Transforming Collections, Rewinding Internationalism

Transforming Collections, Rewinding Internationalism aims to bring artistic, curatorial, art historical and museological practices into critical dialogue with machine learning development. The conference will be sharing ongoing research and emerging findings from the project, Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage, led by the Decolonising Arts Institute and the Creative Computing Institute at University of the Arts London (UAL), in close partnership with Tate. The conference will take place in the context of the exhibition Rewinding Internationalism at the Van Abbemuseum, conceived as a generative site of speculation and experimentation.This conference is addressed to artists, curators, researchers, academics, archivists and creative computing technologists interested in exploring decolonial feminist praxes through the interrogative, interruptive and disruptive potential of practice-led research in and with museums.The programme will open with a keynote by Professor Stephanie Dinkins (USA). Speakers include Amal Alhaag (NL), Sonia Boyce (UK), Alice Correia (UK), Rebecca Fiebrink (UK), Irene Fubara-Manuel (UK), Tehmina Goskar (UK), Mick Grierson (UK), Setareh Noorani (NL), Ananda Rutherford (UK), among others. Sessions aim to explore architectures and archaeologies of absence, decolonising data and unlearning erasures, and approaches to disrupting collections. The conference will include research-in-progress papers and participatory workshops.The thematics, temporalities and modalities weaving across the two days will be guided by the deceptively simple question, ‘Whose heritage?’ and the restorative and regenerative possibilities of ‘potential histories’ (Hall, 1999; Azoulay, 2019). We seek to ask:What, where and how might ‘potential histories’ within and between collections and archives be articulated, activated, vocalised or materialised?How might we surface systemic biases, barriers, absences, erasures, ambivalences, subversions - and resurface an abundance of overlooked artistic creativity?When, where and how might ‘art’, ‘nation’ and ‘heritage’ be reimagined, within and beyond the 'national' or the ‘international’?How might we effectively and ethically intervene in the ‘cultural archive’ (Said, 1993; Wekker, 2016) and the ‘digital cultural record’? (Risam, 2019)How can approaches to technologies, such as interactive machine learning, contribute to strategies of countering, re/encountering, re/connection, re/distribution, reimagining and rewinding? What are the possibilities and risks?Who are ‘we’, and who speaks?