This project is situated in the interrelated academic fields of Disability Studies and History, Disability Culture and Disability Art. The Principal Investigators (PI's) are Professor Dr McKeown (UK) and Professor Dr Musenberg (DE). Musenberg's research is situated at the intersection of History of the Discipline of Special Education, Cultural Disability Studies and inclusiveness in Historical Education. McKeown's research is situated in the fields of Art and Design, Disability Art and Disability History and Heritage. Disability Studies (and in the UK Disability Art) emerged from the emancipatory Disabled People's Movements of the 1970's and 1980's and was established in academia in the context of the social sciences. Cultural perspectives brought additional points of contact with e.g. Literary studies, Cultural History and Disability Culture and the Arts. For the purposes of this project we have aggregated and described our interests as reflected by Cultural Disability Studies. The project will view, analyse and disseminate a seminal body of disability and impairment related artworks collected and curated by the German disability pedagogue Hans Würtz (1875-1958) between 1910-1933 - a critical period in European history that saw the rise of National Socialism and its extreme attendant ableist and disableist thought and action. Würtz innovatively moved away from the prevailing medical perspective on impairments to a more cultural perspective that materialised in his outstanding collection both in regard to its size and content. The Collection, paradoxically, survived because the National Socialist authorities saw no value in it and allowed Würtz to remove the Collection to his place of exile in Czechoslovakia. Therefore the Collection survived in two Prague based archives. The largely unmapped collection comprises 180 pottery, ivory and wood statuettes; 3500 images in the form of drawings, cartoons, lithographs, engravings, reproductions from magazines and photographs; 20 paintings; Glass plate negatives which document elements of the collection. One of the main research question is, how impairment and disability is represented (and staged) in the Collection; across the whole assemblage and through the closer investigation of a selection of key items? Following this question our key objectives are - to make the Collection accessible for our research (capture the Collection in a digital form) and to view and organise the Collection in regard to its themes and topics, - to analyse a sample of images and sculptures regarding the staging and production of disability within the artworks - to combine art historical contextualisation and iconology of the Collection with an reconstructive, qualitative approach of image interpretation (documentary method) - to contribute to Cultural Disability Studies knowledge by reflecting on the historic culturally 'fabrication' of the body and to contribute to the development of museology in relation to Disability Arts in the UK and in Germany. The project's outcome will be two scientific colloquia and two exhibitions in Berlin and Middlesbrough featuring key signature images including 2D artworks and 3D virtual statuettes in Berlin and Middlesbrough, a transdisciplinary anthology and research papers submitted by the two project PostDocs.

Over 20 years ago, Stuart Hall posed the question, 'Whose heritage?' (Hall, 1999). Hall's call for the critical transformation and reimagining of heritage and nation, for 'un-settling "The Heritage" and re-imagining the post-nation', remains as urgent as ever. In the context of the ongoing disparate impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and the global re-ignition of the Black Lives Matter movement, 'a national collection' cannot be imagined without addressing the structural inequalities in the arts, debates around 'contested heritage', and the difficult and contentious histories imbued in objects. Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage aims to build on decolonial feminist approaches and creative machine learning (ML) development: to enable digital cross-search of collections, to surface patterns of bias, to uncover hidden and unexpected connections, and to thus open up new interpretative frames and potential narratives of art, nation and heritage. Transforming Collections seeks to address the following questions: - How can we counter structural biases and decentre white Western narratives in our cultural collections? (Wekker, 2016; Olusoga, 2016) - How can we surface suppressed histories, amplify marginalized voices, and reevaluate artists and artworks ignored or sidelined by dominant narratives? - How can we transform the architectures and 'algorithms of oppression' (Noble, 2018) that underpin collections and reproduce inequalities and erasures? - How can we imagine a distributed yet connected 'national collection' that builds on and enriches existing knowledge, with multiple and multivocal new narratives? - How can we reimagine art, nation and heritage through collections as part of the wider 'digital cultural record' (Risam, 2019)? Transforming Collections is an interdisciplinary collaborative project led by University of the Arts London (UAL) with Tate, home to the national collection of British art from the 16th century and an international modern and contemporary art collection. The project will be led by a core team from UAL's Decolonising Arts Institute and Creative Computing Institute, working closely with Tate as an Independent Research Organisation (IRO). In addition to Tate, Transforming Collections has nine project partners and four collaborating organisations across the UK, representing significant public collections as well as major arts charities and key archives of different scales. These are: Arts Council Collection, British Council Collection, Birmingham Museums Trust, Glasgow Museums, Liverpool Museums Trust, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Wellcome Collection, Art Fund, Contemporary Art Society, Art UK, the JISC Archives Hub and Iniva (Institute of International Visual Art). We also have an international project partner in the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, who will host a major project conference in year one. The project adopts a braided approach enfolding 1) Critical art historical and museological research with 2) Creative machine learning development and participatory design and 3) Artists digital commissions as interventions into collections. Building on the insights and emerging findings of the Tate-led TANC Foundation project, Provisional Semantics (2020-22), and the UAL-led projects, AHRC Black Artists and Modernism (2015-18) and UKRI MIMIC project (Musically Intelligent Machines Interacting Creatively, 2018-21), Transforming Collections approaches the challenge of 'dissolving barriers' as a problem of knowledge and power - not only a question of what becomes visible, legible, accessible, but also how, and for whom. As such, Transforming Collections aims to model and test new and sustainable ways of searching across collections; to expose in-built inequities in collections data; to reconnect, recontextualise and reinterpret the work of 'artists of colour'; and empower diverse stakeholders in discovering the sometimes uncomfortable stories that collections.