Images and video · 2026-11-11

How AI helped recreate the childhood memories of South African artist Esther Mahlangu

Google Arts & Culture launched an online retrospective of artist Esther Mahlangu, where AI recreated her childhood memories that were missing from the archives.

✨ What the project is

To mark her 91st birthday, Google Arts & Culture published the first online retrospective of South African artist Esther Mahlangu. It was curated by Dr. Nontobeko Ntombela, a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

The exhibition includes more than 45 stories, archival materials, and photos of her murals. Anyone can explore it for free from anywhere at goo.gle/esther-mahlangu.

📌 Why AI was used

The archives contained nothing from her life before 1980. So the team gathered stories from her own accounts, through workshops and interviews. One of them: at age 10 she started painting, using feathers instead of a brush.

Based on these accounts and old archival material, AI generated still images, and Google DeepMind's Veo turned them into short videos. This is how the AI-made recreations of her early years were created.

🔹 What to look at

Besides her own videos, the platform hosts material from partner museums: Art of Contemporary Africa, Iziko Museums of South Africa, the British Museum, the Jean Pigozzi Collection, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Serpentine.

The organizers say the project shows a new way to preserve cultural heritage, where technology is guided by respect for personal memory and historical accuracy. A separate YouTube video explains how the AI recreations were made.

Sources: 🔗 Google — The Keyword (AI)