Christopher Kulendran Thomas

Gagosian is pleased to announce Peace Core, an exhibition by Christopher Kulendran Thomas, opening at the gallery’s Park & 75 location in New York on September 4, 2025. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. A gallery dedicated to Kulendran Thomas’s work will be on view starting September 2 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, with other major presentations of his work taking place this winter at the New Museum, New York; K21 museum, Düsseldorf, Germany; the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; and as part of the 14th Taipei Biennial.

For much of the past decade, Kulendran Thomas has been using artificial intelligence tools to question the myths of Western individualism. His paintings metabolize the colonial art history that came to dominate in Sri Lanka after his family, who are Tamil, left escalating ethnic violence there. The artist often exhibits these paintings with video installations that fuse propaganda and counterpropaganda into a speculative vortex of alternate histories.

The exhibition takes its name from its centerpiece, Peace Core (sphere) (2024), a video work of infinite duration that continually auto-edits American television footage first broadcast in the moments before the world-changing events of September 11, 2001. Originally presented as part of Kulendran Thomas’s recent exhibition at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, and realized together with his longtime collaborator Annika Kuhlmann, this work is juxtaposed with six paintings that depict a largely undocumented massacre on the beaches of Mullivaikkal, Sri Lanka, that was perpetrated in 2009 in the geopolitical aftermath of the “War on Terror” and went largely unwitnessed by the outside world. Painted by hand, ambiguous figures merge with their surroundings through allusive, expressionistic brushwork. Lacking documentary evidence, Kulendran Thomas imagined these scenes by engaging with the visual language of the colonial history that precipitated the violence they depict—a visual language often seen as synonymous with artistic freedom, but which has also been deployed by the West as a form of soft power.