Nora Al-Badri is the guest of the second episode of the podcast series I did with artists who 1. are among my absolute cultural heroes and 2. have exhibited at Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana.

Nora Al-Badri is an artist with a German-Iraqi background and a degree in Political Sciences. In 2016, she and Nikolai Nelles announced that they had illegally scanned the Nefertiti head at the Neues Museum in Berlin. They then made a copy of the bust and released the 3D data. In the podcast interview, Al-Badri tells me how the “Nefertiti Hack” became the centre of heated discussions about ownership, authenticity, cultural identity and power imbalances. From there, we talked about decolonisation, repatriation of cultural artefacts, ethical museum practices and one of her recent (and brilliant) works: The Post-Truth Museum. In that video, the artist used deepfakes to make the directors of Prussian Heritage Foundation in Berlin, the Louvre and the British Museum admit “the truth about imperial plunder—confessing their crimes, speaking about healing, restitution, shame, or art as critical knowledge.”

I hope you enjoy the episode!

Nora Al-Badri, The Post-Truth Museum, 2021–23

Nora Al-Badri and Nikolai Nelles, The Other Nefertiti (film still), 2016

Previously: Tactics&Practice [podcast]: The Future Behind Us. Episode 1, Trevor Paglen and Using AI to question the power structures of Western museums. Interview with Nora Al-Badri.

Tactics&Practice [podcast]: The Future Behind Us was produced for PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay, the programme curated by Aksioma for the 25th edition of Pixxelpoint – International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices which will take place in Nova Gorica/Gorica on 7 to 17 November 2024.