Biography
Dr Meghna Singh is a Cape Town based visual artist and researcher with a PhD in visual anthropology from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her work examines colonial and capitalist legacies through decolonial approaches. Working with video installation, sculpture, and XR, blurring boundaries between documentary and fiction, she creates immersive environments highlighting issues of ‘humanism’. Her interest lies in creating public art installations that activate spaces while highlighting colonial and capitalist legacies within urban cityscapes.
She is a New Archival Visions Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025-2026, at the University of the Western Cape, working with its Robben Island Museum and Mayibuye Archives associated with South African liberation struggle histories to create an augmented reality experience at the heritage site of Robben Island. She also leads Nordic AR and Public Space, a collective of artists, curators and academics from across the Nordic countries, focused on activating colonial histories in rural contexts through augmented reality. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark, a Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab 2023-2025, a National Geographic Explorer (2019-2021), an honorary fellow at Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery & Emancipation, University of Hull, and a fellow at the Creative Knowledge Resources, a platform for creative pedagogy and social engagement art in Africa and its diaspora. She was nominated by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture to be an artist in residence at Indigo Art Alliance in 2023.
In 2025, Singh co-created 'The Founder’s Pillars', a site-responsive Augmented Reality memorial in collaboration with Simon Wood and Lesiba Mabitsela during her fellowship at MIT. The project fuses colonial architecture with African futurist storytelling and premiered at the Tribeca Festival 2025 and won the ST ARTS Prize Africa Award of Distinction. Her previous project, co-directed with Simon Wood, Container-Witness the Invisiblised, premiered at the 75th International Venice Film Festival and has been showcased internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Luxembourg Film Festival and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong. It became the first VR film to be invited by the Nobel Prize Society to screen at the Nobel Week Dialogue in Gothenburg 2021. She collaborated with Simon Wood to co-create the In the Wake series consisting of public site-responsive immersive installations across the port cities of South Africa. Funded by the South African Presidential Employment Stimulus Fund, the project trained youth from across the five port cities in virtual reality.
She is co-directing 'The Four Floors of Faneuil' Hall, a quadriptych film with Simon Wood. Incubated and developed with the support of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, the project challenges the construct of American identity and the nation’s enduring paradoxes by simultaneously presenting the realities unfolding on its four Levels.
Synopsis: Hacking Heritage
The urban landscape of Cape Town functions as a highly contested spatial palimpsest, where colonial and apartheid histories are violently inscribed into the physical environment through architecture and monuments. As the city grapples with post-apartheid spatial justice, the legally protected monuments anchoring its central business district remain flashpoints of ideological conflict, representing entrenched narratives of imperial dominance. Concurrently, the global transition toward digitized societies has birthed an equally contested realm: the digital sphere. This dimension is increasingly defined by algorithmic colonialism, wherein the data and cultural narratives of the Global South are systematically extracted by monopolies in the Global North. Within this context, artificial intelligence systems often marginalize non-Western ways of knowing, reinforcing settler futurity by projecting colonial worldviews into technological horizons. To address this dual crisis, public art interventions must evolve into dynamic, immaterial, and highly political tools for reclaiming public memory and asserting digital sovereignty.
Operating precisely at the nexus of these realities, "Hacking Heritage—Decolonizing the Cityscape and the Digital" is a participatory digital arts intervention proposed for the 2026 Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) Live Art Festival by Dr. Meghna Singh and Simon Wood. The project functions simultaneously as a pedagogical tool, a critical spatial confrontation and a dynamic public performance. It centers on a rigorous, three-day Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) co-creation workshop, uniting 8-10 students from the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town, and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. This framework is inspired by the historic Community Arts Project (CAP) of the 1980s, which shaped the notion of culture as resistance by providing marginalized youth with the tools to author their own liberation. Today, we upgrade those tools, training South African creatives to utilize generative AI and AR as mechanisms of decolonial refusal and indigenous sovereignty.
The project workflow is carefully phased, beginning with a pre-production stage where the student cohort is granted total agency to identify and research specific public spaces and historical sites within downtown Cape Town that embody contested heritage. The execution phase relies on an intensive three-day workshop. On day one, students engage deeply with archival materials and conceptualize what suppressed truths or subaltern testimonies need to be visually overlaid onto their selected sites. Day two transitions into digital asset creation within a decolonial AI framework. Students utilize generative AI tools to visualize alternative realities, deliberately pushing against inherent algorithmic biases to render African-centric imagery. Simultaneously, a professional green-screen studio is used to record the students' physical performances or spoken word poetry, inserting the living Black and Brown body back into exclusionary spaces through digital capture. Technical experts will then seamlessly composite these visual, audio, and AI-generated elements into cohesive AR layers.
On the final workshop day, utilizing Web AR technology and spatial tracking applications like Zapworks, the digital interventions will be precisely anchored to the physical dimensions of the selected urban environments. The students will map out a geographical route through the Cape Town CBD, linking their individual interventions into a cohesive walkabout. During the ICA Live Art Festival, the project fully transitions into a public, durational performance. The student cohort will take turns leading festival audiences on the curated AR walkabout. The audience will utilize smartphones or provided tablets to view the hidden, augmented layers superimposed over the physical monuments. The physical gesture of navigating the city, raising a screen to a colonial statue, and witnessing the collapse of its ideological authority becomes a collective, performative ritual that democratizes both the history of the city and the advanced technologies of the future.
The relevance of this proposed AR walkabout is rooted in a profound alignment with the festival’s historic institutional mandate. The ICA Live Art Festival is explicitly designed to extend the public's experience of live art in a non-commercial environment, making accessible the work of artists who break boundaries and confront audiences. This project is exceptionally relevant because it disrupts the passive relationship between the audience, the artwork, and the contested urban space. The artistic intent is to weaponize augmented reality as a tool of epistemological restitution, executing an invisible occupation of state-sanctioned monuments. By intentionally assembling a diverse cohort and training them in AR and AI, the project demystifies and decolonizes access to digital production, proving that the collaborative pedagogical process is as politically resonant as the final exhibition itself. Ultimately, this intervention transforms the everyday act of walking through the city into an act of reading a dynamic, living archive, fulfilling the festival's aim: to fiercely confront the realities of the post-colony and imagine liberatory futures through the unapologetic lens of live art.
