Christopher Kulendran Thomas discussed how his work metabolises Sri Lanka’s colonial art history while also engaging with the lost legacies of the Tamil Liberation movement, which was brutally defeated in 2009. He spoke about collaborative projects with the Tamil diaspora to reconstruct artworks from that revolution — often based on fragments of memory or scattered archival traces — and about building a decentralised structure for co-authorship. His immersive video installation narrated by an AI avatar explored how histories are written through new technologies, reflecting on alternative possible realities and how collective identity is shaped beyond trauma. In a conversation with Daniel Baumann, he questioned frameworks of critique and identity politics in contemporary art, suggesting instead a more open, ambiguous approach that multiplies possibilities rather than reducing them.
“These days artists are highly incentivized by the art market to perform a sort of authenticity to our minority identities in the most simple and legible way possible. The problem is that we end up with a very reduced set of possibilities for who we can be.”
— Christopher Kulendran Thomas
