BEING HUMAN
CHRISTOPHER KULENDRAN THOMAS, 2019
This piece doesn’t let the word “human” stay innocent. This is Being Human. Christopher Kulendran Thomas. 2019. It’s a video installation on glass. You can see through it, which means the paintings and sculptures behind it bleed into the image. You’re watching the work and looking past it at the same time. You can’t fully arrive and you can’t fully leave. What’s in the video is documentary footage from Sri Lanka mixed with AI-generated deepfakes. And that’s not a tech trick stapled onto an art piece. The AI is the argument. Here’s what a deepfake does: it generates something that looks convincingly human. It passes. And the moment you realize a machine can produce something that passes as human, the word “human” stops feeling like a fact and starts feeling like a border. Kulendran Thomas grew up in London. His family is Sri Lankan Tamil, a community that lived through a civil war where the language of human rights and democracy was supposed to mean something solid. And this work just sits there, very calmly, asking: solid for whom? Who got protected? Whose humanity was recognized and whose was paperwork? Because once “human” is a category that technology can fake, it gets easier to see that it was always a category that politics could revoke. Not an eternal truth. More like a door. One that some people get through and some people don’t. And the glass helps. You’re literally looking through an image of contested humanity at other artworks. Paintings, sculptures, things that got through the door into this museum, this room, this canon. Everything in your field of vision is something that was granted status. The title is almost sarcastic. Being Human. As if that were a stable condition. As if history hasn’t spent centuries deciding, very unevenly, who qualifies.