Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage is a 3-year project led by Dr susan pui san lok, UAL Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Decolonising Arts Institute.
It’s 1 of 5 national Discovery Projects announced by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in September 2021 as part of Towards a National Collection (TaNC): a 5-year research and development programme harnessing the potential of new technology to dissolve barriers between collections.
Summary
Transforming Collections is driven by our belief that a national collection cannot be imagined without addressing structural inequalities in the arts. Its work will be carried out by an interdisciplinary team of colleagues from UAL Decolonising Arts Institute and UAL Creative Computing Institute working closely with Tate and a further 15 national and international collection and archive partners.
It will combine critical art historical and museological research with participatory machine learning design. It will embed creative activations of the research through artist commissions. It sets out to engage with the contentious histories imbued in objects and reveal the sometimes uncomfortable stories that collections tell.
Aims
This research seeks to enable online cross-search of collections, surface patterns of bias and uncover hidden connections, to generate new narratives around art, nation and heritage.
Its aims are to surface suppressed histories, amplify marginalised voices and re-evaluate artists and artworks ignored or sidelined by dominant narratives. And to begin to imagine a distributed yet connected evolving ‘national collection’ that builds on and enriches existing knowledge, with multiple and multivocal narratives.
Project team
Principal Investigator
Co-Investigators
- Professor Sonia Boyce
- Professor Rebecca Fiebrink
- Professor Mick Grierson
- Dr Anjalie Dalal-Clayton
- Dr Peaks Krafft
- Dr Athanasios Velios
- Christopher Griffin (Tate)
- Dr Hannah Barton (Tate)
- Mark Miller (Tate)
Researchers
- Dr Tiffany Boyle
- Kit Bower-Morris
- Dr Alice Correia
- Dr Andrew Cummings
- Dr Jon Gillick
- Dr Tehmina Goskar
- Dr Ireti Olowe
- Veera Jussila
- Ananda Rutherford
- Dr Ian Sergeant
- Dr Charlotte Webb
iniva Archivist
- Kaitlene Koranteng
Project and Partnerships Manager
Project Administrator
You can contact us at ContactTransformingCollections@arts.ac.uk
Project partners and collaborating organisations
Stories
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Yu-Chen Wang, 2020-2022, 'If there is a place I haven't been to', installation view at Le lieu unique, Nantes (2022) and MoCA Taipei (2020).
Announcing the Practice Researchers in Residence
Four artist researchers have been selected to undertake a 15-month virtual practice-based research residency as part of the Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage project.
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Stephanie Dinkins, On Love and Data (installation view), Stamps Gallery. Michigan, 2021
Transforming Collections, Rewinding Internationalism at the Van Abbemuseum
The Transforming Collections, Rewinding Internationalism conference aims to bring artistic, curatorial, art historical and museological practices into critical dialogue with machine learning development.
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Upper Gallery, Workshop block, London College of Communication, UAL. Photo by Ideal Insight
Initial Project Report
The Transforming Collections project team have published their first report, documenting the approach and first year of activity on the Towards a National Collection (TaNC) Discovery Project.