Nouf Aljowaysir
Nouf Aljowaysir (1993) is a visual artist whose practice critically examines the role of algorithmic intelligence in shaping personal and collective constructions of selfhood and historical knowledge. Working across photography, performance, and moving image, she creates narratives that move between archival materials and digital speculation, questioning how technologies shape and reduce the understanding of identity, memory, and particularly non-Western histories. Born in Saudi Arabia and having moved to the United States at age thirteen, her work is informed by themes of migration and cultural fracture and is shaped by growing up alongside the rise of the internet and digital technology. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Jeu de Paume, Photo Élysée, Centre Pompidou, M+ Museum, and Tribeca Film Festival. Her film Ana Min Wein? (Where Am I From?) won the 2023 Lumen Prize for Moving Image and was released by The New York Times Op-Docs series in June 2024. She has been featured in Le Monde, BBC Culture, Le Quotidien de l'Art, and the British Journal of Photography.
Articles of Nouf Aljowaysir
Absent Intelligence
This paper investigates how contemporary AI systems reproduce and amplify colonial hierarchies of knowledge. Through practice-led artistic research, Nouf Aljowaysir traces how the historical and digital visual record of the Arab world, largely produced by imperial actors, has been absorbed into AI training data, shaping both archival memory and algorithmic interpretation. In response, she developed Salaf (Ancestors), which uses AI segmentation techniques to remove orientalist figures from the Ken and Jenny Jacobson Orientalist Photography Collection at the Getty Museum, producing what she describes as an absent dataset. Drawing on Vilém Flusser's apparatus theory, the work argues that intelligence is defined by what has been narrowly recorded, digitized, and made legible online. By centering oral storytelling traditions and creating absent datasets, Aljowaysir's practice reveals how non-Western knowledge systems remain systematically marginalized within computational infrastructures that present themselves as universal.