Maker Unknown is a digital archival exhibition, conceived by visual artist and researcher Deniz Soezen. It reimagines the The Camberwell Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) Collection of non-European material through a new collaboration with writer and storyteller Vayu Naidu and artist-researcher Mukul Patel.
The project’s aim is to explore ‘archival silences’, and the lack of information regarding provenance. Experimenting with multilingual storytelling and collaborative processes of writing, thinking, learning and art making, this online exhibition will present objects which embody the history of empire, such as a textile elephant or saree fabric from India and it will look at the potentials of multilingual storytelling and sound to re-imagine the archive as educational tool in the digital realm.
Web platform, 3D scans of objects, macro photography and soundscapes by Mukul Patel. ‘Making of’ images by Deniz Soezen. Archive photographs courtesy of UAL Archives and Special Collections Centre. Translations and voiceovers by Vayu Naidu (English and Hindi), Rajesh and Shivya Majumdar (Bengali), Rupinder Kaur (Punjabi), Hari Rajaledchumy (Tamil), Sabrina Naz Nabir (Urdu), Rohini Patel (Gujarati) and Nabeela Paniyath (Malayalam).
All content on the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
We thank Jacqueline Winston-Silk and Sarah Mahurter, UAL Archives and Special Collections Centre, for their support. Furthermore, we would like to thank all workshop participants and the Decolonising Arts Institute, UAL for promoting the workshops.
Special thanks also to Vanessa Giorgio for admin and marketing assistance, Ameet Gauher for checking the Punjabi font, and Anita Srivastava for her support with the ACE grant application.
This project is supported by Arts Council England.
