Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage

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.

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.