From Friday 21 February to Sunday 11 May, FACT presents two compelling exhibitions by artists Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Bahar Noorizadeh. The exhibitions invite visitors to explore the intersection of media, technology, and global politics, with Christopher Kulendran Thomas showcasing a major new body of work, Safe Zone, alongside a reimagined staging of Bahar Noorizadeh’s film Free to Choose.
Within these powerful exhibitions, the artists encourage audiences to reconsider their relationship with politics, technology, economics, and societal structures while reflecting on how momentous events have shaped the world as we understand it today.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s work explores the legacies of imperialism. A British artist of Sri Lankan Tamil descent, Kulendran Thomas has been using artificial intelligencentechnologies over the last decade to examine the foundational fictions of Western individualism. His new exhibition, Safe Zone, features two bodies of work that metabolise the historical mediums of soft power: a series of paintings and a video work that auto-edits television footage. The exhibition at FACT marks the work’s UK premiere.
At the centre of this exhibition is Peace Core (2024), a new work co-commissioned by FACT in partnership with WIELS and Artspace Sydney, and produced with Kulendran Thomas’ long-term collaborator, Annika Kuhlmann. The rotating sphere sculpture consists of 24-screens that transmit a continuous stream of television footage broadcast in the moments before channels cut live to the unfolding events of 11 September 2001. Peace Core employs an artificial intelligence algorithm to continuously edit over 24,000 clips into an infinitely evolving sequence, accompanied by a soundscape that keeps remixing thesounds and music broadcast that morning on American television. It draws on the visual language of #corecore, an internet aesthetic combining seemingly unrelated videos, images, and soundbites to evoke a shared emotional response to the overwhelming nature of contemporary existence.
With this exhibition, Kulendran Thomas asks audiences to reflect on the overlooked connections stemming from the global geopolitical shifts triggered by the ‘War on Terror’, in which unrelated independence movements were rebranded as terrorist organisations following the 9/11 attacks on the United States. This rhetoric provided the Sri Lankan government with justification for ‘counterterrorism’ measures in the Tamil homeland of Eelam. Previously a self-governed independent state that Kulendran Thomas’s family is from, these measures led to the Mullivaikkal Massacre in 2009.
Illuminated by the glow of Peace Core is a series of new paintings that use AI-generated images to imagine these events. Abstracting the work of early Sri Lankan modernists, the images are composed using a neural network trained on the colonial art history that was first brought to Sri Lanka by European settlers. The largest painting in the series shares its dimensions with Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. While Picasso’s masterpiece depicted the widely reported horrors of the massacre in Guernica during The Spanish Civil War, the events at Mullivaikkal remained largely undocumented due to the expulsion of foreign journalists. With no outside witnesses to the atrocities in Mullivaikkal, Kulendran Thomas’ paintings are imagined through a networked collective consciousness of other events
represented across art history and rendered in the visual language of the colonial history that could itself be seen as a pretext for that violence.
FACT and The Otolith Collective are proud to present the UK premiere of Bahar Noorizadeh’s Free to Choose (2023), produced in collaboration with animator Ruda Babau and the experimental opera group Waste Paper Opera, and commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum. Bahar Noorizadeh is a UK-based artist, theorist, and filmmaker whose work explores speculation, finance, neoliberalism, fiction, the weird, and the unknown. Noorizadeh describes Free to Choose as a “financial science-fiction opera” or “fi-fi opera” that depicts the credit system of the future as a Central Time Travel Agency, regulating time travel between Hong Kong circa 1997 and Hong Kong in 2047. The title references the 15-part television series starring economist Milton Friedman, broadcast in the US in 1980.
Free to Choose pushes Friedman’s praise of Hong Kong as a ‘free market utopia’ that will ‘set an example for the rest of the world’ to a delirious and absurdist extreme vision of a financialised future.
Free to Choose draws on Noorizadeh’s extensive research on Milton Friedman, Michel Feher, and Rem Koolhaas. It brings together a luminous world of a vivid and disorienting future megacity and a cast of unpredictable inhabitants with a playful script and dream-like
plot. The narrative follows Philip Tose, the former racing car driver and CEO of Hong Kong-based Peregrine Investment, as he attempts to survive and surpass the 1997 economic crash by borrowing a lump sum from his older self in Hong Kong in 2047. In his
search for his future self, Tose encounters the hierarchies that divide a future world where rating activists demand free time travel for all and credit Untrustworthies navigate the floating cities of the Pearl Megalopolis.
Alongside the exhibition, FACT and The Otolith Collective are delighted to present a public programme series that further explores Noorizadeh’s practice. A programme highlight is the UK premiere of the audiovisual performance Admiror, Or Revolutionary Sentiments.
Following performances at the Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Admiror, Or Revolutionary Sentiments takes place at the Invisible Wind Factory, Liverpool, on Friday 21 February 2025. Admiror, Or Revolutionary Sentiments stages an opposition between the sentimental logic of liberalism and the feelings that propel liberation. The work is produced in collaboration with opera maker Klara Kofen, with drums and sound design by composer Cameron Graham and CGI design and animation from Ruda Babau.
Maitreyi Maheshwari, Head of Programme at FACT, said: “In light of recent political, social and economic upheavals, it feels urgent to reflect on how events of the recent past have shaped the world we live in today. How do we recognise the moments when the world
changes, and what is the aftermath of such large-scale global events within different local contexts? The works of Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Bahar Noorizadeh bear witness to the interconnectedness of economic ideologies and political rhetoric, using new digital media technologies to reimagine the unseen stories of the specific impacts these systems of power have on people, places and times we ordinarily see as disparate.”