Dr Meghna Singh and Simon Wood are Cape Town based artists and filmmakers who collaborate across documentary film, visual art and extended reality. Singh is a visual artist and researcher with a PhD in visual anthropology from the University of Cape Town. Wood is an Emmy nominated filmmaker and multimedia artist. Both creators were fellows at the MIT Open Documentary Lab from 2023 to 2025.
Their collaborative virtual reality film Container premiered at the Venice International Film Festival. The project screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2022 and the Nobel Week Dialogue in Sweden. Container examines labour, slavery, capitalism and global consumer systems.
In 2025, Wood and Singh created The Founders Pillars, a site responsive augmented reality memorial, in collaboration with Lesiba Mabitsela. Developed during their MIT Open Documentary Lab fellowship, the project uses colonial architecture, African futurist storytelling, textiles, myths and freedom making practices to address histories of slavery, memory and public space. The project augmented the New York Stock Exchange Building at the Tribeca Festival in 2025 and the Texas State Capitol Building at SXSW in 2026. It received a S+T+ARTS Prize Africa Award of Distinction.
They are currently co directing The Four Floors of Faneuil Hall a quadriptych challenges the construct of American identity by presenting four levels of a building founded by Peter Faneuil. The work examines the marketplace, the Great Hall, the military museum and the basement slavery exhibit simultaneously. Incubated at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, the project received an Honourable Mention at the IDFA Forum Awards in 2024.
Dr Meghna Singh
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 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 on the Playing with Ghosts project 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 a lead artist on Interco(a)stal, one of the Monument Labs 2026 ReGeneration projects, led by Atlantic Black Box, The Third Place, Maine Maritime Museum and Bomazeen Land Trust. On this year long project, she's using augmented reality as a tool to reinterpret Maines Maritime history. 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.
Meghna has published journal articles on the theme of decolonising AI and the arts and contributed chapters to books on public art, decolonising heritage, maritime worlds and Indian ocean studies.
Simon Wood is a filmmaker and multimedia artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. His work has
screened at international film festivals and exhibition platforms including IDFA, Venice, Tribeca, Hot
Docs, SXSW and BFI London Film Festival. Wood was a fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab
from 2023 to 2025.
screened at international film festivals and exhibition platforms including IDFA, Venice, Tribeca, Hot
Docs, SXSW and BFI London Film Festival. Wood was a fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab
from 2023 to 2025.
'The Founders Pillars' is a site responsive AR memorial created with Dr. Meghna Singh and Lesiba Mabitsela. Developed during Wood’s fellowship at MIT Open Documentary Lab, the project uses colonial architecture, African futurist storytelling, textiles, myths and freedom making practices to address histories of slavery, memory and public space. It had its world premiere at Tribeca Festival in 2025, received a S+T+ARTS Prize Africa Award of Distinction and was included in Layers of Place: Austin at SXSW in 2026.
In 2024, Wood was awarded an Honourable Mention at the IDFA Forum Awards for 'The Four Floors of Faneuil' Hall, a quadriptych film co-directed with Dr. Meghna Singh. Currently in post-production, the project challenges the sanitised narrative of American history by simultaneously presenting the four levels of Boston’s iconic Faneuil Hall a building hailed as the “Cradle of Liberty” yet founded by Peter Faneuil, a wealthy slave trader. Each panel focuses on a specific floor: the ground level, a bustling marketplace filled with patriotic souvenirs and snacks; the second floor, known as the Great Hall, where immigrants are sworn in as U.S. citizens; the third-floor attic, home to a military museum; and the basement, where a discreet slavery exhibit is tucked beside the public restrooms.
Wood’s film ‘Container’ World Premiered at the 78th Venice International Film Festival later screening at the Tribeca Film Festival 2022. A VR180 collaboration with Indian artist Meghna Singh, the project made history becoming the first VR film to be invited to screen at the Nobel Prize Giving Week in Sweden. Container makes visible the 'invisiblized' bodies enabling our consumer society. Confronting slavery and capitalism through an ever transforming shipping container, the past becomes the present, the invisible become visible.
In 2020, Wood was the recipient of the World Press Photo ‘Online Video of Year’ award for ‘Scenes from a Dry City'. The film was produced by Academy Award Winner Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cooke at Field of Vision. ‘Scenes from a Dry City’ premiered in competition at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and had its U.S premiere in 2019 winning the Best Mini Doc at the Academy qualifying Big Sky Festival in Montana. In June 2019, the film was awarded an honourable mention by the American Film Institute at AFIDOCS. Since its premiere the film has screened at over fifty festivals, winning recognition from juries across the globe, culminating in Wood’s first Emmy nomination in August 2020 for Outstanding Short Documentary.
His previous film ‘The Silent Form’ won four awards including Best Documentary Short and Best Cinematography at the 2017 SAFTAS (South African Film and Television Awards). This capped a successful year for the film which had its world premiere in Toronto at Hot Docs. 'The Silent Form’ is a collaboration between Wood and one of South Africa’s most successful artists, the sculptor Dylan Lewis. Forging the artist and the filmmaker together as a mode of conceptual modelling, playing into the world of interpretations and reinterpretation, we witness a filmmaker visualising the sculptors work and in turn giving birth to a new creation.
This was the second year running that Wood had a film selected for Hot Docs following his 2015 film ‘Orbis’. Shot in twenty eight continuous days ‘Orbis’ is a hypnotic journey through one of South Africa’s largest townships, Umlazi, its inhabitants’ existence shaped by their proximity to Africa’s largest port, Durban. The port oversees material endlessly circling the globe, temporarily shaped as fridges, televisions, washing machines, ultimately destroyed, returned to its creator, reshaped into a new product. In 2018 ‘Orbis' was awarded The Golden Ribbon award for best international documentary by CCTV in Beijing .
Wood’s first film ‘Forerunners' was selected for IDFA in 2011: it’s an ancestral examination of four members of South Africa’s new black middle class as they delicately balance the traditional views of their childhood with the western consumerism that rules their professional lives, selecting and discarding elements from each world to forge a new legacy for their descendants. The film garnered awards in North America and Europe and was screened on Al Jazeera’s Witness strand.
Wood’s next feature documentary ‘White Masks’ is currently in post production was selected for the Final Cut at the Venice International Film Festival and IFP’s Spotlight on Documentaries for Independent Film Week in New York City.