Christopher Kurendran Thomas is imagining ghosts of the future

For more than a decade, Christopher Kulendran Thomas has been training his own neural networks, building them from scratch before the “art of artificial intelligence” became widely available. He inputs images of Sri Lanka’s past painters into his models and then uses them to create new works, hand-painted on canvas by him and his Berlin studio. The title is simply the automatically generated file name of the source PNG.

“The network analyzes the patterns of aggregation behind their work,” the artist told me at Gagosian’s Upper East Side location, slowly so I could understand. “It learns a way of seeing.”

The result is a painting that metabolizes colonial art history—and it was this visual grammar that redefined Sri Lanka after his Tamil family fled civil war. “These are the only works that have a specific historical significance,” he said, describing them as “the only ones where I explicitly state what they depict.”

The Gagosian painting is part of the “Core of Peace” series and its subject is Mullivaikkal Beach, which Kulendran Thomas described as “the most haunted place I have ever been to”. In May 2009, as Sri Lanka’s civil war drew to a close, an estimated hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians were herded into that narrow stretch of sand (declared a safe zone) and then bombed.

“Nobody knows how many people were killed that day,” he said quietly. “There were no witnesses. The United Nations was forced to leave. Foreign journalists were banned from interviews.” His paintings re-present the Holocaust through a language inherited from Western painting itself – a language that, as he points out, is “arguably above all about the pretext for violence.”

Despite the same theme, the works are bright, even meditative. Their ambiguity—horror and beauty, destruction and generation—is the emotional realm Kurendran Thomas strives to achieve. “Back then I could only see things in black and white,” he said. “Now I can occupy multiple positions in a very complex history.”

This is what Thomas often said, he was serious but never serious, philosophical but funny, a man who might show up wearing a floor-length coat that could be worn by a Star Wars character, The Matrix and an 18th-century poet.

Thomas’s work has been exhibited widely in Europe, including at the Wells Center for Contemporary Art in Brussels, where he previously exhibited works for Peace Core, and now in New York. His Gagosian show ended earlier this month, coinciding with an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, which plans to continue showing his 2019 video installation as a person Until 2027. Meanwhile, his work will soon appear in a reopening exhibition at the New Museum.

The Gagosian exhibition features 11 paintings organized around a central video installation. On one screen of the installation, algorithms remixed footage from major U.S. television channels between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on September 11, 2001 – the five-and-a-half minutes between the first plane hitting the North Tower and the moment the world realized what had happened. In the final footage, there were no images of explosions, morning shows clashed with Britney Spears videos, cereal commercials were combined with fashion show coverage, and TV commercials for flashing toothpaste merged.

“It feels like it’s from another world,” he said of the video, which offers “the illusion that history is over.” The video’s algorithms continually recombine the images with snippets of the day’s music, creating an infinite vaporwave-like soundtrack. Its editorial logic is trained on TikTok’s core genre, constantly rearranging the past — proving that even nostalgia can be automated.

The paintings surrounding the installation seem similarly stuck in the past: although they are new, they appear modernist. “The uncanny valley of historical plausibility,” Kurendran Thomas said, “is another way of understanding these paintings.”

installation at the Museum of Modern Art, as a personis also an incredible meditation on pop culture and art history. In it, Norwegian Tamil artist Ilavenil Jayapalan considers Western political philosophy and deftly draws a line between Immanuel Kant’s theory of knowledge (the theory that we can only understand reality based on our interpretation of it) and Duchamp’s notion of the readymade and what we now call contemporary art. Along the way, there are also some elegant digressions on the thorny questions of human morality and democracy.

Then there’s an all-too-familiar blonde who may or may not be Taylor Swift (actually a convincing AI version of her), who ponders the vulnerability between authenticity and simulation. There is also a version where Oscar Murillo discusses how the definition of contemporary art is divorced from time. There’s even a pop song with lyrics written by ChatGPT and a music production that’s incredibly close to every song songwriter Max Martin has ever collaborated on with Taylor Swift. “It’s a great song,” Kurendran Thomas said with a smile, standing outside his personal gallery at the Museum of Modern Art. “But the lyrics were trash. Still, it became my favorite Taylor Swift song. And I’m a serious Swiftie.”

Contrary to what you might expect, Kulendran Thomas is skeptical of most AI art. “It’s as boring as drawing with a paintbrush,” he told me. What interests him is not the novelty of artificial intelligence but its ubiquity—and the way perception itself changes once the machine’s logic becomes second nature. “At some point, no one will talk about these tools,” he said. “They’re just part of the way we think.”

When he talks about his models, he sounds less like an engineer and more like a mystic. “I like it when people recognize things in my paintings that I didn’t know they had,” he says. “Because I’m not the ultimate source of everything – it’s channeling a network, a collective consciousness. You can try to control it, but you can’t. That’s what’s most interesting.”

Ironically, Thomas’s critique of Western individualism was conveyed through the painter’s hand, which modernists viewed as a form of personal expression. Kurendran Thomas knew there was a contradiction here. “Painting,” he said, “is the ultimate cultural expression of a particular fiction of what it means to be human.”

“We are the only civilization that has defined what it means to be human for an entire species,” he continued. “It’s a great way to become an empire.”