Ceremonial Ancestors

Research

As an extension of my Salaf research, I turned to the Ross Archive of African Images at the Yale University Art Gallery, one of the most significant collections of African art from the 16th to early 20th centuries, to examine how colonial-era archives continue to persist and reanimate through contemporary AI systems.

Composed almost entirely of European-collected images, the archive exposes issues surrounding the politics of representation and collection. It rarely includes African-authored interpretations, voices, or contextual knowledge, instead reflecting the colonial gaze through which these objects were catalogued and circulated. The photographs document artifacts that were often extracted during periods of imperial expansion, taken from communities under coercive or exploitative conditions. Many of these objects were never intended for display—they were made to be used, worn, or inhabited within specific social, ritual, and spiritual contexts. Their removal and reclassification as “art” transformed them into ethnographic specimens or aesthetic curiosities for Western institutions. It also stripped them of cultural specificity, flattening the objects into a generalized notion of “African art.”

Even as the archive acknowledges its preservation challenges, the deeper concern lies in how AI systems train on these colonial datasets, perpetuating and reanimating the same structures of power and misrepresentation.

Material

Ceremonial Ancestors uses the same technique as Salaf and erases parts of the image using an AI segmentation technique to create another "absent dataset" for AI to train on. This absence is an act meant to disrupt AI from repeating problematic modes of cultural preservation and documentation. Also, in this work, the absence becomes material. The erased images were laser etched on jesmonite sculptures that echo the physicality and materiality found in the original archive.

An Erased Archive