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.
Open Call: Practice Research Residencies
We recently put out a call for artist researchers to undertake virtual practice research residencies as part of the Transforming Collections project. Please note that the open call has now closed.

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)
- Hannah Barton (Tate)
- Mark Miller (Tate)
Researchers
- Kit Bower-Morris
- Dr Alice Correia
- Andrew Cummings
- Jon Gillick
- Dr Tehmina Goskar
- Ananda Rutherford
- Dr Ian Sergeant
- Dr Charlotte Webb
iniva Archivist
- Kaitlene Koranteng
Project and Partnerships Manager
Project Administrator
Project partners and collaborating organisations
More to explore
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Donald Locke, Trophies of Empire, 1972-4 © Estate of Donald Locke. Courtesy of Tate
AHRC award
Read about the £3m grant UAL Decolonising Arts Institute received to transform UK collections using emerging technologies.
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Sonia Boyce, Devotional Wallpaper and Placards, 2008-2020. Acquired by the Contemporary Art Society for the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) through the Rapid Response Fund, 2020.
Projects
Learn about Decolonising Arts Institute activities.
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Image: Daniel Day, AHRC Black Artists and Modernism project, David Medalla Study Day. Image: Daniel Day
About us
Find out more about our vision and ambitions for decolonising arts.