Babylonian Vision

2020, Gan Video

Al-Badri expands on speculative archaeology and decolonial as well as machine learning based museum practices by generating technoheritage. A pre-trained neural network based on GAN technology (General Adversarial Networks) was trained with 10.000k images from 5 different museum collections with the largest collections of Mesopotamian, Neo-Sumerian and Assyrian artefacts. The images were in the majority collected through web crawling and scraping and without the institutions approval (even though she asked each museum beforehand) and just two through their open API. Subsequently new synthetic images evolve as a living memory of the images. The generated image is at the same time the artefact itself. Yet, materiality is very important, since the input images are images of material objects of our past. If MI is seen as a technology performing and processing our collective memory it makes sense to apply it to our big cultural data of the past and to generate new images as traces and circulating image worlds. Applying MI to cultural big data supplies other, more speculative and abstract insights on the search for a visual language, form and pattern of an era within a specific spatial context: Babylonian.  The input images of these databases carry time and memory themselves (patina, broken pieces, most of them mid- to low-res). Subsequently new synthetic images evolve as a living memory of the images. The generated image is at the same time the artefact itself. The series consists of over 150 videos.

The work was awarded a honorary mention from Art Jameel.

With texts written by: Prof. Wendy M. K. Shaw, Dr. Fazil Moradi, Dr. Saud Al-Zaid, Daphne Dragona, Dr. Anita Hosseini

Engineers: Negar Foroutan and Melika Behjati

Realised in the framework of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne CDH AiR program 2019

AFU. This is not a hackerspace.

2021, Intervention, 3D sculptures

Commissioned work for KW Institute for Contemporary Art and the virtual exhibition "The Last Museum".

Enter here

Welcome to some savage archaeology in outta space! Occupy Archaeology! Occupy hackerspaces!

We are in dire need for more cave paintings in hackerspaces, more boards of mothers to be leading us with ferocity and care, more PC towers of Babylon, more hieroglyphic encryption and more hybrid creatures. The artefact is the agent creating subaltern hackerspaces with HERitage und HERstory.

All made by hand thousands of years ago, remixed, stitched by hand through software yesterday, conceived in a 3D printer today and reimagined tomorrow. The printer itself is the fetish object of open source and making communities. Forget „do-it-yourself“. It has always been the time for „do-it-together“. We, the women of color, the invisible spirits and work force imagined and built computers and systems. We did the tinkering always. And we don’t exist in dualisms of maker/made.

Forget the god-lists the scientists made up of the ancient materials. No need for hierarchies of gods or domination of one god upon the other. Few spirits kept their identity throughout the millennia. In outta space we prefer spirits to gods, spirits that are fluid and that emulate from one to another. Spirits, Diĝir, Nin, that care for their spaces and people. The geek is resolved in punk archaeology by the crafting and coding of spirits, masquerades, witches, goddesses and daimons.

We, the spirits, are defying a strict and linear temporality but a mixing of material and human life of different times. We are the nodes of the causal network that give events and codes coherence and meaning. One will recognise ways that people now and then self-organise, envision, resist and revolt.

Credits:

Videography: Siska

Soundtrack mix: Shamsa, Track mixed in: Cadans - No Connection (Broken Mix), Melodic Acapella female sound: Lynn Adib

Credits poem: Nikki Giovanni "Ego Tripping"

الأمل Al-Amal/ Hope Mars Mission (via Youtube)

Special thanks to the spaceship crew in Berlin-Mitte as well as Norberta and Gregor. Special thanks to Andy and CCC.

Spherical Drop

2021, 3D sculpture / Golden NFT project

On this remixed digital clay tablet known as the “Babylonian Map of the World“ one can see that the earth was described to be a disc with Babylon at its center. But then it is a little easy to discard the author and their culture as “primitive“. We don’t really know how mythology and reality were lived at that time. Plus there was no geocentrism within Mesopotamian cosmology: not the Earth was the center of the universe like Aristotle tried to establish in „On the Heavens“.

Our contemporary myth-making of the „dark past“ where many people supposedly believed the earth to be a disc is kind of not true (just makes us feel better and more enlightened). There was a lot of evidence ever since ancient Egypt with Herodotus, Indian astrology, or Mediterranean thought, and everybody after that. In fact, since then the majority of scholars have believed in the concept of the spherical world. The digital artefact now comes with instructions to materialize as a 3D print that addresses the denial of the existence of gravity by todays’ Flat-Earthers.

The original artefact was looted from Iraq and is since then kept in the British Museum. Al-Badri sees the money gathered through the NFT sale as a form of monetary reparation: the piece was donated to a PENG! project, Golden NFT, that is gathering money for refugees to buy their way into Europe (“golden visa”).

The Post-truth Museum (essay)

2021

This essay was written for the KW Berlin Open Secrets online exhibition.

Find the full essay here: https://opensecret.kw-berlin.de/essays/the-post-truth-museum/

Robo Polke

2018, acrylic on canvas 65 x 50 cm, video

A human-robot commentary on machine-non-creativity citing Sigmar Polkes famous painting “Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen!”. A parody on the robots in art hype. In collaboration with Jan Nikolai Nelles.

NefertitiBot

2018, chatbot installation

The chatbot is dreaming of museums: With its neuronal AI capabilities it can be described as a voice of the subaltern taking on an agency for objects, opposing the dominant narrative as well as experimenting towards post-authorship through machine intelligence in curatorial practice. After all the bot can be a  self-learning system, an interface and maybe an entity which can be held accountable.

NefertitiBot seeks to take over the power of interpretational sovereignty from administrative and curatorial museums structures. A bot through which material objects of other cultures in museums of the Global North will start speaking for themselves shaking off the violent colonial patina by deconstructing the fiction inherent in institutional narratives and challenging the politics of representation. As soon as objects - of entangled and disputed collections - start speaking for themselves, and machines will transcend biases it might affect us in the marrow of our bones…

The work is by Jan Nikolai Nelles and Nora Al-Badri.

Fossil Futures

2017-ongoing, data, bone replica, video

We were commissioned by the community of Tendaguru in Southern Tanzania to initiate a re-centering, a reclaiming of territories, where over 100 years back German and British colonizers extracted 230 tons of dinosaur bones and put them in European museums. Almost no one is aware of that fact and the dinosaurs are the centrepieces of the German Natural History Museum in Berlin. This area today in Tanzania is still a disputed territory, where land grabbing by multinationals and severe displacement of the population started taking place only recently. Just another colonial continuity. Yet the site and the dinosaur bones are regarded as sacred heritage by the community. The decolonized museum in the Tanzanian forest is an investigative and indigenous narration and re-imagining of a museum. We’re using technology amidst nature, anticipating possible non-anthropocentric futures for non-invasive and multi-sensory experiences. It is about creating new platforms of representation of the subaltern and making places of origin visible.

Project together with Jan Nikolai Nelles and was kindly supported by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW).

For more information and background have a look at our research videos:

HOW AN AI IMAGINES A DINOSAUR

2017, 3D print and evolutionary algorithm

The dinosaur data of the bones is the subject of exploration with an evolutionary algorithm (while the algorithm is based on the physicality of bone structures – it is called generative design). Asking a generative design AI to complete parts of the skeleton. Since not one skeleton was found with 100% of the bones ever, the paleontologists always needed artists such as painters or sculptors to complete the skeletons for the museum display. For this specific skeleton - one of the biggest dinosaur skeletons ever found - the Brachiosaurus Brancai from Tanzania around 30% of the Brachiosaurus skeleton parts were never found during the excavation. In the history of dinosaur depiction, being painted or erected in the museums is a lot human creativity involved which brought dinosaurs back to an imaginary life. And they seem to be one of the most powerful icons in pop culture to attract people (hence they are used as center pieces for natural history museums, but also in technology as „default/modelobjects“ showing what a technology is able to do). With the piece the artists are investigating human vs. artificial creativity as well as scientific truth about the authenticity of the incomplete dinosaur skeletons.

Together with Jan Nikolai Nelles.

The Other Nefertiti

2015, intervention, 3D print, video 17 min

Disentangled

2017, Ditone print framed 100 x 82 cm, edition of three

We Refugees

2015, 100+ C-Prints, various sizes

We Refugees gathered photographic fragments of individual escape stories whose paths cross in Berlin. The title of the exhibition is based on the eponymous essay by Hannah Arendt in 1943. Therein refugees are referred to as the “vanguard of their peoples”. Photographs that have been brought by refugees or have been taken during the escape, have been arranged by the artists to a narrative. The people who are still living were anonymized in the photographs and visual overlays were made. The faces we can look at because they are not anonymous, belong to dead people. “We Refugees“ was realized with: Ajmal, Ali, Amer, Daniel, Hassan, Husam, Mohamed, Muhammad, Noor, Omar, Rami and Rawia. In collaboration with Jan Nikolai Nelles.

“Al-Badri and Nelles sought to use their photo project to produce an image of refugees that countered those most seen on the internet, TV, or in print media. For refugees are most often seen in such places aspart of an unmanageable flow of people, or as representing very dramatic individual fates. The exhibition sought to focus on the idea of the refugees as producers of images. (...) In this way the issue of identity, insofar as it is directly connected to facial recognition, was thematized as a formal absence, visually and metaphorically overwritten by the background. These images give rise to a number of questions about creation, distribution, material and economic conditions, the act ofidentification, and relationships between power and powerlessness.“ Prof. Ilka Becker, University of Braunschweig

Datteldenkmal

2014, bronze, 65 cm

The memorial for the date fruit refers to the war situation in Iraq and it
is dedicated for all the palm trees, which were destroyed in the past decades through war. Iraq experienced an environmental disaster with the soil being contaminated for millennia through uranium-depleted ammunition. Before the destruction, Iraq used to be the biggest exporter of dates in the world and it was certainly part of the Iraqi identity. For the diaspora the date was one of the few things, which were available outside the country. The date palm (phoenix dactylifera) originates from Mesopotamia and it takes years until a palm carries fruits.

Untitled

2014, bronze, edition of 5

Piece of bread in bronze. Brotlose Kunst.

Nuda Veritas

2013, 3 photographs wooden frames, Cairo

Three photographs of German wheatfields. The the work “Nuda Veritas” (ar: " الحقيقة العارية") evolved in the night before the 30th June 2013 when one of the largest peaceful protests was mobilized in Egypt and subsequently former president Mursi was forced to step down. By mounting the three images the artists planted a medial representation in the city space. The work remained on these walls for more than two years. The mural was done on 28th of June in collaboration with the Egyptian artists Ammar Abo Bakr, Alaa Abd El Hamid and Sameh Ismael Tawfik. The intervention was in Downtown at Qasr Al Nil around 200m away from Tahrir square. On the 30th masses were passing the street.

Together with Jan Nikolai Nelles.

More information

Schirn Magazine “Land ohne Regeln: Street Art in Ägypten”.

World Wide Wheat at Faust Kultur

Dying a Second Death

2013, video

Two channel video installation loop. Natural History Museum Cairo, Egypt.

Together with Jan Nikolai Nelles.

Small rewards

2014, C-prints, 12 motifs, various sizes

Small Rewards zeigt den absurden Versuch, Waffen mit Waffen zu zerstören, während die Maschinerie der Waffenproduktion an anderen Orten der Welt unablässig weiterläuft. Die kontrollierten Explosionen werden aus sicherer Distanz in der Einöde gezündet und verwandeln diese für wenige Momente in einen Ort des Spektakels. Die Munition und die Waffen werden weitläufig versprengt. „Small Rewards Programm“ der USA ist ein Aufruf an die Bevölkerung in Post-Konflikt Gebieten wie dem Irak oder Afghanistan ihre Waffen gegen Bezahlung und ohne Strafe abzugeben. Die Serie verdeutlicht einen Zyklus, der niemals aufzuhören scheint und der Fragen nach der Ökonomie des Krieges aufzuwerfen versucht. Die ursprünglichen Bilder stammen aus Original-Footage von Soldaten, das von der Künstlerin digital weiter verarbeitet wurde.

Greetings From Iraq

2012, Postcards (10,5 x 14,8 cm), 10 motifs, edition of 200

They are not the top ten sights in Iraq. Just a small part, which is reserved to combatants and unfortunate residents. The postcards show motifs based on snapshots from American soldiers, which were processed and finished as postcard pictures.

Places like Babylon, Bagdad or Ur accommodate historical treasures of human history. Now they serve as places of idleness of the soldiers. Up-to-date pictures are almost only available through the military context. The places are built by the Sumerian, but also by Saddam Hussein himself. Hurt or destroyed in many wars.

The Iraqi Diaspora is one of the biggest in the world, but without danger of life they can't visit their homeland or the second generation discover the country of their ancestors.

Living Equestrian Statues

2013, C-Prints, various sizes

The work deals with the historical role models and the representation of power through equestrian statues: The photographic series recreates nine well-known statues. Equestrian and horse are posing at the split of a second the exact pose of the original model. The images are about rulers like Kaiser Wilhelm I, Felipe IV (the first rearing statue), or Jeanne D’Arc. Also early and influential statues like Marc Aurel or drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci are included. The artists replaced the rulers...

Together with Jan Nikolai Nelles.

Gräber

2011, C-print

Objet Trouvé found in the ruins of the abandoned Iraqi embassy to the former DDR in East Berlin. The artist added text referring to the city of Samarra as a fantastic death world. The picture shows the 'Golden Mosque' in Samarra. A conflictual place in Iraq: in 2006 and 2007 parts of the mosque had been severely destroyed in bomb attacks. The Al-Askari Shrine is one of the most important sacred sites for Shias.