleration, Being Human reflects upon issues of individual authenticity, collective sovereignty and what it means to be ‘human’ when machines are able to simulate human understanding ever more convincingly.
In partnership with Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University, to coincide with the launch of the collaborative MA Curating Art and Public Programmes with Whitechapel Gallery.
Supported by the Stanley Picker Trust.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas is an artist whose work manipulates some of the structural processes by which art produces reality. Recent solo exhibitions include Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2019), Institute for Modern Art, Brisbane (2019), Spike Island, Bristol (2019) and Tensta konsthall, Stockholm (2017). Kulendran Thomas’ work has been included in the 7th Bi-City Biennale, Shenzhen (2017); the 11th Gwangju Biennale; the 9th Berlin Biennale; and the 3rd Dhaka Art Summit (all 2016). Recent exhibitions include Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI, de Young Museum San Francisco (2020), Time, Forward!, V–A–C Zattere for the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Alternatives for Living, Kunstmuseen Krefeld (2019), I was raised on the internet, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018); moving is in every direction, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2017), Bread and Roses, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2016), Co-Workers: Network As Artist, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2015) and Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making, Tate Liverpool (2013). Upcoming solo exhibitions include ICA, London (2021), and V–A–C Foundation, Moscow (2021).
Annika Kuhlmann is a Berlin based curator. Together with the artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas she has been conceiving of the art and research project New Eelam with presentations for the 9th Berlin Biennale, the 11th Gwangju Biennale, Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Tensta konsthall (Stockholm), Spike Island (Bristol), the Institute for Modern Art (Brisbane), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the V–A–C Foundation (Venice) amongst others. She has worked on exhibitions at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), BFI Miami, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (Hamburg) and Gropius Bau (Berlin). She’s currently Executive Director at Berlin’s Schinkel Pavillon.
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