Biography
Dr Meghna Singh is a Cape Town based visual artist and researcher with a PhD in visual anthropology. Through video installation, performance and XR, her work examines colonial and capitalist legacies through decolonial approaches, often blurring documentary and fiction to create immersive environments that question ideas of humanism. Her public art installations activate urban and rural spaces while foregrounding histories embedded in place. She is a 2025–2026 New Archival Visions Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Western Cape, working with Robben Island Museum and Mayibuye Archives to develop an augmented reality experience for Robben Island and leads the Nordic AR and Public Space Network. She’s a National Geographic explorer and an alumni of the MIT Open Documentary Lab.
Synopsis: Hacking Heritage
This augmented reality installation reimagines Cape Town’s Castle of Good Hope as an extractive data centre, connecting historical colonial power to contemporary digital colonialism. Built by the Dutch East India Company, a pioneer of the modern multinational corporation and publicly traded shares, the fortress embodies the relationship between corporate capitalism and colonial expansion. Its transformation into a speculative data centre draws parallels between the historical extraction of land, labour and resources and the contemporary extraction of behavioural data.
Developed in collaboration with land rights activists, spatial practitioners and anti-data-centre activists, the installation features co-created AR activations across five spatial thresholds. Each transforms elements of the historic fortress into digital infrastructure, progressing from resource extraction through defensive firewalls to an algorithmic core of governance.
By overlaying computational networks onto the Castle’s architecture, the work makes invisible systems of digital power tangible, exposing how corporate colonialism persists through contemporary data extraction, the commodification of human behaviour and the marginalization of Indigenous knowledge systems.
