Nouf Aljowaysir
Ceremonial Ancestors
2026, Permastone sculpture with laser etching + generative video
A video and sculpture in dialogue, exploring the biases encoded in artificial intelligence and in the archives that train it.
In 2020, Aljowaysir began a research practice examining how AI systems interpret identity. This work revealed two entangled problems: the stereotypes these systems reproduce, and the structural biases embedded in the datasets they learn from. Both are explored in her video Ana Min Wein? (Where Am I From?), which traces the failure of AI tools to hold the complexity, nuance, and layered histories of Arab identities.
Ceremonial Ancestors extends this inquiry through the Ross Archive of African Images at Yale, a collection composed almost entirely of European-made photographs. Many of these images document objects extracted from communities under colonial conditions, then reclassified as “art”—stripped of their ritual, social, and spiritual contexts, and flattened into a Western-legible idea of African culture. Today, AI systems train on archives like this one, inheriting and reanimating the same distortions.
Aljowaysir responds through erasure. Using AI segmentation, she removes parts of the archival photographs, creating gaps in the data and disrupting the cycle of misrepresentation. These altered images became the training material for the model that generated the video: a latent space walk through multiple generated outputs from the model. Yet the work shows that even through erasure, AI continues to learn and reproduce colonial patterns, turning bias into an almost unrecognizable abstraction.
Nouf Aljowaysir
Ana Min Wein? (Where Am I From?)
video, machine learning
A short film and visual diary that constructs Aljowaysir’s genealogical journey using two different voices, her own and an AI narrator.
After moving to the US from Saudi Arabia at a young age, she explored her identity by tracing her childhood and family memories. While the AI character supports her journey, it reveals stereotypes and biases derived from its training and algorithmic composition.
By juxtaposing oral storytelling against AI, Where Am I From? exposes the reduction of her culture and eradication of her ancestors' collective memories.