BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.4.7//EN TZID:Europe/London X-WR-TIMEZONE:Europe/London BEGIN:VEVENT UID:10336@artinliverpool.com DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London;VALUE=DATE:20250221 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London;VALUE=DATE:20250512 DTSTAMP:20250201T162647Z URL:https://www.artinliverpool.com/events/fact-christopher-kulendran-thoma s/ SUMMARY:FACT: FACT: Christopher Kulendran Thomas DESCRIPTION:\n\nChristopher Kulendran Thomas’ Safe Zone invites us to e xplore the political\, economic\, and cultural forces that underlie our ev eryday experiences. Paintings\, sound\, and video works created using arti ficial intelligence technologies draw connections between globally witness ed and overlooked events.\n\n\n\n\nWhat does the world look like in the mo ments before it changes forever?\n\nChristopher Kulendran Thomas' work exp lores the complex legacies of imperialism. A British artist of Sri Lankan- Tamil descent\, Christopher has been using artificial intelligence technol ogies over much of the last decade to examine the foundational fictions of Western individualism. His new exhibition\, Safe Zone\, features two bod ies of work that manifest the historical mediums of soft power: a series o f paintings that metabolise Sri Lanka’s colonial art history and a video work that auto-edits American television footage.\n\nAt the centre of thi s exhibition is Peace Core (2024)\, a new video work of infinite duratio n produced in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann. This rotating sphere of 24 screens transmits a continuous stream of television footage\, broadcast in the moments before TV channels cut live to the unfolding events of Sep tember 11 2001. Peace Core’s purpose-built AI algorithm stitches over 24\,000 clips into an ever-evolving sequence\, accompanied by a soundscape that continually remixes the sounds and music broadcast that morning on A merican TV. The work draws on the editing language of early #corecore\, an internet aesthetic combining seemingly unrelated videos and music to evok e a shared emotional response to the nature of contemporary existence.\n\n Nearly a quarter-century later\, many of the clips from chat shows\, news\ , music videos and commercials still resonate. On the surface\, Peace Cor e conjures the allure of seemingly simpler times. Yet\, the perpetual rem ixing of sound and image\, whilst on the one hand infinitely extending tha t illusion of innocence\, also creates new meanings\, informed by our know ledge of the tragedies that followed.\n\nThe exhibition draws overlooked c onnections amongst the global geopolitical shifts triggered by the 9/11 at tacks on the United States. The 'War on Terror' that followed led governme nts around the world to reclassify unrelated independence movements as ter rorist organisations. In one part of the world\, this provided the Sri Lan kan government with justification for 'counterterrorism' measures in the T amil homeland of Eelam\, previously the de facto self-governed state that Christopher's family is from. These measures led to a massacre in 2009 on Mullivaikkal beach\, where aerial and ground assaults on a designated "saf e zone" for displaced Tamil civilians killed countless thousands.\n\nIllum inated by the glow of Peace Core is a series of new paintings composed u sing AI tools to imagine these events. Each of these works is painted by h and from a digital file. The neural network used to generate these PNG fi les is trained on the work of successive generations of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated artists\, who have looked to the colonial art history of the W estern canon first brought to Sri Lanka by European settlers. The largest painting in the exhibition shares its dimensions with Pablo Picasso's Gue rnica. While Picasso's masterpiece depicted the widely reported horrors o f the massacre in Guernica during The Spanish Civil War\, the events at Mu llivaikkal remained largely undocumented due to the expulsion of foreign j ournalists. With no outside witnesses to the atrocities in Mullivaikkal\, Christopher imagines them through a networked collective consciousness of other events represented across art history\, rendering the resulting pain tings in the visual language of the colonial history that could itself be seen as a pretext for that violence.\n\nBringing together multiple eras of art and communications technology\, Safe Zone utilises the intricately nuanced mediums of soft power to confront how narratives are valued\, circ ulated or erased from history. With the rapid acceleration of technology i n the 21st century\, this exhibition focuses on multiple turning points: o ne that was seen universally in real-time at the twilight of the broadcast age\, another that transpired in its wake but was largely unseen by the o utside world\, and the third that we face now at the dawn of the era of AI . Safe Zone invites us to pay attention to how the effects of momentous events continue to ripple across time.\n\n ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://www.artinliverpool.com/wp-content/upload s/2025/02/web-resKulendranThomas_SafeZone_5.jpeg CATEGORIES:Exhibitions LOCATION:FACT\, 88 Wood Street\, Liverpool\, L1 4DQ\, Liverpool\, United Ki ngdom GEO:53.402564;-2.978127 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=88 Wood Street\, Liverpool\ , L1 4DQ\, Liverpool\, United Kingdom;X-APPLE-RADIUS=100;X-TITLE=FACT:geo: 53.402564,-2.978127 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/London X-LIC-LOCATION:Europe/London BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20241027T010000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20250330T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR