Meghna Singh

New Archival Visions, Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr Meghna Singh is a Cape Town based visual artist and researcher with a PhD in visual anthropology from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her work examines colonial and capitalist legacies through decolonial approaches.

Working with video installation, sculpture and XR, blurring boundaries between documentary and fiction she creates immersive environments highlighting issues of ‘humanism’. Her interest lies in creating public art installations that activate spaces while highlighting colonial and capitalist legacies within urban cityscapes.

She is a New Archival Visions Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025-2026, at the University of the Western Cape working with its Robben Island Museum and Mayibuye Archives associated with South African liberation struggle histories to create an augmented reality experience at the heritage site of Robben Island. She also leads Nordic AR and Public Space, a collective of artists, curators and academic from across the Nordic countries, focused on activating colonial histories in rural contexts through augmented reality. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark, a Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab 2023-2025, a National Geographic Explorer (2019-2021) an honorary fellow at Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery & Emancipation, University of Hull and a fellow at the Creative Knowledge Resources, a platform for creative pedagogy and social engagement art in Africa and its diaspora. She was nominated by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture to be an artist in residence at Indigo Art Alliance in 2023.

In 2025, Singh co-created ‘The Founder’s Pillars’, a site-responsive Augmented Reality memorial in collaboration with Simon Wood and Lesiba Mabitsela during her fellowship at MIT. The project fuses colonial architecture with African futurist storytelling and premiered at the Tribeca Festival 2025 and won the ST ARTS Prize Africa Award of Distinction. Her previous project co-directed with Simon Wood, Container-Witness the Invisiblised, premiered at the 75 th International Venice Film Festival and has showcased internationally including the Tribeca Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Luxembourg film festival and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong. It became the first VR film to be invited by the Nobel Prize Society to screen at the Nobel Week Dialogue in Gothenburg 2021. She collaborated with Simon Wood to co create the In the Wake series consisting of public site responsive immersive installations across the port cities of South Africa. Funded by the South African Presidential Employment Stimulus Fund, the project trained youth from across the 5 port cities in virtual reality.

She is co directing ‘The Four Floors of Faneuil’ Hall, a quadriptych film with Simon Wood. Incubated and developed with the support of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, the project challenges the construct of American identity and the nation’s enduring paradoxes by simultaneously presenting the realities unfolding on its four levels.