Transforming Collections, Rewinding Internationalism at the Van Abbemuseum

The Decolonising Arts Institute is pleased to announce the Transforming Collections, Rewinding Internationalism conference on April 20-21, 2023 at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

The conference aims to bring artistic, curatorial, art historical and museological practices into critical dialogue with machine learning development. It will be sharing ongoing research and emerging findings from the project, Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage alongside the exhibition Rewinding Internationalism 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) and 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 also include research-in-progress papers and participatory workshops.

The conference convenors are: susan pui san lok (artist, writer, Principal Investigator on the Transforming Collections project, and Director of the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute), Nick Aikens (Curator, Van Abbemuseum) and Scarlett Lösch (Digital Archivist, Van Abbemuseum).

Transforming Collections is led by the Decolonising Arts Institute in collaboration with the Creative Computing Institute, working closely with Tate. The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of Towards a National Collection: a 5-year research and development programme harnessing the potential of new technology to dissolve barriers between collections.