UAL Decolonising Arts Institute's 20/20 programme
What is 20/20
20/20 is an ambitious 3-year programme announced by the Decolonising Arts Institute in November 2021, with funding from Freelands Foundation, Arts Council England and UAL.
Combining artist residencies with artistic commissioning at scale, 20/20 is bringing together 20 emerging or mid-career artists of colour and 20 UK public art collections, leading to 20 new permanent acquisitions.
20/20 was launched in November 2021 by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute, working in partnership with 20 UK public collections, museums and galleries, and supported by funding from Freelands Foundation, Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants Programme and UAL.
20/20 is a project of national significance that responds to the need to fundamentally reassess and address the often problematic, difficult and negative ways in which diverse audiences see themselves reflected in collections. This includes the display or neglect of objects in the collections, the processes and relations that underpin their acquisition, and related narratives of interpretation.
Working with Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Billy is working with Wolverhampton Art Gallery and will be creating a new work for the gallery's permanent collection as part of the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute's 20/20 programme. Billy commented:
“I'm thrilled to be working with such a talented team at the gallery, and I'm looking forward to contributing to the important conversation around decolonisation. I believe that decolonisation is not about deleting things, but about widening the discussion. Why aren't minority communities represented in our museums and galleries? What can we as artists do to change that”
During Billy’s residency, he will be producing a new piece of work that responds to the gallery's collection, works spanning over 500 years. The final commission will become part of the permanent collection at Wolverhampton Art Gallery which will be on display from September 2024. A limited edition print of the work will be acquired by the other 19 institutions taking part in the initiative.
The Outputs
During the 20/20 residency, Billy researched hidden histories - specifically, the stories of empire workers who migrated to the Black Country. The gallery’s 19th and 20th century landscape paintings of the area, particularly the work of Edwin Butler Baylis, presented themselves as offering a version of the Black Country's role in the Industrial Revolution, both fictional and obsolete. What was missing in them?
The technological innovations from this region gave the British Empire a significant edge in global extraction practices. This led Billy to wonder: Is today's tech innovation - with the computer chip as the modern foundry - set to repeat similar patterns?
Will the digital "system," due to inherent biases, marginalise certain cultures and realities as it absorbs information, overlooking what it doesn't "see"?
To explore these questions, Billy collaborated with software engineers to build a database of images including scans from the gallery's permanent collection - now in the public domain - and ethically sourced images from my archives of mid-20th-century empire workers. They meticulously tagged each image to train a machine learning model, which he leased. This model generated new visuals based on prompts from the 20/20 residency and local anecdotes Billy has long wanted to see in image form.
The resulting artworks are the product of careful experimentation while the technology that has been used is timestamped as Summer 2024.
The resulting project is entitled "Endz of the World" and led to multiple creative outputs: