Interrogating archival photography and artificial intelligence (AI), the exhibition weaves together the environmental landscapes of 19th-century mining of gold and diamonds in South Africa with the scripting process of AI.

The exhibition asks how have diverse languages become compressed into one singular coding language and questions whose voices are not allowed to speak through the colonial archive. Whose voices are silenced, whose lives erased, and what materials cannot be archived?

Central to the exhibition is a series of single-shot films that use a variety of generative AI and digital processes, crafted from archival photographs sourced from the Papers of Cecil Rhodes at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Photography was an essential technology of imperial communication and a space of trespass and refusal, where subjects challenged the present and intent of colonial place-making.

The photographs in the exhibition provide a visual vocabulary of the “environment” of Rhodes and his legacy – from his origins in Hackney, East London to the diamond fields of South Africa – and provide a “portal” for critically engaging with the extractive logics of AI. The resulting works offer new narratives by exposing the gaps in large language models (LLMs) and the structural racial logics of universal norms.

Online commission

This project is also available online on Unthinking Photography. It features extended studies based on four archival photographs from the Cecil Rhodes Papers at the Bodleian Library and uses parallax scrolling to navigate through the timelines of each study. Throughout, you'll notice internal links marked by red dots, which draw thematic connections between different areas of the work.