Dorothea Schlegel Artist-in-Residence

Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters"

October–December 2025

Decolonial Synthetic Data

Nora Al-Badri explores colonial museum collections and narratives, focusing on her father's homeland of Iraq, as well as other places in the region and their contested histories. Within her practice, the concept of 'technoheritage' emerges as an emancipatory space where artificial intelligence and Southern training datasets converge.

In her project, she will engage with the potential and challenges associated with datasets from the Global South, addressing issues such as visibility, restitution, healing and reparations. AI is a technology that hallucinates histories while erasing or obscuring what is happening in real time right in front of us – it polarises, misleads and amplifies propaganda. However, it is also projected as a tool of intimacy, offering simulated companionship for conversations that many would not dare to have with their fellow human beings...

Based on her 2024 video work The Post-Truth Museum, she will further investigate the notion of post-truth culture at a time when museums in the USA and elsewhere are under threat for exhibiting works that articulate certain political narratives.

Nora Al-Badri is a multi-disciplinary and conceptual media artist with a German-Iraqi background who lives and works in Berlin. Her works are research-based as well as paradisciplinary and postcolonial. A graduate in political sciences from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and a former fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Humans and Machines, she is currently a lecturer at the Eidgenössische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich. Her practice focuses on the politics and emancipatory potential of new technologies such as machine intelligence and data sculpting. Al-Badri's artistic approach combines speculative archaeology with performative interventions in museums and other public spaces. 

She has exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum's Applied Arts Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, at the Istanbul Design Biennal, ZKM Karlsruhe, KW Contemporary Berlin, Science Gallery Dublin, NRW Forum, Jeu de Paume Paris, European Media Art Festival, Transmediale, Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Ars Electronica, and the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT).