"GROUND ZERO"
Original Soundtrack and Sound Design by Aaron David Ross
10 years ago, in the summer of 2009, the Tamil homeland of ‘Eelam’ was wiped out by the Sri Lankan army. Born through a neo-Marxist revolution, it had been self-governed as an autonomous state for almost 30 years. However, following attacks on the United States on September 11th 2001, revolutionary movements around the world were re-labelled as terrorists, enabling their eradication. As the international community turned a blind eye, Eelam was annihilated. Curiously, in the months following that violence (and with the economic liberalisation that followed), the first white cube commercial galleries opened in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, projecting democratic values internationally and representing a generation of artists influenced by the Western canon encountered online.
“Around the world, the juridical framework of human rights has been leveraged not only to protect the oppressed and disenfranchised but also to justify the imperial ambitions of the nation states by which human rights are enforced. Perhaps though, the problem is not with the concept of human rights but with the very category of ‘human’ itself.”
Christopher Kulendran Thomas in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann at Schinkel Pavillon Berlin
Audio & Video samples available on request
