Bianca Durrant

The Collection

August 30th – September 21st, 2024

Based on creative development during a GlogauAIR Berlin residency in 2024, The Collection continues the artist’s focus on how museum objects function, the politics of display and institutional ontologies. Using generative AI tools – that are trained on inherently biased content – as a proxy for institutional knowledge, the artist reveals relationships amongst artist, object and institution, and uses these as prompts for generating an installation that highlights how inherent biases and invisibilities of our past are replicated and amplified in artificial intelligence-derived knowledge systems. In The Collection, an archetype ‘object’ holds the space for these provocations. Objects are placed in playful dialogue to explore past, present and future. The archetype object, a hand-cast bronze, at once prompts our innate desire to anthropomorphise against a backdrop of museum archives full of problematic histories and interpretations, whilst facing off with its 3D printed replica that heralds the now and future of the digitisation of objects and knowledge systems. Data points then become the artwork itself in an exploration of their form and structure, reflecting back the replication of the problems of the institution in future iterations. The exhibition also operates as a site for reflection on museological practices, where digitisation and replication offer new ways to address access, archives and repatriation, establishing a new set of values for the ‘object’. What is real, valuable or precious is no longer mediated by its extant qualities alone: objects now exist as data in a world rapidly mixing human and machine ontologies.