Reflections on decolonial data

In this artist talk, Nora Al-Badri will explore colonial museum collections and narratives by examining their data through an anti-colonial lens. Using critical AI-driven chatbots, AI-generated artefacts and 3D printing, her work creates a new form of ’technoheritage’ that challenges museums and technological power structures, amplifying marginalised voices and experiences. During the talk, she will also address the impact of broader digital colonialism and discuss the opportunities and challenges associated with datasets from the Global South. This will include issues such as genocides, visibility, restitution and healing. AI is a technology that hallucinates histories while erasing or obscuring what is happening in real time right in front of us. It polarises, misleads and amplifies propaganda. However, it is also projected as a tool of intimacy, offering simulated companionship for conversations that many would not dare to have with their fellow human beings…

Nora Al-Badri is a multi-disciplinary and conceptual media artist with a German-Iraqi background. Her works are research-based as well as paradisciplinary and post-colonial. She lives and works in Berlin. She graduated in political sciences at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and is a lecturer at the Eidgenössische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich and was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Humans and Machines. Her practice focuses on the politics and the emancipatory potential of new technologies such as machine intelligence or data sculpting. Al-Badri’s artistic material is a speculative archaeology from fossils to artefacts or performative interventions in museums and other public spaces, that respond to the inherent power structures.
She has exhibited in the Viktoria and Albert Museums’ Applied Arts Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, Design Biennal Istanbul, ZKM Karlsruhe, KW Contemporary Berlin, Science Gallery Dublin, NRW Forum, Jeu De Paume Paris, European Media Art Festival, Transmediale, Space Fundacion Telefonica, Ars Electronica, REDCAT Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater amongst others.