Image: Kunstmuseum Bonn
Christopher Kulendran Thomas has been named the recipient of the 2026 Human AI Art Award, presented by Deutsche Telekom and Kunstmuseum Bonn. The artist is showing a newly reconfigured version of his video installation ‘Peace Core’ in the museum’s Human AI Art Space, an outdoor structure designed specifically for the annual prize. The exhibition runs from 25 June through 13 September 2026 in Bonn.
Now in its third edition, the award recognises artists working at the intersection of visual art and advanced technology, particularly artificial intelligence. For this year’s presentation, Kulendran Thomas has spatially reconceived the work as ‘Peace Core (surround)’, an immersive, continually unfolding installation made for multiple screens.
The installation presents US television broadcasts from the final moments before the events of 11 September 2001. The footage is continuously remixed and altered in real time by an AI algorithm trained on vaporwave aesthetics and the style of early TikTok “corecore” videos, according to the Kunstmuseum Bonn. The resulting work extends a media environment immediately preceding a watershed event into an apparently endless present.
The museum’s description connects the installation’s focus on the pre-9/11 period with the geopolitical shifts that followed, including their impact on Tamil Eelam, identified as the homeland of Kulendran Thomas’s family. The Tamil independence movement there was suppressed by the Sri Lankan government under the pretext of the “War on Terror,” the museum states. The work therefore places an algorithmically manipulated stream of popular media alongside histories of violence and political transformation.
Kulendran Thomas has worked with artificial intelligence for almost a decade, using the technology to question what the museum describes as the myths of Western individualism. The artist spent his formative years in London after his family left Sri Lanka because of escalating ethnic oppression. His practice is interdisciplinary, combining AI technologies with collaborations involving architects, writers, technologists and musicians from around the world.
‘Peace Core’ was originally commissioned by WIELS in Brussels, Artspace in Sydney and FACT in Liverpool. The Bonn presentation was developed in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann and is installed in the Human AI Art Space outside Kunstmuseum Bonn. The award exhibition opened on 24 June at 7pm, while admission to the Human AI Art Space is free during museum opening hours. The museum notes that limited capacity may result in waiting times.
