Leaking Collections

Curated by Roxana Fabius

“The stranger dreamed that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest ones hung at a distance of many centuries and as high as the stars, but their features were completely precise. The man lectured his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and magic: the faces listened anxiously and tried to answer understandingly, as if they guessed the importance of that examination which would redeem one of them from his condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the real world. Asleep or awake, the man thought over the answers of his phantoms, did not allow himself to be deceived by imposters, and in certain perplexities he sensed a growing intelligence. He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.”

-Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins, 1940

Borges’ words describe the quest of a man who, through his dreams, seeks to conjure another human being into reality — to understand the element that distinguishes a mere image or illusion from a soul, to understand what makes us human. Revisited today amidst the looming crisis around artificial intelligence, this prescient story might invite us to ask a subsequent question: what keeps us human? What are the elements that anchor us here, in this shared reality? Could it be the stories we tell ourselves and each other — particularly stories that resist easy answers, that inhabit intermediary and uncertain spaces, that hold us in the productive discomfort of doubt?

The artists in Leaking Collections insert this kind of ambiguous narrative into the digital environments that dictate our collective memory and experiences: database collections that train AI, univocal virtual representations of museum collections, and the construction of possible futures. In these sites of interplay between technology and cultural heritage, the artworks combine material from seemingly disparate sources to propose new and disruptive ways of envisioning stories beyond the frameworks built by tech corporations.

In some ways, we could understand the works in this exhibition as performing the role of  information leaks, as defined by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey in their book Evil Media  (2012). Leaks make visible not only what a story is, but how stories come to be known. The leak can take many forms, but its essence lies neither in its material nature nor its content — it is an attempt to mobilize and unleash the dynamics of unexpected consequences. A leak is a result of the accident, the double agent, the mixup, to be offered up in the spirit of Borges as one of the enduring gestures of humanity.

Leaking Lands by Ofri Cnaani is a three-channel video installation that recounts the story of a devastating fire in Brazil's National Museum that destroyed two centuries' worth of treasures, leaving almost no physical trace of the building or collection. Cnaani’s piece operates as a digital séance, conjuring the museum’s collection back to life. On the first screen, the artist wanders through a spectral virtual museum as generated by the Google Arts and Culture Initiative and guided by conversations with the institution's official caretakers. On the second screen, crowdsourced images from Wikimedia give us access to only the images the public chose to share, thus creating an alternate collection of remnants that disrupt the canonical institutional order and its indexing standards. On the third screen, a collaboration with Uruguayan dance-maker Luciana Achugar brings 3D models of collection objects into dialogue with her "pleasure practice," a healing movement methodology. Through movement and breath, participants connect somatically with inanimate objects. The inherent tension between the modus operandi of modern national colonialism and late-capitalist digital colonialism invites us to think about the interstitial spaces emerging in today's techno-political environment, where people are able to manipulate, intervene and ultimately refine corporate technological space by adding a layer of lived experience that it can´t limit.

Stephanie Dinkins’ Cosmologies from the Bay: Gifts Between Us and the Universe presents an AI-voice audio recitation of texts gathered in early 2025 through conversations with Black communities across the Bay Area. The artist asked participants what AI should know about them in order to become more caring, culturally grounded, and accountable to people. These informal oral history gatherings were a space for stories, reflections, memories, humor, ritual, worry, and wisdom to be shared openly and deeply. The work is a vocal performance that is at once community speech, DNA storage, decoded language and live voice read by a machine. The original stories gathered for the project arrive as plural constellations: ancestral knowing, everyday ritual, coded entanglements, family memory, grounded sacredness, survival knowledge, and speculation about what should be carried forward. Collectively they resist Silicon Valley’s flattened logics of the future, where progress is measured by efficiency and human selfhood is broken into data points. Instead the work foregrounds rememory, relationships, cultural specificity, collective survival, and continuance. Within the project, participation becomes a form of agency. These stories are treated as data gifts: intentional acts of sharing rooted in relation, reciprocity, and trust.

Agency over one’s own history is at the core of The Heist by The LOOTY Collective, an artist-created institution dedicated to the digital repatriation of looted cultural artifacts. Using blockchain technology, augmented reality, 3D scanning, and NFTs, LOOTY creates a hybrid physical-digital museum experience. The project aims to restore appropriated and displaced artifacts to their rightful places —both geographically and within global cultural consciousness — while also providing educational resources regarding heritage preservation and the historical injustices of colonialism. The “heist” is both a title and a strategy to question Occidental notions of the role of institutions in preserving and re-presenting  the objects that anchor shared global narratives and design collective memory. The heist acts as a leak in the sense that it liberates both the object and the information that the object projects from the secure vault of the museum, even if only temporarily in our imaginations. LOOTY’s mission is to digitally repatriate looted artifacts and showcase them in an immersive and accessible environment in order to redefine their stories.

Narratives are technologies. Stories are technologies. The invented structures we use to share narratives and stories inform how we understand, question and accept them. Video games are among the most pervasive world-building tools of contemporary culture. In his ongoing series of site-specific video games titled Nepenthe, Lawrence Lek explores memory and identity in virtual worlds. Named after the mythological remedy for sorrow and first realized at the 2021 Ljubljana Biennale, the installation presents a future of totally automated entertainment in which forgetting is the vehicle for healing. The current game centers on the ruins of Da Shui Fa, the waterworks of Beijing's Old Summer Palace, destroyed by Anglo-French forces during the Second Opium War in 1860. A playable game and an accompanying short film imagine a lone traveller encountering the ghosts of past civilizations within glowing ruins and pristine virtual architecture. Step by step, we play toward the erasure of individual and collective memory — an act that paradoxically diminishes our agency.

It is in the threshold between past memory and future world-building that Sisters, Not Twins by Skawennati takes root. Inspired by a virtual bedcover in the artist's own 2017 machinima She Falls for Ages — a science-fiction retelling of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) creation story — the work originates in an ancient world populated by a technologically sophisticated people whose culture centers on a Celestial Tree. At the story’s heart is Otsitsakaion, also known as Skywoman, who steps up bravely to become an astronaut and world-builder. The work takes the form of whole-cloth, hand-stitched quilts in dupioni silk, and appear as if they might have been shipped from cyberspace, or perhaps from Skyworld itself. Their unusual circular shapes summon portals to other worlds, while the quilts’ association with beds and dreaming evokes the possibility of imagining and creating a future based on the cosmologies of the past.

Individually and together, these works cunningly navigate the complexity of what keeps us human in this time of transformation — which may well be, as Borges suggested, the moment that another human is dreaming us into reality.