Nouf Aljowaysir’s Ceremonial Ancestor (2025) is a new iteration of her ongoing series, developed from her Salaf (meaning ancestor in Arabic) project, which uses AI to interrogate colonial-era photographic archives. For this iteration, rather than photographs of human subjects, Aljowaysir turns her attention to images of African sculptures and artefacts. Drawing from the online Ross Archive of African Images at Yale University Art Gallery, the work comprises wall-mounted terracotta-coloured tablets with laser-etched imagery on their face, each with an accompanying short video. By using AI tools to erase and reconfigure figures drawn from historically biased datasets, Aljowaysir transforms absence into a form of resistance, inviting reflection on the persistence of orientalist narratives within digital and historical records.

Nouf Aljowaysir (b. 1993) is an award-winning new media artist based in Brooklyn. She splits her time between the art and tech world to study how technologies are designed and their consequential impacts on society and culture. Focussing on our changing relationship with algorithms, she poses intimate questions to tools of “intelligence”, using the exchange to reflect not only on herself but also on how these systems shape our ways of seeing and thinking. Nouf has been awarded residencies at ThoughtWorks Arts and Somerset House. Her work has been exhibited internationally at galleries and festivals such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; M+ Museum, Hong Kong, China; and the Tribeca Film Festival, New York, US. among others. Her film Ana Min Wein? (Where Am I From?) won the 2023 Lumen Prize for Moving Image and was released by The New York Times Op-Docs series in June 2024.