Christopher Kulendran Thomas: FOR REAL

“How can you know the reality of a conflict when the winners get to write its history?”

Christopher Kulendran Thomas: FOR REAL takes the failed struggle for an independent Tamil homeland, Tamil Eelam, in the north and east of present-day Sri Lanka, as its starting point. Another point of departure connected to this is the observation that, with the end of the war there in 2009, the contemporary art world was able to establish itself in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, with new galleries, a museum and a biennial projecting democratic values internationally. Conceived and realised in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann, the exhibition retells the story of this attempt to create a new reality on the island, and traces the revolutionary creative scene that was extinguished by it. But the exhibition is more than what it seems. Melding historical documentary with speculative sci-fi, the show plunges you into a hall of mirrors of propaganda and hallucination, an algorithmically-generated psy-op from an alternate reality. Except that everything is true.

The war for Tamil Eelam began when an armed struggle broke out on July 23, 1983 between the Tamil minority on the island and the Sinhalese majority. The Tamil liberation movement sought freedom from oppression by the Sri Lankan government and the complete independence of the Tamil areas in the north and east of the island. This war—the culmination of previous decades of conflict—came to a brutal end in 2009, having claimed the lives of countless civilians and driven hundreds of thousands to flee to other countries. Nevertheless, it seems this history might be forgotten.

Kulendran Thomas explores the struggle for his family’s homeland through a variety of diverse works exhibited at Kunsthalle Zürich, beginning with a cycle of paintings that metabolise Sri Lanka’s postwar art scene, alongside a series of figurative ceramic reliefs extrapolated from the defeated Tamil revolution, two immersive film installations and sculptures fashioned from repurposed camouflage clothing. Using a wide range of media, styles and strategies, a body of art emerges that grapples with questions of history and propaganda—of documentation and fiction—and that is, it has to be said, very entertaining. For Kulendran Thomas’ work not only experiments with how history is recorded and told, it is simultaneously seductive, full of artistic ambition, both pessimistic and hopeful, detached and deeply personal, utopian and despairing.

The unfinished, bloody history of Tamil Eelam may be at the centre of the exhibition, but there’s a lot more going on too. While FOR REAL is certainly an important opportunity to engage with a recent lost history, Kulendran Thomas goes much further and looks not only at this particular conflict, but also poses what are by now urgent questions about history itself. How is history shaped and by whom, and will the power to write it be either consolidated or challenged by new technologies? What impact does technology have on our understanding of the past and how we inform ourselves—how do we use it, or are we used by it? How do new technologies alter our understanding of ourselves? Are they tools for emancipation, or for manipulation? And, as if by the by, another question comes into play: what part does (and can) art play in this? Should art intervene in the production of reality and to what end? The exhibition answers this last question in the affirmative—though you may not agree.

(Excerpt from exhibition text.)

Christopher Kulendran Thomas: FOR REAL is produced in collaboration with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, with thanks to Stefan Kalmár and Francesco Manacorda. It is made possible with generous support from Filecoin Foundation, Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. With thanks to Samir Bantal, OMA|AMO, satis&fy, Adam Hall Group and OCA Norway.