During her residency at GlogauAIR, Bianca Durrant has completed a research and development phase for her upcoming exhibition project, "The Collection,” to be presented at Five Walls in Melbourne, Australia in 2024. The project merges her dual roles as both artist and curator, to explore how text and narrative operate within museological frameworks. Through "The Collection," Durrant aims to push the boundaries of traditional exhibition formats and challenge conventional notions of curation and presentation while examining the complex interplay between artist labour, institutional structures, and the art market.

The residency has led to a deeper exploration of the textual basis of (Western) knowledge systems. Using generative AI tools, that are trained on inherently biased content, as a proxy for institutional knowledge, the artist reveals relationships amongst artist, object and market. These prototype works further challenge the delineation of knowledge systems, as we enter a post human phase, where non-human AI generated content is infiltrating human-based knowledge sources rapidly, affecting the way we understand creation and information. 

When human and virtual ontologies collide, how does the art object function in this context? What does this mean for digitisation and virtual replications of work and data? And, what does this mean for collecting institutions?

The development phase has also led to the creation of an archetype ‘object’ that will hold the space for these provocations and more in “The Collection” exhibition. Presentation of the ‘object’ in a museum style display, alongside its replication through documentation, text based narrative and 3D printed replicas.

Workings for a performance work have also been devised, in an extension and new modality for the artist. The performance highlights the inequality of labour and rewards for artists, using the gallery as site and architecture to establish ‘zones’ of the arts eco-system.