BEING HUMAN
CHRISTOPHER KULENDRAN THOMAS, 2019
It's projected on glass. You never get a clean look at it. The room keeps showing through the picture. You can't fully arrive, and you can't fully leave. Right now, that's Taylor Swift. A cane chair. A hotel bed behind her. A stone Buddha head on a stand. Except she isn't Taylor Swift. She was generated for this. Later, the painter Oscar Murillo shows up. Fake too. Then the film drops you into Sri Lanka. A train heading north, into ground the war had torn apart. The civil war lasted twenty-six years. It ended in 2009. Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed in the final offensive. Christopher Kulendran Thomas was born in London to a Tamil family that had fled Sri Lanka. He made this with Annika Kuhlmann. They called it Being Human. It asks what the human in human rights was ever supposed to mean. The art market has its own version of that question. Kulendran Thomas says it pays artists like him to perform their authenticity. Keep it simple. Make it legible. Watch what he does with that. And right around the time the war ended, down in Colombo, Sri Lanka's biggest city, the international art market arrived. A biennale. New galleries. Collectors. Fast. The paintings and sculptures in this room came through that market. Kulendran Thomas bought all of them from the same Colombo gallery. They're by Sri Lankan artists. One of them is Kingsley Gunatillake. Then he hung one more. A Gunatillake that Gunatillake didn't paint. A machine trained on generations of Sri Lankan painters made the image. His studio painted it by hand. It's in here with the originals. The fakes aren't only on the glass. And the thing they give the fake Taylor Swift to talk about? Being real.