Minne Atairu is a Nigerian interdisciplinary artist and researcher who uses generative AI to examine gaps and biases in historical and visual archives.,,Her work often centers Black hair and the looted Benin Bronzes, using tools such as Midjourney, StyleGAN, and text-to-3D systems to reveal what training data leaves out or distorts.,,
Atairu holds a BA in art history from the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria and a master's degree in museum studies from George Washington University.She has pursued doctoral research in art education at Teachers College, Columbia University, focused on equitable frameworks for integrating AI into K-12 art classrooms.,,Much of her practice investigates how text-to-image systems misrepresent Black hairstyles: prompting Midjourney for "blonde braids" produced hair that mapped the color of a hair extension onto a Black woman's natural hair, a bias she traced to gaps in the systems' training data.Her Blonde Braids Study II, which shows the algorithm rendering a portrait of Black identical twins with blonde braids, was exhibited in Feral File's “In/Visible” exhibition as an example of how such gaps flatten Black identity.One related portrait, Eye See U, had been turned down from earlier shows for being too "monochromatic" before Atairu exhibited it at “Techné Disruptors (II)” in 2022 as a way of reclaiming darkness within her practice.
Atairu's research also examines gaps in Benin's art historical archives, recombining historical fragments, sculptures, texts, images and sounds into synthetic reconstructions of the looted Benin Bronzes.,For her 2023 installation To the Hand at The Shed in New York, she used Blender to convert text into 3D-printed sculptures made of corn starch and sugarcane infused with bronze, surrounded by terracotta rings representing the walls and moats of Benin.Her 2024 paper "Reimagining Benin Bronzes using generative adversarial networks" appeared in the journal AI & Society, and she contributed a piece imagining an alternate history for the looted Benin Bronzes to Stephanie Syjuco's 2024 book The Unruly Archive.,
Atairu's work has been shown at institutions including The Shed, Frieze London, the Harvard Art Museums, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and Somerset House in London.,She received the Lumen Prize for Art and Technology's Global South Award in 2021 and the S+T+ARTS Prize Africa in 2024.,
