I am in your dreams, but you are not in mine is a new exhibition and commission by the collective Planetary Portals at The Photographers’ Gallery from 7 March 2025. Interrogating archival photography and artificial intelligence (AI), the exhibition weaves together the environmental landscapes of 19th-century mining of gold and diamonds in South Africa with the scripting process of AI.

The exhibition asks how have diverse languages become compressed into one singular coding language and questions whose voices are not allowed to speak through the colonial archive. Whose voices are silenced, whose lives erased, and what materials cannot be archived?

Central to the exhibition is a series of single-shot films that use a variety of generative AI and digital tools, crafted from archival photographs sourced from the Papers of Cecil Rhodes at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Photography was an essential technology of imperial communication and a space of trespass and refusal, where subjects challenged the present and intent of colonial place-making.

The photographs in the exhibition provide a visual vocabulary of the “environment” of Rhodes and his legacy – from his origins in Hackney, East London to the diamond fields of South Africa – and provide a “portal” for critically engaging with the extractive logics of AI. The resulting works offer new narratives by exposing the gaps in large language models (LLMs) and the structural racial logics of universal norms.

A website on Unthinking Photography and a dedicated events programme will run alongside the exhibition.

About the commission

The project was selected through an open call to develop, research and create a new digital commission which explores the intersections of photography, imperialism and networked culture. The commission and wider research around generative AI, self-made tools or other advanced technology is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Biography

A creative research group around critical and artistic practice, Planetary Portals interrogates the continued colonial legacies and geo-traumas as they extend from mining gold and diamonds in South Africa to the renewed scramble for African minerals and data that fuel global digital economies.⁠⁠