 Well, thanks for joining us this afternoon. My name is Sarah Turner and I'm the Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Whether you regularly attend Paul Mellon Centre events or this is your first time joining one of our online gatherings, let me extend a very warm welcome to everyone logging on to the Potential Histories and Solidarities Panel of the London Asia Art Worlds programme. Thank you so much for joining us. It really means a lot to me and to my co-organisers to be connected with you all today as a virtual research community. And to hear the work of our amazing panel of speakers, which includes Michael Rakowitz, Omar Khalif, David Morris, Maryam Ohadi, Hamadani, and have the conversations and presentations chaired by Parallel Davian Mukherjee. Paul Mellon Centre is a research institute and an educational charity based in Bedford Square in central London, and we are part of Yale University. And you can find out more about our programme on our website, along with details about our research collections, publications, grants and fellowship schemes, our learning activities, and more about our future events. London Asia Art Worlds is a five week multi-part programme, taking place in May and June of this year. And it reflects on the ways in which the growing fields of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersect with and challenges histories of British art. The event marks five years of the Paul Mellon Centre's London Asia project, established in collaboration with the Asia Art Archive, and which is co-led by Hamad, Nasa and me. The project is concerned with excavating the historical, as well as reflecting on the contemporary entanglements that link London and more widely Britain and Asia. It does so by focusing on three research strands, exhibitions, institutions, and art schools. And the London Asia project questions the boundaries of national and regional histories, and explores new models of researching and writing about the transnational infrastructures and networks that have shaped the histories of art. The London Asia Art Worlds programme has been co-organised as a collaboration between myself, Hamad Nasa, who's senior research fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre, as well as curator of British Art Show 9, and recently appointed as lead curator of the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, with responsibility for delivering the Turner Prize in 2021. And also with Professor Ming Tiampo, who is Professor in the Department of Art History and Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. The online event is being run by the PMC's Events Manager, Shauna Blanchfield, and Events Assistant, Danley Convy. And they're on hand to answer any questions that you have throughout this afternoon and a huge thank you to them both for getting us all here together and running this event so brilliantly. Before we kind of go further, I would just want to walk you through the PMC's online housekeeping guidelines and just tell you a little bit more about how this Zoom webinar will run. So we first will start with a keynote in conversation that will last around 45 minutes and will be followed by a question and answer session. After the break, there'll be further 20 minute papers and a Q&A session as well. And audience members can ask our panellists questions by using the Q&A function, which you'll find at the bottom of your screen. I'm sure you're all very familiar with Zoom events by now, but just to say we really appreciate members of the audience asking questions and putting their thoughts and ideas to our panellists. You can also use a chat function for general comments and to alert us to any technical difficulties that you might be having. The session will be recorded and made available to the public after the event. So close captioning and you can find that by clicking on the CC button on your screen to enable captions. And it goes without saying that we won't tolerate any offensive behavior during our Zoom webinars, and that we have the right to remove any audience members that contravene this. But without further ado, I'm going to hand over to my co-organizer Ming Tiampo to tell you more about today's program. This is Sarah and welcome to everyone. And thank you for joining us today. Our title, London Asia Art Worlds, is we hope, suggestive of our approach. The juxtaposition of London Asia invites a kind of dissonance, for example, by bringing into proximity a city with a continent, something that we were talking about in the last session. This is a city on London, a city that resists easy nationalist framing Asia, a region so vast and diverse that it complicates any homogenizing categorization. We embrace this ambiguity and easiness of scale and resistance to sharp definition. We do not propose a comparative framework, however, instead it encourages new perspectives on the entanglements, historic and contemporary real and imaginative of art worlds. The London Asia Art Worlds was conceived as a conference and is now unfolding as a murmuration, a virtual meeting ground in which conversations, images and ideas will twist, turn swoop and swirl across a series of interconnected papers, panel discussions, performances and interventions. Our program will unfold over five weeks, focusing on the following propositions, sociality and affect, which we had last week, potential histories and solidarities. Today's session, circulation and encounter, which will take place tomorrow, pedagogy and learning, bureaucracy and agency, aesthetics and ways of knowing, thinking through empire and thinking from Asia. A series of commissioned art projects and interventions, a collaborative crowdsourced data project will also offer different visual and virtual spaces in which to test these interconnections between London, Asia, art and worlds. And this series of programs will inform workshops, publications and an exhibition that will follow in the next two years. I'd like to pass the baton to Hamad now. Well, thank you, Mary. London Asia Art Worlds proposes new ways of imagining art history, beyond national boundaries, monographic studies and sequestered scholars. In bringing together researchers and artists from around the world, this series of gatherings offers a shared platform, where the empirical traces of London Asia Art Worlds are laid down, collaborative methodologies are developed, theoretical concepts are articulated and the seeds of community planted. In this way, we hope London Asia Art World engenders art histories that are both entangled and offer multiple perspectives, proposing new models for writing global art histories through collaborative practice. Now both sets of art histories, British and Asian are disrupted, their complexities revealed through layered connections via infrastructure such as exhibitions or art schools or institutions, as well as the worlds that they carry friendships and other socialities, aesthetics, politics and philosophy. In our first session last week, sociality and affect, we considered friendship as a method. And in that spirit, today's keynote is a conversation between two friends and longtime collaborators, Michael Raccovitz and Omar Khuleif. I will let our chair for today, Parul Davimukherjee, tell you more about what's in store, and it's my pleasure to introduce Parul to you. Parul Davimukherjee is professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in India. She holds a PhD from Oxford University and has a long and stellar sort of list of publications to her name. I will not read them all out but will give you a little flavor of the range of her scholarship and its collaborative nature because virtually all of them have been co-edited and collaboratively developed. She works contemporary art in Asia, co-edited with Namanahuja and Kavita Singh, with her art history in a globalizing world, a contribution to art bulletin about arts and aesthetics in a globalizing world, co-edited with Namanahuja in their core. Art history and its discontents in global times, in art history in the wake of the global turn, published by the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute in 2014. And her forthcoming publication, 20th century Indian art, which she's co-editing with Bartha Mitter and Rocky Balram will be published by Thames and Hudson London this fall. I look forward to it and my pleasure to hand over to you, Paru. Paru, you're still muted. Thank you, Hamad, for your very generous introduction. And let me start by congratulating the organizers of this very hot, provoking and stimulating conference, Sarah Turner, Hamad Nasser and Minciankul. And also thanking them for inviting me to share the session. Since this project on London Asia art worlds has all the potentiality of transforming the field itself, and making us rethink about the very meaning of history, archive, memory, art and politics. It's a real honor to be part of this. I'm delighted to welcome you all to today's panel on potential histories and Solidarity. We're going to take place around the world. It's going to take us around the globe in terms of time and space with London being both the point of departure and arrival at various moments in history. Along the outdated terms of reference, like the center and the benefit, potential histories and Solidarity unfold around unexpected junctures, exploring untapped archival sources, including oral histories to offer a fresh take on the very relationship between art and politics. Much of it promises to bear resonance with our own types. So let me start by welcoming our keynote speakers. Dr. Omar, please, and Michael McOvix. I would introduce the first speaker or my colleague who's a writer and curator and cultural historian is director of collections and senior curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, government of Sharjah. And as a political scientist, colleagues career began as a journalist and documentary filmmaker. Before entering into the picture palace of New York's concern with intersections of emerging technology with queer was colonial and critical race theory. The writing has explored histories of performance art, the experience of mental illness, and the interstices of social justice, and the aesthetics of the digital. The curator of 100 exhibitions of art design and architecture, they are the author editor of 31 books, which have been translated into 12 languages. These volumes include Goodbye World, looking at art in the digital age just brought out by Sternberg Press 2018 and art in the age of anxiety, MIT 2021. We are currently completing a monograph Internet art is titled Internet art the first 30 years, which is going to be published by fight on next year 2022, and an anthology of essays would switchers and the art of being invisible, which is also expected next year. In the early curated Michael like of its first medium survey exhibition, and accompanying monograph called backstroke of the West at MCA Chicago in 2017. Michael backwards is an Iraqi American artist, living and working in Chicago. We are here worldwide, including at document at the team. Oh my yes one. And finally the Tokyo 16th Biennale of Sydney in the UK is probably best known for the invisible visible enemy should not exist. For the fourth place in trafficals where when he recreated a statue from the extents of wind, but called last move from ancient Assyria, which is modern era. The statue has been destroyed by ISIS in 2014, unfortunately, but from 2019 to 2020, a survey of records work was held in the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and travel to Castillo to revolve in the day after contemporary on your in Torino to the Jamil Art Center Dubai. The first sculpture work, April is the cruelest month was unveiled in Wargat on first May. It's the first sculpture of the 2021 waterfront exhibitions, taking place along south coast of England until November, and depicts life size figure of British soldier who took part in the occupation of pasta after the US led invasion of Iraq into Iraq. In addition to this artistic practice, Michael is also professor of our theory and practice at not Western University. So in this key conversation, the two friends and long time collaborators they're going to come together to discuss the diversion practices as artists and creator as historians and makers, and have influenced the ways in which the individually construct their own specific concept of solidarity. The discussion will begin with a reflection by Dr. Police, which aims to argue that Dracovic's artistic practice operates on an act of historical making and proposing a methodology of seeing the world through the lens of deep coloniality. The conversation that follows explores hidden histories recited by unreliable narratives. Together they explore the possibilities of unfurling and decoding one's personal biography through the practice of art. To untangle notions of imperialism, situating the discussion around Dracovic's project, the invisible should not exist. The invisible enemy should not exist. Lamaso of Nineveh, 2018, which was on view on the fourth plane of London's Trafalgar Square from 2018 to 2020. It gives me great pleasure to invite our keynote speakers to make the presentations, Michael Dracovic and Omar Khalif. Pardon me, thank you very much. I was muted there. So as we were told, I'm going to begin with a short, well, a reflection. Thank you for Isaac Nisim, Sonny Rene and Jude Nisim. For my first godchildren, Ike Sarkisian and Anouk Sarkisian, for my goddaughter, Ariel Orion Love, and for Abdel Eder, my jiddo who taught me to be brave, and to all of those who remain dispossessed. On March 29, 1948, Capitol Records, written in 1947. Nat King Cole sings, The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved. In return, in the final line, the notes ascend through octaves, question mark, or a whole step down to G. I used to believe those lyrics were the greatest gift, a corrective turn, for love cannot exist without life, the possibility for living. Life, the inherent manifestation of existence, the foundation that exists before we come to speak of ontology, of looking, of our emotions. Life. It is all too often a contingent feature that belongs to an asset class. As media organs continue to obfuscate, to shroud and meticulously conceal, the right to life continues to be contested, and the struggles for solidarity around those targets become ever more precarious, despite whatever visual lexicon that the mainstream media might portray. I speak here today as an individual to discuss the loved and lived experiences gleaned from and with Michael Rackowitz. In the introductory text that I offered that was just read out to you for today's conversation, I describe Michael as a longtime collaborator. In earnest, it will be more appropriate to call him one intense collaborator. Mark has encouraged me to move across geographic expanses, both figuratively and literally. An individual who has fortified that right to push and pull in the creative process, not only of and in matters of formal and conceptual stance, but equally of ideological and phenomenal logical position. This conversation was seated through affinity, through shared stories of our grandfathers, our teachers, food cooked and shared as a form of suturing, healing familiarity from the wound of the prejudice that existed right outside of our doors. And finally, our affinity to one another developed from and through Michael's artistic practice, a body of work that seeks to interrogate what it means to exist between the interstices. Indeed, what does it mean to use ones in between this to mobilize ones very self as a mechanism to explore broader social and political issues. We're both students of an imperial pop culture found in the West. It was a mythology that these spaces produced that animated some of our political inclinations. What does it mean to learn about resistance through pop culture. As a dear friend mentor and colleague noted recently in an Instagram post. We were and are a generation that learned of solidarity in the liner notes of album sleeves from bands such as rage against the machine. They're very constitution, their name propelled us to be defined about what was spoon fed to us. We be the last such generation is a question that I asked. Michael Rockowitz was born somewhere at some point. I choose to refer to him as an Iraqi American. This has been the subject of much negotiation. An Iraqi American who also happens to be Jewish, an Iraqi American father, an Iraqi American husband, son, brother, friend, and Iraqi American obsessed with the Beatles and Star Wars, but for reasons that you might not expect or comprehend. As an artist who came to renown after the events of September the 11 2001, Rockowitz embodies many of the tensions that undergird the life of a subject who cannot identify with the supposed unipolar ethnic stance of proposed whiteness. In his artistic frames, Rockowitz presents the articulated post colonial tensions of hybridity and mimesis or rather resistance of and to the latter. His art, which one could dub as conceptual, socially engaged, sculptural installation based and more deals with the problematics of code switching the necessity to shift between identity, humanitarian and linguistic poles for survival, while also exploring the claims of authenticity that plague all our creative voices. This is further complicated when the artist cannot be easily situated into an archetypal form. Some of these states mirror Du Bois's narrations of double consciousness, but equally extend beyond them. Rockowitz can and is often found uncomfortably negotiating who he is pulling apart the Fred's interrogating who constructed this. One could easily describe Rockowitz as having produced a field of practice that is post colonial, but it would be much more apt to call his work contra colonial. This was a term introduced to me by my friend and mentor, the late professor Jean Fisher, who through the figure of the trickster proposed an alter escape for and of examination, arguing that the potential for art to shift from being merely illustrative into something propositional was through the subversive act of restaging history through unconventional means. This suggestion can be found in gestures that emblematize some of the works that I will discuss with Michael today. We also find contemporary credence inside the apartments concept of critical fabulation a practice, or perhaps a mechanistic tool that enables an interplay of facts and fiction to be deployed by the historian. It is a technique that allows the offer to fill in certain blanks in order to allow suppressed and oppressed voices, this space to live. This act to give its value to Tina camp's argument that we should listen to images, especially of those which at first may seem negligible or quotidian. Yet it is in this act that we not only in gender life, but also enable the prospect and possibility for breath. It is undeniable that Michael Rockowitz's art is an act of resistance. Through reenacting re offering re thinking and restaging histories both minute and grand and scale. He creates a space of restitution restoration for dispossessed communities who are seeking forums of oven for repair. For us to consider. What does it mean to be an active agent in the making of one's own history to unfurl the lies that we are told about ourselves growing up to create new forms of understanding as to how one is situated in the expanse that is visual culture. Here the personal is of course political. This conversation is about potential histories and solidarities. The title is drawn or not to our area as Zule's book, which acts as a suggestive roadmap for decolonial decoloniality. This act and her proposition of unlearning imperialism. For example, our world is essentialist, and that essentialism is most often rounded into the contours and corners of the apparatus from which we work act and speak. We are incredibly grateful to be hosted by the Paul Mellon Center, an organization that supports the study of British art and culture. We recognize the hermetic connotations that the term British in genders and potentially conceals a subjects who both hail from countries seized and colonized by Britain as people whose families were displaced from their homes, directly or indirectly due to these struggles. In some fashion or another, there was an occupation there. Thus it feels essential at this particular juncture in history to acknowledge one of the imperial sediments of Britain, and that is the ongoing ramifications of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Britain concealed the people and their multiple histories. The scars of Imperial Britain remain visible in the stance that it has taken in cloaking Palestinian life from view. As a British person myself, I believe that acknowledging solidarity with Palestine and its people today more than ever is a fundamental act. I will bring in my interlocutor, my dear friend, and my brother, Michael Rockwoods. Omar Habibi, thank you so much for that beautiful, beautiful speech. I almost feel like I don't want to say anything because I don't want to, don't want to mess it up. I echo everything that you're saying, and I thank our hosts, and also our audience, and I'm calling in today from the unceded territory of the Kikapu, the Peoria, the Padawatami, the Miami, and the Oceti-Shahuin, the Council of the Seven Fires, which in this place is known by a settler colonial name of Chicago, which in itself is an indigenous word but misplaced. So, yeah, I appreciate everything that you're saying, and I think that it's fundamental to begin with our situation, especially in the last month of, atrocious month, which has seen the vulgarity of continued settler colonial project of Israel and the atrocities against Palestine. And, you know, you and I have this relationship, and I love the way that you presented it here and created this space of intimacy, and of course that relationship involves other relationships. So I'm thinking, you know, deeply about our friends who are in Palestine and also outside of it and have been dealing with everything that has surfaced in the last month. Today I marked over the last two days the 80th anniversary of the Farhud, which was the violent dispossession of Iraq's Jews in 1941 that came largely in the aftermath of different kinds of colonial experiments done on the control of the place that is now called Iraq. And I can't help it, but see the kind of the symmetries and everything that's been happening on the streets of Palestine and the mobs that have gone through and terrorized Palestinian neighborhoods and mixed cities like Haifa, like Lod, and have created circumstances where people feel unsafe, as if they didn't feel unsafe before. These are the conditions that were created 80 years ago that led my grandparents to make the decision that they were leaving Bacabal. And it's part of the kind of sequence of events that led to me being born on Long Island and has created that question mark that you talked about in terms of the Haifa nation of my identity. And the questions that that raises and how that becomes a way of making things unfixed. So I appreciate the territory that you've set for us, one that's unstable, you know, and I can't ask for a better partner to dance around on it with. In terms of our dance, you know, to go back to Aray Allah, you know, the book that the potential history on learning imperialism begins with this very personal exploration of her own identity as an Arab Jew, who discusses how being born in Israel was not a choice of hers. Thus, her Israeli citizenship or nationality equally being raised there. And then in it in search in diasporas by her family being taught Hebrew as opposed to Arabic was also not a choice of hers to make. And so in the beginning there is this actor of reclamation where she inserts Aisha into her name and recasts herself as a figure who's going to take us on this propositional journey. And I think there are incredible parallels and resonances with your identity as someone who is Iraqi American or shall we say an Iraqi Jew, who is supportive of particular causes who has a liberal political stance, but also who grew up in a world that didn't necessarily echo those specific views or that context. And I wonder if we could begin by trying to think about that very specific notion of how we construct our identity and how art plays a role in animating that in an interesting way for people. Hmm. Well I think that the catalytic possibilities of art are such that they allow us to escape the orthodoxy of what we have come to consider an extension of reason. I don't think that indexical relationships are necessarily extensions of reason I think that those are constructions that have allowed for colonial entities to divide and conquer. I mean I'm very appreciative also for our writing and thinking that I've become will have again more proximity to through the strike MoMA movement. And I also think about a la show hot, who is somebody that entered my life in 1992 when I was an art student to my second year of art school and she was the only person other than my mother who I heard used the word Arab Jew. And she wrote this this this text that same year called Reflections of an Arab Jew. And it really pulled apart the moment that a lot of us found ourselves in. In the aftermath and also during the first Gulf War operation Desert Storm as it was called by the American invaders, and it is. It's it's something that really kind of allowed for me to explode these ideas of what our preconceived notions were and that's what art has always been capable of doing. That's one of the reasons why I find that these relationships between art and activism are not mutually exclusive that they're very much intertwined that it really is about a constant challenging of orthodoxies and status quotes, and you know in the same way that you have liberation movements you also have liberation movements of thought that happen. When you when you decide to kind of take a radical idea like the reciprocal ready made and put it forward and have it institutionally start to deconstruct everything that's been locked inside of the train separated from the people that once owned it, or you know so those kinds of things for me are really, you know, connected so being able to kind of talk about identity through the lens of art through the lens of culture allows for it to be untethered by the political forces that look to kind of create those divide and conquer situations, you know to be able to offer citizenship for one group while not offering citizenship for another. I would like to quote Tony Morrison, you know, like one of the things that's great about this hyphenation that you offered me, you know by calling me Iraqi American is that it really kind of like reinforces everything that this brilliant person said throughout her life, you know is that, you know, distilled into this one quote, you know that in America, the word American means white, everybody else has to hyphenate. You know, and when I think about the hyphen, what what Ella Shah has talked about in in relationship to the Arab Jew hyphen that goes in between those two words is that it acts as a bridge. It also acts as a suture, you know, a remembering and a remembering of severed parts, you know, of disconnected parts so I absolutely will, you know, make the choice not to reject that label, because it also puts in you know, like when museums completely flatten us, you go on to the most website look at the collection you'll never ever get the nuance of Mark Chagall, even though it says American born Belarus, it doesn't tell you anything. It doesn't tell you anything about that artist struggles about the, the traumas of being in Europe and coming to the United States the traumas of attempting assimilation, those kinds of things you know get lost in the way in which we, we start to kind of like tidy up provenance I'm actually interested in the messiness of it. And, you know, and, and, and to your point also about the, the middle name, you know, Ariela Ayesha, Azulea, one of the most beautiful moments that I've ever had as an artist was in that project where I reopened my grandfather's import export business to import Iraqi dates. You know, the Iraqi exporters, you know, who like why you want to import Iraqi dates, you know, who are you and I explained that my grandfather and you seem many socket that would that Aziz, you know was from Baghdad and had an import export business, and on all of the correspondences afterwards one of the companies, you know just put Michael that would rackets, like they put it back they said like we're giving you this. You know, and, and our hopes that the son of our city's daughter might come back. You know, and so those kinds of moments are not unimportant, you know those kinds of, of, of, you know what we might call the placeholders for some kind of return. You know, are actually, they're actually really important so I'm grateful to you, you know for having insisted on that a bit when we work together. I just want to know that Ariela Ayesha Azulea is actually in the room today I don't have a lot to say that. Wonderful we conjured, we can let's conjure more, you know, more, more heroes. conjured that and that I think that it's really, you know, this idea of messiness that you mentioned is in relation to this project return and a subsequent project spoils actually a very useful way for us to get to the fourth it actually is personal biographical facts which historically when trained as a historian of so called art. One is not necessarily encouraged to rely on those specific facets but to focus on on what might be predetermined notions of concept form movements and so forth type of very specific historical periods and it's always about trying to link things back so you'll see a lot of writing now trying to link back socially engaged practices now to that institutional critique which I find was a very important part of both of our educational histories but that what happens that has actually moved on from that but what I wanted to kind of go into is people know a lot of people here know about the fourth from Tripoli Gris where the invisible enemy should not exist the iteration of the Lamassu which we'll come to in a second which was composed from Iraqi dates serve cans, but the genesis of that dates back to this, this project return and and Davidson's and Co as well as spoils which were all about trying to explore something very intimate and that was somehow being concealed wherever it was through a label on it on a can saying that a date serve can was actually not from from Iraq but actually from Lebanon, or wherever it was concealed in the in the food that people ate in a restaurant such as the case of spoils which has also other many layers and I could you reflect a bit on how that motif or how that very personal human bodily substance you know Iraqi dates serve has come to form so many projects. Yeah, you know, it came to me recently, you know just how sticky it is physically you know it's kind of apropos that it becomes this binder of a lot of projects as a material, you know that like when you, when you puncture the can, you know and you let the material out. You know that it really does serve as a kind of aggregate. In fact dates syrup in Iraqi Jewish culture. During the Passover Seder, there's, there's a kind of substitute for. Well not a substitute but but actually you have all of these food stuffs that have metaphorical meaning magical meaning projected on to them. The Exodus and one of them is called horoset and in Ashkenazi traditions, you know European Jewish traditions it's usually these chopped want and walnuts with with apples and that that really sweet Sabbath wine and everything else you know mixed together. And it's supposed to stand for the mortar that was used to put the bricks together done in Pharaoh's Egypt by the enslaved Hebrews. And in Iraqi Jewish culture it's just date syrup, you know with chopped walnuts in it and so it really does become the thing that holds things together and so I've really appreciated its presence in my life. But when I think about all the other things that you're, you know, connecting it to is, you know, it really allowed for me through one object to really kind of see, you know, became a lens through which to see everything that if we look at the, the can of date syrup, that you're describing that conceals where it's from. Almost like it's a terrified object. You know that's too terrified to tell me where it's from as if like the pressures of xenophobia that are being visited on it or almost like the pressures from a hammer onto a chisel, you know that ends up sculpting what it is for me. And so, all of a sudden through this one object I saw all of these moments of power that are, you know, sometimes made invisible. You know but they're not invisible when you look at the marks on people's bodies when you start to kind of understand the traumas in their lives as you start to kind of like really get to know a person. You understand how power works and I felt like getting to know that object allowed me to know how power works. And so it became, yes, like this thing through which I did this project called spoils and the whole idea was, you know, had many layers we can't possibly discuss them all here, but one of them was just that like a high end restaurant will tell you where your food comes from and it will tell you where your arugula is coming from which farm where your meat is harvested from and it's a way to make the diner feel good. And in this collaboration with this restaurant in 2011 I wanted to make the diner feel bad. And so I wanted there to be this kind of moment where the Iraqi dates syrup would appear on the menu, saying exactly where it was from. And it also served on a surface that, you know, created a condition where some people couldn't bring themselves to eat off of it. And then when you talk about it being the material culture of the law must do on the fourth plan. That was a function of having to propose a material that was going to stand up to the British weather. And, of course, Papilla Michelle was the material that I was using to make all of those objects that are part of the series. Before that, but the date syrup had already existed in my life since 2006. And so those cans came back as the material that could not only stand up to the British weather, but could also stand up to the statuary that was in that square. So we have, you know, the columns and the lions that are made from, you know, like the columns of the capitals on Nelson's column are actually made from the melt the down cannons of the HMS Royal George. So the material culture of the weapons of war in this square that's celebrating British imperialism and militarism is being stared down by the material culture of the victims of war. We're just talking in its sense about the human victims we're not talking just about the cultural heritage. We're also talking about the ecological disaster, because when you look at the history of the date palms through the lens of the date syrup. You realize that there were 30 million date palms in Iraq before the Iran Iraq war, then after that, there were 16 million and at the end of the US London bit invasion less than 3 million remain. It's still dwindling because of just how toxic the soil has become because of the munitions. And so I wanted to be able to have a kind of non anthropocentric moment in that work and so you know that was just another thing that surfaced. It began, it is part of a project called the invisible enemy should not exist, which is an ongoing work, which is, as you mentioned when made out of using a technique of paper machine but it is one might not necessarily recognize that but it you use records from organizations such as the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago to find data about every at the time and I don't know if this has changed your goals to recreate to scale using the detritus. And basically of Middle Eastern food packaging in the US to recreate every single looted item from the museum to scale. And we developed this relationship around Dr. Donnie George you unveiled his mythologies from being in the deep purple cover band as a side job for survival to, you know, showing the whole world, basically these artifacts that they would never get to see in this form, but they were, despite the scale and the size and I've worked with you on many presentations of this, the Masu of Nineveh was a very specific, almost response to the invitation to make a proposal for the fourth plinth and that very loaded history that you articulate and can you go into that for us. Sure. I mean, you know, when I was, when I was nominated. I was a little stunned. You know, as somebody who trained as a public artist and studied with artists like Christof Wadichko and Dennis Adams and Ritz Gotahoe, Joan Jonas. You know, the idea of putting an object on a plinth is actually a little bit antithetical to what I would do as somebody working in the public sphere. I'm much more interested in moments of dispersal. And so, you know, there was this question like what could I possibly propose. And, you know, Gormley had done that incredible one and other, where he had different people sign up to occupy the plinth and do performances and I thought that was just an incredible way of approaching a work like that and also dispersing. I was actually a little bit, you know, stuck on what I could possibly get excited about on a plinth and then around the time that I was invited I was in touch with Kirsten Neumann down at the Oriental Institute and my team, my studio team and I, which is very important to say because, you know, I don't do this work alone. There's no way I could in terms of the scale. So my studio team and I were researching what it might take to do, you know, a kind of monumental version of these reappearances that you're talking about. And, and we were looking at the, the, the Lamos of Nineveh, which had been destroyed earlier that year. And, and so, you know, she wrote back and she gave me the measurements. And she said that it was 14 feet long. And I think it was a day or two later that I got the packet from the fourth plinth commission. That gave me the architectural drawings of the plinth and it turned out that it too was exactly 14 feet long. And so immediately I thought what else would I do. And I immediately recognized just how charged that space was given everything I said before in terms of the other monuments. And also the way in which it was only 20 minutes walk away from the British Museum where you have seven Lamos that are being held in that museum, and what it would mean for one of them to be located outside. To be outside with its wings raised with its, its asked to a museum, not looking as though it's walking into it but looking southeast towards the houses of parliament where the decision to go to war with Iraq was made but also looking past them towards Nineveh, you know, almost yearning for return. And, and you know it became a monument and an admonishment, you know, one of the things that that really interests me is that the word monument comes from Monterey, which is Latin for warning. And so you have, you know, demonstrate which means you know you go out and show people how things are remonstrate as you show somebody the error of their ways. And the word monument coming from that well the word monster also comes from that, you know, in the belief that the monsters were sent down from above to warn humanity. You know so so that was kind of the way it, it happened in terms of the conceptualizing the other thing I just want to answer a little bit is what you said about the food packaging. And when we talk about what does it mean to recreate something to scale that existed and no longer exists. I mean the food packaging is one of the ways in which one recreates to scale. You know, one of the things of joy and gathering and cooking, you know that one leaves behind when one goes into the diaspora and so you know this is this monument becomes a steas fork object with wings. You know that's capable capable of moving around which is, you know, not something that people want when they put up something on a pedestal. The idea is that it's fixed, you know, and in my opinion, nothing is fixed. And I know that, you know, there have been, there are lots of stories about this, this body of work which have, you know, led to contestation and you know there's, there is one particular piece which is in the MCA Chicago collection which, which, you know, created some recently tensions when in that with the Pergamon Museum, when we were doing a project there but I'm interested in trying to think about how these works that are almost admonishments of a particular way of being can function as restorative tools and the kind of the fate of the Lamassu sculpture that you built is quite unique and I think speaks a little bit to that. Could you tell us about what's happening now to the Lamassu in terms of its future journey? Well, one of the things that had always interested me is whether or not this kind of work could ever end up in Iraq. And, you know, I think that, you know, as I was making these, you know, there's, there's a desire in a way to see if it's something that's wanted. You know, if these things should go back. You know, but one thing that I quickly realized in my conversations with Iraqis after the fourth plinth was that, you know, there was still, you know, this dignity that had not been, you know, the violence of the relationship with the West is that it does not offer dignity, you know, to the people who have been parted from their culture. And so, you know, one of the things that came up is there were different British London based organizations that were interested in being a custodian for the work. And when I am, when I actually had a conversation with somebody from the British Museum said, hey, listen, you know, London now has an extra Lamassu. What if I were to, you know, give this to you and and then you send one of the originals back, you know, as solidarity with this place that you were doing research with and about. And, and so the response was, was really, you know, I don't know how to call it anything but colonial largesse where the response was that they were very proud of the fact that they allowed for factum Marte to come in and scan their Lamassu, and that they were reprinted 3D with the patina exactly the way it is in the British Museum and they were sent to the University of Mosul in this kind of like active restoration. This for me is not restoration that that, you know, sending those empty shelves back if that's okay then why the hell isn't that museum making the decision to kind of say okay let's 3D print what we have with all the patinas, in an actual act of restorative justice we can send the originals back. So those kinds of empty gestures for me are like, you know, part of, I think what we're going to see is a disease of, of repatriation of restitution falling into the trap of apology where apologies uttered more for the person saying it than the person receiving it. So, the future of the Lamassu is that it now has shared custody. The tape modern has 50% of it and the other 50% belongs to an Iraqi Museum. And so it is this, it's a relationship that's based on mutuality, and also on the knowledge that this is a diasporic work, you know, but it has a desire to go back. It actually keeps the problems alive. It allows for the work to continue to be sculpted by those pressures of power that we were talking about before so much of Iraq actually exists outside of its borders. And you talked to it's the people, and they're going back and forth between places. And this is the relationship that should be reflected in those objects, not some kind of like happy ending because it's not a happy ending. I do talk about rest, you know, I've actually talked about restoration being something that should be in the conversation about repatriation and restitution. So one of the things that I've actually initiated. And several places are actually considering this is that when I do get invited into these places from now on to intervene in their collections, you know, when they invite artists that are coming from places like Mesopotamia, you know, or, or any other place in the colonized world to intervene in an imperial museum's collections where those objects are being held hostage. That, that I'm not so willing to just play a polite game. I will agree to work and I'll actually up the ante and say not only will I work but I'll gift you the work. If you send this back. And my reasoning for that is that every museum that I know of has a restoration department, you know, conservation report or department. And true restoration actually does engage in the more difficult layers of removal of certain kinds of harms in the artwork and why shouldn't that not be also applied to the way in which we look at the world where at large from which these objects come. There will be something very violent about separating people from their objects and putting them on display. You know, but how is it that we start to kind of reverse this or interrupt that cycle. I mean, I think what you're doing is a very interesting gesture, but I think it's just that for now. It's in the grand scheme of things. It's only still a gesture because that this, you know, that the notion of reciprocity, that is not solidarity, and that is not proposing a context of restitution or renewal with formerly calling my sights why let's think of the broader contemporary landscape in Britain, for example. You know, it has become with the opening of tape modern in 2000 vogue to collect international art, and that it opened with an exhibition century city which would basically curators invited from different countries to curate their country essentially that's the reduction of course of the curatorial thesis. And it was for me a very interesting and layered exhibition that challenged me and which I challenge in different ways. And I respect the person who created the overall project very much, but the issue with what tape modern then created in terms of being the institution that collects that holds the national collection of international art for Britain is that when you want to collect the art of Michael Rackowitz, for example, they have these regional acquisition committees which are largely formed of individuals who are from those places, paying money to sit on these committees to allow Britain to acquire their culture. Meanwhile, their historic culture is in its encyclopedic museum still being held hostage under numerous conditions, and then the idea or notion of a nuanced conversation, or even the generosity of simply giving back is not really on the table because what you're doing is you're actually giving them something back that is, that actually has a value or proposing to anyway, in the case of say the BM. So, I think it's, it's a broader and more complex issue, of course, that has to look at also the contemporary and modern discourse. That is the historic artifacts that have been taken from these places, because why is it that we are people from our countries are sitting and giving money for Britain to acquire this or why shouldn't they be reflecting the of people voices that reflect its constitution, you know, we're in London, a city that is almost 40% not white and by 2050 will be more than more that will be almost more than half. So, why is it that take modern in London, which has, you know, as we saw, the majority of its audience are international tourists because the figures went down from four plus million to one point something million, not want to reflect the but only a very specific kind of dead white artist who tends to be male. So, you know, that I think my issue with our institution debate is that it needs to come into play with the present in a way that also acknowledges that every art fair every biennial of just an opportunity for a museum director to go and fundraise for their museum at home. And I find it really difficult. And I think COVID has made me realize that when we can travel. And when museums are declaring that they might have to close. It raises a lot of questions questions about what is the function of a museum and can't you just hand it over and make it a social space. Sure you can. I mean we've seen that happen, you know, in the past where you know you're talking a little bit about the ways that social practice is now being kind of like intertwined with a larger history of like institutional critique. I hate the term social practice, you know, it actually begins in the realm of psychology in the 1980s, you know, which is all about betterment and more positivity. You know, which in a way for me has allowed for social practice to kind of like just be, you know, tethered and declawed, you know, like we don't talk enough about antagonisms as a possibility within work, you know, as opposed to being something that just rests in positivity And when we think about like people like merely later in the ukuleles you know or the different projects that have been done over the time to turn a museum into a shelter to turn a museum into waste production site to turn a museum into an urban farm or whatever. Those museums actually do have the capability of being exactly the thing that they're not, you know, that is a way of pushing against this kind of like colonialistic idea of what a museum is and should be. Azalea has also, you know, spoken really, you know, passionately and compellingly about the violence of modernity. You know, we're not talking about that in this conversation enough, you know, in terms of like what these museums are set up to do when it comes to like the realm of contemporary art and modern art. So all I can ever do as an artist in my work is to operate in that the in the symbolic realm. You know, so like when you're talking about it being gestural, what it is that I'm doing I'm trying to kind of create these unresolvable situations in a museum's like with another museum which museums hate doing, you know, you know, to kind of create something that is nomadic in its collection as opposed to fixed. And so that for me was the important part. If I think about also what simple restitution means I think that we're, we're also speaking for people, you know, who are not here. You know what I want to do in any of these restitutive conversations or anything about decoloniality or anything about repatriation is to be led by the communities to which things are being proposed to be returned. And that is where that potentially will elide if we don't have those conversations being led is that once again, it's this complete and total West view looking east, you know, thinking about the importance of rest, you know, of also about conservation. And some things that are in situ like the Bamiyan Buddhas we've talked about that extensively about the $30 million that was offered by European government for the restoration of the Buddhas. But none of that could be given to the people who were starving in Afghanistan. You know, so those kinds of moments are are like really important for us to bring in here. Because we can have the Sar Savoy report, you know, we can have all of the things that we know and it's really great that there are places that are actually accelerating the situation by returning the Benin bronzes. You know, what about what I'm trying to engage in now is an escalational aesthetics in something that can actually, you know, do the equivalent of putting some lighter fluid on the on the barbecue. And but also to kind of create situations that are not easy for museums. I mean, part of also the agreement with the Tate is they have to continue to lobby the British Museum to return things. You know, so if you actually are able to activate other people in your field to do these things that are that are not part of their job description are uncomfortable then then there's the possibility that these things aren't just gestural. I think the way that I use the word gestural is more in a kind of lyrical fashion and that it's the it's the notion of a gesture that can that triggers the conflict can trigger a conversation that might then escalate but my point was that at this moment it remains in a place where that bigger conversation hasn't been triggered across expenses. But I having worked in public institutions my entire career. I also know how incredibly difficult it is for two institutions to ever want to work together around a project in that way so I think it is an incredible feat, but I meant it more as a, as a, we are still at the beginning of the turning point or a tide, where we can encourage, use the kind of structures and mechanisms of how institutions are governed how they are governed to twist them enough to allow them to kind of create this ripple effect and that will take a lot of artists doing the same thing. And I think it's necessary but at this point I think I've been told that we should bring in parole our, our, our convener back into the room to help moderate some questions I believe. Thank you, Michael, and am I, am I audible. Yes, you are. So thank you very much for this very unusual dialogic keynote, and in form of a very rich and poetic, you know, evocative dialogue between two friends, collaborators, and for sharing your insights about each other's practice, I think it comes from years of friendship and solidarity. And you have this number of issues like in between this resistance to pop culture, and also resistant against authenticity, I think which is very very crucial question of our times. And what I also found very interesting is the way in which you underlined synesthesia, that is, the need to listen to images, not just see them, but also listen to them. The need to once again assert that the person is political. And I have been very cautious of identity politics of this kind, because one, one felt that you know, this is something which was very much in discussion, maybe a decade or two back. I think it's, we are reaching a point in, in global, you know, geopolitics where one is forced to confront some of the issues, they're coming back in different types. And so, your invocation of hyphen life was also very, very, you know, evocative because hyphen is when it's used in identities, it can work both as separator, as well as join up. And Omar your critique of historicization has a tool in art history, which cannot take into account the intimate events, which I think totally resonates with this project that one is talking about London Asia, and Michael your response was in form of the role that food plays in forming memories. And what I found very evocative and poetic was your use of the phrase terrified objects, which is a powerful and quite an idea. And you're connecting this with the chisel coming down heavily on stone. So kind of resonates with your own materialistic practice. I just wanted your reflection, both of your reflections in terms of art practitioner, as well as, you know, curator on the new visuality, or the decolonizing visuality that you're both seem to be, you know, just sharing towards. So, so how would, how would you articulate that from within your own practice, the new visuality. And just last question that I would like to end with is, you concluded your responses to each other by turning towards the whole politics of restitution, you know the whole museum politics, and, and sort of invoked people as a, you know, let the people decide. And I was wondering, what about the fracture public sphere. What if the public sphere itself is fracture, where it's not possible for us to think of a public. So, what, where does that take us. If I could just say, because I'll be brief, you know, I, when I moved to America for the second time as an adult, I moved, and I actually moved to live like moved right like two blocks or three blocks from Michael's house. And he might not know this but it's also because I was terrified because Donald J Trump had just been elected president of the United States, and I was told by the museum director who had offered me the job. He had announced his candidacy to see that the American people were not so stupid as like Donald J Trump and there was and I was actually terrified because when I had lived in America as a child. I lived in a, in an Asian suburb called Torrance in California, where it was incredibly fractured in the sense that minorities were segregated and separated from each other in specific communities and I thought I was coming back as an adult into a world. And so, you know, I think that there's a lot of post internet post digital media that you know the proximity and distance between cultures had changed, and obviously that political polarization that resulted in the election of Trump, and that was not the case, and that to speak of an America, just as it is to speak of a Britain with when also of course Brexit occurred in that in that time is an impossible task or feet. But I think that we have to have at least, and I hate using this word or throwing it in flippantly. We have to construct our own semblance of hope, whatever that may mean and the word hope is is in and of itself futile. If you can construct a semblance of from pulling from here and here and here. If you pull from every part of a city like Chicago or every part of city like London. So we can create, I believe, communities and spaces for discussion resistant solidarity, or even just what we talk what we mentioned a new visual reality, ie, a space of solidarity that is celebratory where one isn't just constantly fighting, where one is also able to cherish and celebrate a culture in a way that is with contextually situated without the fear of erasure. And that's my biggest fear is that you write you write you write, and you speak and you speak and you speak and where does this archive go Amazon Web Services, and then what happens. So, you know that's my fear, but that's just a positive combined response. Well, you know what I'll, what I'll say to this is, you know that that also when we think about the archives all, I'll, I'll borrow from, you know, to really dear friends and collaborators mtl. And I mean who's saying who talk about the archive as being something that is in them, you know the archive is in us, you know that we are in ourselves, you know, operating with a kind of vector of time, you know where it, there's a vector of time behind us and there's also going to be a vector of time in front of us, you know in terms of our time on this earth. And to feel as though those things are are also nomadic and within us and can be activated and that's one of the reasons why I think it's really important to in this moment where you're talking about a fractured public sphere. I feel like I've been dealing with a fractured public sphere ever since I entered into, you know this kind of thing called public art, I mean, Bruce Robbins has written about the, the, the phantom public sphere and of course Habermas has written extensively, you know, about the illusivity of publics. And so, you know, I think it's always something that's divided and conquered. And, and we can see that actually the lens through which I look at that is the way the ways in which you, you have these Jewish communities in places like North Africa, and in West Asia, and the ways in which different kinds of colonial entities created moments of separation that weren't there, because of what powers were given what kind of privileges were given. You know, so those kinds of things actually demand for us to activate a certain kind of solidarity of recognized in the fact that no one is truly free unless we all are, you know, it may sound, you know, flattened and cliche to say that but it's actually very true, you know, like when we can actually see that struggles are intertwined. We actually have to call it out, you know, and that actually is the kind of thing that will allow for us to truly activate something that is like intersectionality. So like if we're talking about something like strike moment, it's not just about a museum, the museum is actually like a scaled down version of everything that we're fighting against everywhere. When we're talking about power structures when we're talking about oligarchy that allows for certain things to stay in place. You know, when you start to actually disentangle and you start to actually connect all of these different struggles it makes it all the more unavoidable for us to start to envision a world beyond these places. You know, so for me, you know, like, again, I'm going to go back to it and say that like I do want voices, you know, from these places in there. And I can say that very simply, like through the lens of something like Nineveh or Nimrod, and to ask for there to be a voice, an Assyrian voice that's actually able to speak to what those artifacts mean to them, not just to the colonial project of Iraq alone. Right, you know, if we think about the Iraq Museum, what the Iraq Museum does is, and I'm not talking about the actual space I'm talking about the name is in itself it starts to flatten a lot of the things that that are not homogenous, you know, throughout that you have the Assyrian people who still speak their who still, you know, practice their traditions, you know, and to know that like some of these artifacts if they are restituted might not end up in Mosul, you know, but might end up in Baghdad. That's a different, you know, that's a that's another scale of what we're talking about in terms of top down paternalistic preservation. You know, so that's one of the reasons why I think it's so crucial that those voices come from a different than the one that we're actually maybe kind of like prone to to immediately default to. And the other thing I'll say is that like, you know, let me throw this out there as a provocation and as a thought experiment to say that like, what if what if the Imperial Museum or the Encyclopedic Museum could be a model that suddenly does go from being crime palaces to being something that is like a polite reliquary of like, you know, the curiosity the mutual curiosity of the world's cultures what if that happens, you know, and what if instead of restitution. And the Catholic Museum says no no no don't give us that back but give us like some fragments from from Stonehenge, you know, what kind of what kind of wound, you know, is the Empire, you know willing to engage in, you know, and to accept as something that's mutual, or reverse, you know those kinds of things actually for me would open up more space other than about solving a problem. You know, what if we keep those traces of problems and failures alive, but I have to look at my history and fragments, the same way I've made you look at your history and fragments. Thank you. I think we have one question from the audience. And I would like to read it out to you. It's from Bojana Stansik who says thank you for the talk. I was hoping to hear Michael talk more about the accelerationist is that it's a possible acceleration, I was calling it escalational, but maybe accelerationist is the same, but in a way, you know, I'm thinking that that that that has a lot to do with again with MTL has written about in October in 2018 about, you know, going from institutional critique to institutional liberation, you know, what if, you know, as we start to talk about the ways in which we want to decolonize museums once we recognize the fact that most of these places are dragging their feet, if not outright, you know, trying to like completely put down these rebellions and that we decide to make a collective exit from those places. What would it mean, you know, for an exodus of cultural practitioners to do what Omar said so beautifully which is that like, you know, one person can do it but unless there's a collective kind of movement, it won't mean anything. Well, not that it won't mean anything but that the massive kinds of like shifts that we're looking to won't happen. But you know, that's what gives me hope, you know, because every every movement that ever excited me in art history was always one that was almost like completely insane at the beginning or people regarded it as insane to the point where they wondered if it was art at all that was being done. You know, so if we think about escalational aesthetics, you know, being the kind of thing in this case like and this is my own lens there's other ways in which people can look at it. But we can actually engage in something that is simultaneously problem solving and trouble making, you know, that that actually does the kind of thing you know to kind of like engage with restitution but then also creates a problem. You know, that's my job as an artist. And so, you know, if we if we can almost think like what it would mean to to say, you know, if we were really to look to disrupt institutional leverage. What would it mean for us as artists to not do the thing that everyone's asking us to do which is to de author our work. You know, or two in one way, you know, activate our visual art artist rights, you know, in America, you know, where you can say you can no longer attribute this work to me. But what if we were to actually like reopen the additions, you know, and to actually say well, fuck it, you, you know this place has one out of three. Guess what it's one out of 75 now, you know, and to actually do something where we're in control of our own production, and we decided to flood the market. You know, to the point where we're not devaluing ourselves but we're devaluing the actual institutional framework that is already in place. That's just one example, but I'm actually writing about this topic now so I'm, I'm, I'm happy. I'm actually very very grateful to to boy on offer for asking this and I hope to get back to you with a more satisfying answer in the future. Thank you Michael, and I'm just going to check with the organizers how we place time wise. Can we take one more question or shall we wrap up and take a break. We can take we can take one more question and a brief responses because it's great to have it so and it's an important question so we'll we'll adapt as we go along. Fantastic. So there's this very interesting question from Brinda Kumar, who is asking, is one of the propositions then to focus on the intimate scale of response that is as far as possible from the national implicit in the British Museum, or even the Iraq Museum, especially at a time of resurgent problematic nationalism. I think it's a good question which can be answered by both. Omar go for it. You're on mute. Oh, I mean I know the person who asked the question where they work and, and then where they've worked and I think it's that question comes from, from there because, but I think that there is there isn't there is an issue which is that the tape is a Nash is a national collection but it says something else so my only fear is that we can hide behind other umbrellas and banners so the idea of actually fall focusing on small scale. Actually, that's kind of what I meant by gestures. It's like, I think a wonderful Chicago and friend Claire Pentecost said this. The small accumulations and their effects basically are what change have the potential to change society. So the small things accumulate and it was Sophia Victorino who introduced me to Claire talking about that and introduced me to Claire who's a wonderful activist and thinker at sec. And, and I think it's about the gesture it's about actually not about trying to destabilize the notion of, of nationalism, and in a way Michael I think what you the, the, the reason to give you Iraqi and as a title was, I could not bear to put to do a solo show of Michael Rockwoods and the first and first survey in the museum and have it say Michael Rockwoods born 1973 Great Neck in New York because that's the indexical system that will be used. And the devil was this guy from Great Neck from Long Island doing talking about all this Iraq stuff. So in a way actually to lose it and even those elements to like, where you're born how old you are, all these, all these aspects that also actually dictate what we didn't know which is the problem with, you know, modernity and European enlightenment being the prevalent lens by which and if we wish we look at culture. And so I think it's, I think it's more proposition than a question but I agree with it. Yeah. No, I think that you said it really beautifully. And, and again I think that like the question almost answers itself, or the proposition answers itself I think that it's absolutely correct. And that's being said that that the, you know, the tensions that I've seen, you know, that have opened up in places like for instance, Basra, you know, when things are being excavated in the south of Iraq when they have to like give it to Baghdad it like it really creates a problem because the local population doesn't actually have that proximity to those those archaeological finds that always has to be centralized. And so those nationalistic identities are always violent and and also create, you know, separation more than they create overlap. So yeah, no, I think that, you know, I'm grateful for that being the final, you know, statement from from today's session. Thank you, Michael and Omar for this very very, I would say poetic, evocative exchange conversation between the two of you, and you have really touched upon some of the most, I think, profoundest aspect of where we are located in terms of postcolonial discourse in terms of decolonizing thinking about art and art history and so on. So, with this, I'm going to wrap up the session, and we're going to take a break for 15 minutes as we're going to reassemble, and we will begin the next battle. Thank you very much and thank you audience for these very very stimulating questions. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Welcome back. And I think we needed this break to process the profound questions and issues. So welcome back. I think we needed this break to process some profound questions and issues raised by the earlier session. I hope you've all had a good break. And now we turn to our second panel, which has three speakers. I invite our first speaker, David Morris, who is Research Fellow and Editor at Afterall, and the title of his talk is Artists for Democracy and Vietnam Festival 1975. I invite David to start his presentation. Thank you. Hi everyone. It's really good to be here and to be part of these discussions. And thank you to Hamad, Sarah and to Ming and to all the organizers at Paul Mellon, and also to Oma and to Michael for the issues they raised in the last talk, which I think we'll find some resonance. I appreciate that. So what I'm going to present is somewhat speculative, but it's an attempt to do justice to the complexity and intensity of a particular moment, historical moment in relation to now. We explore phases and contradictions in solidarity and group dynamics, as seen through the group, Artists for Democracy, with particular attention to their 1975 Festival for Vietnam. And to do this, I'm going to draw from the toolbox of exhibition histories and exhibition studies, which is what I work on with colleagues at Afterall Research Center, and in dialogue with a great many other fellow travelers in different places and configurations. And so to lead into the particular history at hand. I'm going to begin with three other exhibitionery initiatives broadly, broadly put. And these are intended, sort of like epigraphs for my talk, points of orientation, inspiration or speculation. I'm pretty much following Ariela Azulay's concept of potential history with respect to the project of unlearning imperialism. I hope these epigraphs or this sort of interpretive constellation may be a way to try and unsettle the historical narratives that follow and open up, open them up to the present in a new way. So the first of these points is an exhibition organized by the British campaign for an independent East Timor, as advertised on the pages of Red Weekly newspaper in 1976. The second of these points is the Spirit of Friendship exhibition initiated by Sobat and colleagues at the factory in Ho Chi Minh City in 2017, an exhibition which traces a constellation of experimental art practices in Vietnam after 1975, and which explores the friendship and community that sustained their work across inhospitable and shifting ideological terrain. And I'm interested in particular in the sort of ambivalence between the spirit of friendship expressed and explored in this project and the languages of solidarity articulated in London in the mid 70s. And the spirit of friendship is an ongoing research project and resource and very, very much recommend looking at it. And then my final point is tools to transform, which is a contemporary network for Asian diasporic organizing in Europe, led by Azure Art Activism, which is free online resource aimed at artists, curators, educators, community leaders and all others interested in organizing in relation to Asian diasporas and building intra and inter-community solidarities. And it involves a great many other groups including justice for domestic workers and many others in a number of different coalitions. And again this actually launched very recently and I would encourage you to check it out. So, artists for democracy formed in London in 1974, with the intention to organize an arts festival in solidarity with Chile, and more broadly to give material and cultural support to liberation movements worldwide. The founding group included Guy Brett, John Duggar, David Medalla and Cecilia Vicunia, and the resulting festival was a multifaceted two week gathering of performance, exhibition and discussion, a space of conversation and mutual apprenticeship, that brought together artists from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas in a multifaceted conglomerate, that's quoting Vicunia. I also would like to think a little bit about festival as form and as practice, in particular where concepts of exhibition and festival may exist in a state of tension, which is something I've been in dialogue with others about for a little while now and I think these are the most interesting cases when there is a sort of tension between these formats. And so the image here shows two rather different contexts of exhibition for John Duggar's work, for example, and so I'm interested in the implications of exploring both exhibition contexts as such, so whether it be the demonstration in Trafalgar Square or the Artist for Democracy Festival exhibition presentation which was held at the Royal College of Arts in London. So the Artist for Democracy group broke apart after the first Chile Festival and so the Vietnam Festival that's my sort of focal point today marks a second phase after which it split again in a different way. Splits were not unusual in the plurality of political groupings at the time. And AFD overlapped with other groups such as the poster film collective which was based in Thomas Square nearby. Another sort of area of squats again in the context of a housing crisis squatting was a fairly common practice among artists and other sort of politicized groups. And so in a conversation for Black Phoenix magazine edited by Rashid Arin. Arin and David Madala discuss what they saw as the failure of Artist for Democracy in retrospect. So in Arin's analysis this lay in its inability to deal with cultural imperialism. This finds resonance with, as a lacework I believe, particularly at the level of artistic practice. Whereas for Madala, its failure was the disconnect between cultural workers who participated and those who were in his analysis had little knowledge of politics but saw, saw Artist for Democracy as an opportunity to exhibit. And this sort of was counterposed with the political radicals who attended the space who weren't interested according to Madala and Arin poetry. But from discussing with various participants and people involved as I have done in preparation for this presentation today. There's also a more complex middle ground between these positions. And this perhaps is most evident in the festivals and the solidarity festivals that the group organized. The founding member Cecilia Vicunia who wasn't involved at all in the Vietnam festival having left for Bogota, Colombia, following the first split after the Chile festival. She retrospectively suggests that the irony of the story is that this second phase of the group was to be remembered in London as the only Artist for Democracy, while the original organization in the Chile festival were forgotten. In retrospect, the exhibition space created by the second AFD on Whitfield Street was a different animal she says. However, quote unquote radical, it was aligned with the changing times where art exists in a niche that doesn't threaten the system. And she she sort of concludes that the failure in her eyes of the original Artist for Democracy is also its greatest beauty as failure seeds the birthing of new forms. And I'd like to sort of stay stay with this, this notion as well. So, compared to the festival for Chile which has has seen a certain amount of exhibitionery and discursive attention in more recent years. And importantly, so the, the festival for Vietnam is comparatively little known. The squatted building at 143 Whitfield Street became the headquarters of the reconstitution of the group. Following the Chile festival with Virgil Calaguen, David Medalla and Junterra living on the upper floors, and the lower floors opened up to host events and exhibitions. And the early exhibitions as well as this festival for progressive poetry and art included solo presentations by Tina Keane and then Richard. So, the Vietnam festival opened with a reading of poetry from Cuba, Mozambique, Sudan, Syria, China, Britain, Yemen, Philippines and the United States. And the first one in the pre-Vietnamese poetry as it's put in the program, a talk by Lee Chan, a representative from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on the problems of post war reconstruction. A drama entitled Vietnam victorious devised by David Medalla, Junterra, Virgil Calaguen and the International Committee for Freedom in the Philippines, of which Medalla was also chair as well as being chair of the AFD group at this point. The drama was set to include kinetic sculptures, lightworks, songs and poetry. According to account given at the time the exhibition component of the Vietnam festival consisted of a series of environments made of simple, often waste materials. The exhibition included artworks, films, performances, poetry readings and theater alongside installations on the life of work of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Workers Party, the role of women in Vietnam and other sort of informational didactic displays which were described by a critic Paul Overie at the time as displaying a kind of knowing foe naivety. The sort of didactic or narrative displays and environments for the show were assembled by the group, but this was never considered collective work. Well at the same time, individual input was also obscure lending them a sort of ambiguous status. The exhibition was also planned to be easily mobile with the hope and an intention that it would travel early documents sort of invite this from for anyone who would like to host it and other places, which was a common sort of technique of activist exhibitions at the time. I'm showing here one of the very few photographs I've been able to locate so far which only shows a particular work from the larger assemblage and this is Rashid Jareen's holds on earth installation, seeing here also in more recently reconstructed form. And this work is a kind of interesting stepping stone between his earlier more minimalist constructions and into the more politicized work of the 70s and onwards and a rare instance of an insolational work. Not documented, however, are there many meals that Rashid Jareen cooked for Sunday gatherings at Artists for Democracy, which are fondly remembered by by participants and which also find continuity in his more recent work and restaurant Shamayana food for thought for change. So relevant here is a an event David organized after the end of us for democracy after the space closed in 1977 as a kind of reaction to the over seriousness and puritanism of British political circles. He organized an Artist for Democracy Grand Artist Banquet which invited 100 artists to come and cook their favorite recipes together as part of a great feasting in London, in which he evoked famous artists banquets throughout history, but also Ho Chi Minh's early culinary training with the great French chef Escoffier. So, Artist for Democracy, as you as you might sort of see, took form and an intersection of nationalist and internationalist agendas. The artistic internationalism advanced by projects such as Signals Gallery and News Bulletin during the 1960s. This is this overlapping or fading into the local and international coalitions of solidarity campaigns, on liberation struggles trade union blocks and campaigns for health care and housing that characterized the 1970s in Britain. The Vietnam festivals program of women's events, as it was built suggests the range of practices and concerns gathered under the general rubric of anti imperialism, which was a kind of an ongoing fracture within the group discussions at the time. The program includes presentation by the Women in Indochina group, showed by a broadside mobile theater group addressing issues such as childcare and abortion, and a site specific performance on the street outside the gallery by experimental performance theater and choreography group, Limited Theater Company, which led by Sally Potter, Jackie Lansley and Rose English, which was directed towards issues and poetics around the history of Ireland, rather than Vietnam. Participants comment on the moment's intensity, the racism and the atmosphere of violence in Britain at the time, as well as its sense of possibility. British politician wrote at that time that in January 1974 the Tories and the whole establishment thought the revolution was about to happen. And in light of Chile, the Spectator magazine in Britain alluded to the possibility or even desirability of a military takeover in the UK. If these activities allow consideration of how artistic political consciousness was embedded at the level of organizing infrastructure, social reproduction and activities outside what was considered art and exhibition. So in light of the Vietnam festivals positioning within towards Southeast Asia. I wanted to move to consider the festival as form and practice and also consider certain complexities within this putative geographic imaginary. The festivals that they organized, in particular the Vietnam festival finds an interesting resonance with critic and artist, Reynando Albanos essay installations, A Case for Hangings, published in Philippine Art Supplement in 1981, which speculates an intersection between fiesta displays and contemporary installation art. This is taken up and what Patrick Flores describes as an installative tendency in art in Southeast Asia, a relationality, as he says, activated by multiple forces motivated by desire to quote concede convene an art world or a relational personal world about by creating conditions for people to assemble across the various axes of dissent development nationalism and solidarity. But to think about the Vietnam initiative in these terms is made more complex by the legacy of the Chile festival which took explicit inspiration from the cultural efflorescence of the end years. Flores, for example, describes his presentation of the red star puppet show theater and works at shops at the Chile festival and elsewhere, which were based on the Indonesian shadow puppet theater way I call it within a system of autonomous as he describes these centers set up by people all over Chile, where they democratically involve new ways of doing things socially, politically and culturally. And so in the exhibition component of the Chile festival there were these kind of apparently these kind of autonomous sort of centers or zones within the within the layout in which terrorist workshops with school children, for example, would occur and other other participants had their own areas to to work in and with. Courtney Martin has described John Douga's work at the time in terms of festival culture and has sort of linked linked this also to the 1972 documentary in which Douga and Madala participated, which in in her account is understood in similar terms as a as a kind of a freewheeling multi platform event, much more than an institutional exhibition. Another thread to follow is the exploding galaxy group. It was discovered over into 1960s counterculture suggesting a lateral connection with the popular free festival movement that was reaching a peak in the mid 1970s in Britain. So, in his book on popular art and modern history published decade after the end of artists for democracy. The artist identifies a combination of forces that contain what he describes as the seeds of a new popular culture. He writes, artistic ideas are in the air and right for use. Nor is it a question of putting art first as a kind of prime mover. A significant fact is the relationship between the people, the event, and the means of expression. And the two festivals that asked for democracy organized in particular established a political particular set of relationships between concrete and imagined political blocks. World historical events, such as the Chilean cool and victory over American imperialism in Vietnam. And did so by a multifarious means of expression. And I think there's there's an interesting sort of rejoinder to Rashidurin's assessment of the failure to address formally the question of imperialism there. So if one's sort of focuses broadened to the, the entire assemblage that the, you know, the festival brought into its remit. And this also connects with artists for democracy's function as an organizing space. So the Vietnam festival invited groups involved in liberation struggles to use the space for events and presentations. And this would continue to be a function of the space as well as hosting performances from an alternative theater groups in this, and many other ways it was oriented towards a network. So let me briefly zoom in on the question of group dynamics, which might be thought of in terms of instituting an institutionality, which speaks to the overlap of the different energies that intersected in artists for democracy. She describes AFD as a self generating organization and with specific reference to the time of the Vietnam festival. And it's interesting to note that the group was adamantly never collective in the sense of taking collective positions. Discussions aimed at broad consensus that allowed different positions to coexist, which also led to splits and unresolved contradictions. It's on the sense of a resolution that I want to round off in the interests of keeping to time. So, Ariela Zulei describes potential history as something that strives to retrieve reconstruct and give an account of the diverse worlds that persist despite the historicides limits of our world. This is not giving voice to a silent past and making the invisible visible, but releasing the past from its pastness, as she says, and letting assume the vitality of what has always been there. And in this sense, I'd like to sort of propose that AFD's unresolved splits and failures were also ways to produce new arrangements and new configurations of elements that may be taken forward in the present. In 1975 Cecilia Vakunya, as I said, left London for Bogota, where she would stay for the next five years. But yes, she arrived, she produced a series of silk banners in homage to the Vietnamese victory in Ho Chi Minh, which drew from her earlier encounter with a visiting group of Vietnam Vietnamese soldiers in the early 1970s. So these banners are produced at more or less the same moment that the Vietnam festival is underway in London. Like John Douglas Banner for Chile, Vakunya's banner is cut in strips in order for the wind to move through it. And that's when I'll finish. But just to say a thank you and an appeal to anyone who has been or knows anyone who is involved in these initiatives. I would really love to hear from you in the course of trying to piece together in more detail and produce a kind of oral history of these events at this particular moment. Thank you everyone. Thank you David for an absolutely reverting presentation, rich individual archival material, which brought to life the art and politics of the 1970s Britain, and also shed light on this very little known Vietnam festival and its relationship with artists for democracy. We're going to have Q&A session afterwards after our second speaker finishes the presentation. So I'm going to now invite Mariam Ohadi Hamadani. She is a post doctoral research associate at Yale Center for British Art, and she will be talking on a little too much Commonwealth new vision. Mariam Ohadi Hamadani. So thank you. Let's see. I apologize for that. Um, I firstly would love to thank our convener Sarah Hamad and me for what is thus far been a really interesting and important series of programs, and for also inviting me to speak here as well today. I would like to acknowledge that the Mohegan Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Scatacoke, Golden Hill Pagasucket, Niantic and the Quinnipiac and other Aglomkin speaking peoples have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now known as the state of Connecticut where I currently reside. I honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these people and nations and this land. I also want to honor my Creek ancestors who survived the forced journey and resettlement from what is now known as the Georgia to what is now Oklahoma. So without further ado. I'm sure that new vision center gallery opened in 1956, the Mao Mao resistance in Kenya was coming to a head, and the Suez crisis generated a newfound anxiety of Britain's global power. In the wake of the colonization and having been twice rejected from the European economic community by France and 63 and again in 68 Britain simultaneously attempted to align itself politically with Europe, while continuing to promote the Commonwealth and abroad. This led to soft power attempts to both visualize and define the cultural, social and political parameters of the Commonwealth. Commonwealth Day replaced Empire Day in 1958. Commonwealth Weeks, a celebration and official celebration held over 18 months from 1959 to 61 and sponsored by the Commonwealth Relations Office, the Colonial Office and the Central Office of Information toward 14 cities throughout the United Kingdom and featured dance, music, film and theater performances, as well as contemporary and historical exhibitions of so called Commonwealth art, such as at the Norwich Castle Museum, organized on a suggestion from the Central Office of Information. This exhibition featured several contemporary artists associated with new vision, including Anwar Jalal Shemza and Ahmed Parvez representing Pakistan, and John Copland's and Dennis Bowen representing South Africa. Similarly, in 1965, the Commonwealth Arts Festival in part sponsored by the Commonwealth Relations Office, a month long program held throughout London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool and Cardiff, showcased acts as varied as Robbie Shankar at the Royal Albert Hall to dance and music performances in Trafalgar Square of the Sierra Leone national dance troupe, still baddens from Trinidad and Tobago and traditional Maori performers. For the festival, the Royal Academy organized treasures from the Commonwealth and exhibition featuring many historical objects from the British Museum and British collections, including the Royal Collections, alongside works by contemporary artists again including collections as canvases titled Love Letter and untitled painting by Parvez and one of Arbery Williams paintings from his Guyana series. Most visibly and more permanently perhaps the new Commonwealth Institute's purpose built art gallery, then the only one of its kind in London, consistently exhibited Commonwealth artists until its closure in the 1990s. Normally the Imperial Institute on Exhibition Row in South Kensington, the Institute was moved to a modernist building overlooking Holland Park. Dedicated by Queen Elizabeth in 62, the inaugural exhibition Commonwealth Art Today included representatives from the 24 countries then in the Commonwealth including Britain, among them again, Arbery Williams and Frank Falling representing British Guyana and Parvez and Shamsa representing the Pakistan section. The Royal Painters Group was formed in 1958 by a group of artists connected to the New Vision Center, founded by artists Dennis Bowen, Halima Nowich and Frank Arbery Wilson and later artist critic Kenneth Coots Smith. The New Vision Center was the first gallery in London dedicated to showcasing painterly abstraction in all its iterations by contemporary international artists until its closure in 1966. As Wilson recalled one objective of New Vision was quote to show people who were coming to England from abroad with paintings that no other gallery would show. And an interest in the international dimensions of abstraction was fitting considering its founders were not born in Britain. Bowen was born in South Africa but raised in Wells. Thank you Arbery Wilson from Mauritius, Halima Nowich was from Poland, and Bowen John Coppins, who was also from South Africa, Leslie Kandapa from Salem now Sri Lanka, Shamsa and Parvez with Daryl Hill and Willie Newcomb from Canada, organized for exhibitions as the Commonwealth painters beginning in 58 with transferences at Swimmer Gallery, and in 1961 their second exhibition Commonwealth Vision was held at the Commonwealth Institute's old building, and their efforts then culminated in two Commonwealth viannuales of abstract art in 63 and 65 at the Institute's new art gallery. There are other galleries that exhibited Commonwealth artists during this period, for example, South Asian artists were regularly shown at Indica Gallery or Victor Musgraves Gallery one which represented Francis Newton Suza and organized the exhibition seven Indian painters in Europe and 58, as well as several solo exhibitions of South Africa Abstraction by Parvez and Shamsa, Avinashandra, and Safiyuddin Ahmed, and Ahmed Shamsa and Parvez along with Ali Iman and Murtaja Basir were also founding members of the LaFour Art Circle and exhibited in 1958 under the group five Pakistani painters at Woodstock Gallery. New Vision however was the only gallery necessarily associated with the notion of Commonwealth contemporary art in the Commonwealth Institute by both its practitioners and critics and by virtue of the efforts of the Commonwealth painters. But it was also new visions expressionistic form of abstraction which encompassed to Shisma art informal lyrical action painting, what critic David Sylvester would term new vision abstraction and how I will refer to these varying and often dissonant modes of abstraction was characterized by its artist and recognized by its critics as an internationalizing visual language, new vision abstraction for Bowen as he described it quote forged a visual language, which in overcoming state barriers as fast becoming the communicative force of universal man in his will to establish his unity. Precisely the perceived non referential properties of abstraction with its potential to eradicate cultural or national particularities of form and representation in favor of the universal that would come to be associated with the Commonwealth. As critic Pierre Rouvet cheekily remarked on the occasion of the Commonwealth painters second exhibition, there was just a little too much Commonwealth new vision. So many of these panels about how collective actions of artists and how such organizations envisioned aesthetic and political projects, at the concept of an artistic, cultural or politically unified Commonwealth, officially promoted by Britain as a voluntary international organization between its former dominions and colonies, having shaken off its imperial and colonial past for the future utopian ideals of mutual friendship and understanding in the words of its figurehead the Queen was and still is perhaps as elusive as its paradoxical motto united in diversity. And in a period in which a burgeoning internationalism transformed London as British citizens of the Commonwealth immigrated and established communities in neighborhoods like Notting Hill rules court base water and lab rope rope. It was felt ideally that new vision abstraction could do the heavy lifting of eradicating differences of nationalism, culture, origins and artistic subjectivity relating the kind of abstract visual language that could reduce the particularities of people places and things in favor of a more equitable visual universalism, yet as it will be shown here new vision abstraction was always seen this way by its critics or even by its practitioners. So the Commonwealth painters group was one of a number of so called Commonwealth collectors during this period which also included the young Commonwealth artists formed in 1959 for the purposes of providing alternate exhibiting opportunities for the many Commonwealth students in London that is frank bullying a founding member claimed felt edged out by more successful British artists from the annual young contemporaries exhibitions. The Commonwealth painters group served practical and ideological purposes, firstly to provide exhibiting opportunities for Commonwealth emigres. Secondly, to affect the solidarity with the immigrant experiences of artists in London united by a shared, albeit vastly differing historical legacy of British colonialism. And this was best achieved they felt by the internationalizing language of abstraction. The Commonwealth thus provided a ready made framework towards you visualizing that mutual aim of a unified utopian world. So embedded in the inner war and post war discourses of modern art is its democratic social duty and abstraction in opposition to the perceived fascist undertones of social realism had the potential to dismantle its medic referential properties, thus liberating the maker or the spectator from that which was known and seen to make instead what is unknown and invisible visible. New vision abstraction for Bowen in his own words epitomize the realization of freedom we thought, why should a worker want to look at people emptying dustbins when he's been doing it or seeing it happen all day long. The tension between arts between arts realism and the abstract between visual coercion and existential liberation between dustbins and dust was visibly expressed in the difference between the permanent displays of the country courts at the Commonwealth Institute, and the abstraction displayed within its art gallery and here I show examples from the India section taken from the Commonwealth Institute's guidebook of 1969. The critics noted this contrast William Bond reviewing the second Commonwealth the anomaly of abstract art remarks that as a frequent visitor I many times note the contrast between its fascinating dioramas descriptive of all of the variety of climate, seen race and occupation, and the recent paintings shown in its art gallery, for the most part, abstract, subjective experimental. To access the art gallery one would first walk through the Ghana country court past a pastoral panoramic landscape neural the fishermen or dynamic dioramic display of Ghana's cocoa industry to catch a glimpse of the gallery's pristine white cubed interior. The contrast to the aims of the two Commonwealth being allies of abstract art and its precursors transferences in Commonwealth vision which were asked to Smith writes in the catalog to demonstrate that it is in the similarities of the human race that fundamental truths line. The Commonwealth Institute's display and other official iterations of the Commonwealth celebrated instead its cultural differences. In his board to the catalog for Commonwealth art today, Eric Newton recognized that several of the artists exhibiting in their country section were living elsewhere, however he believed in terms of stylistic differences that these artists and I quote still belong to the geographical communities in which they were born, or where they spent most of your lives, and that the Commonwealth in its racial characteristics and its cultural traditions could hardly be expected to have an artistic unity. This attitude is also summed up in a statement from Prince Philip on the occasion of the Glasgow Camp Commonwealth Arts Festival, which he states in a world where the uniformity of material existence is constantly increasing. It's most important to remember and to appreciate the diversity of the cultural backgrounds in which the members of our Commonwealth are growing up. Yet in terms of immigration legislation material existence was not uniform for South Asian and Caribbean artists in Britain. By November 6, 1962, the day that the Queen and her speech and operating the Commonwealth Institute, praise the quote diversity and unity and the importance of all the Commonwealth's many peoples. The government had already passed the controversial amendment to the British Nationality Act of 1948, introducing restrictions on immigration through a limited number of employment vouchers aimed specifically at separating from South Asian and Caribbean countries. Artists from South Asia and the Caribbean thus faced another material reality of certain freedoms denied that their Australian or New Zealand or Canadian contemporaries did not, and the Commonwealth Institute purported to visualize another kind of materiality of material reality of the Commonwealth as a vote through the artifice of the Institute's representational displays, dioramas and murals that laid bare the processes for Philip's uniform material existence in its progressing narrative from raw materials transformed into commodities. For the Commonwealth painters and new vision practitioners the socialist humanist politics of abstraction centered around an existential reasoning between the visible and invisible between materiality and immateriality of expended energy derived from the trauma of two world wars, the impending cold war concerns about economic instability industrialization and ecological impermanence and for South Asian and African Caribbean artists, the violence and memory of colonialism decolonization and independence at the threshold of these contemporary threats was the impact of the metaphysical and indeterminate nature of reality, yet another kind of material existence or rather immaterial existence, a persistent anxiety that paralleled the living threat of atomic annihilation. In the introduction to the first Commonwealth Biennale, Kenneth Coots Smith writes that the aims of an exhibition quote such as this is in breaking down the barriers in a world constantly erecting new and dangerous frontiers both in geographical fact, and in the territories of the mind. I hope that the beyond Biennales would provide a biannual quote forum which would reach a wider public while drawing attention to the Commonwealth countries to those of their artists who have achieved some success in London. The Biennale in 63 featured over 100 artworks from 16 new vision artists representing Australia, British Viana, Canada, Salon, India, New Zealand, Pakistan and Rhodesia and 12 artists representing the United Kingdom. In the catalog essay Charles Spencer writes that this exhibition establishes the fact that artists from different countries from wildly different cultural backgrounds of different religious and racial origins share a common technical and aesthetic language. However, he continues on the other hand it would be in my view foolish to assume that having chosen abstraction, they have therefore submerged or denied individual qualities of personality or racial influence. It is obvious truism that an artist's expression must come from somewhere and that no human being exists in a cultural or spiritual vacuum. The founder of signals and it's short look gallery alongside given the dollar guy Brett reviewed the 1963 be an ally and conceded that tashes painting by the time of this be an ally had been elevated to the stature stature of an international language. Finally he claimed that while many saw abstractions salvation residing in its promise for quote universal communication, he wondered if it was steam rolling individuality into the mud. Despite his worries that expressionistic abstraction was flattening out individual subjectivity. He was still able to find difference for him the most noticeable dividing line was not informal considerations or personal expressions, but rather between east and west, like by different approaches to color. Although from Pakistan reviews of abstractionist like harvest shins and Ahmed conjured historical links between the traditional and classical arts and architecture of India, and the abstracted forms within their paintings. Ryu G. Archer wrote about and or shins or shins's work on the occasion of the artists first exhibition at new vision center. Archer was then considered the foremost expert and Britain on India art and in 59 who wrote India and modern art on the Indian modernists of the Bombay and Archer's text is symptomatic of the internationalism of national histories that proliferate it so rampantly in this period, claiming in the preface that any history of modern art in India requires the discussion of Indian art Western art and India itself. The pervading schematic that underlines Archer's reception of modern artists from India is the claim that a loss of Indianness within art practice and in the case of Shimza, not necessarily a loss of Pakistaniness, but also of Indianness equates a loss of authenticity or vital expression. Archer writes that quote art could hardly escape contagion in the historical encounters between Europe and this text gives no recourse to comparative formalist analysis in order to describe this relationship. In this conception of what constituted a sort of art typical compendium of Indian art to Archer and other Western scholars was precisely the sort of underlying thought that perpetuated a certain way that South Asian abstractionist like Shimza would be represented or perceived in these Commonwealth exhibitions. In authenticity of expression was not stressed as explicitly in Archer's review of Shimza, but the usage of traditional forms of Islamic art combined with Western art practice for sources of inspiration that were viewed by Archer as a nationalistic Pakistani visual language. Archer reviews Shimza by privileging Paul Clay's pictures and precepts as a visual stimulus and example for the artist, a solution to what Archer perceived as a problem, which quote was to formulate a style consistent with Islamic principles, principles which have always favored the logical abstract posterior and art the reverse of the sensuous for humanistic. Archer who quotes at length from Herbert Reed opposed universalizing or internationalizing discourse that new vision abstractionists for advocating, instead predicating his critiques on geographic specificity. The history of art as read writes and Archer quotes shows that the art of any particular region always tends to revert to a regional norm to a mode of sensibility and style of expression determined we must assume by ethnic and geographic factors. Archer and Reed debate the validity of national or local versus more open ended modes of expression and they write if arts vitality comes from the crossbreeding of styles, its strength comes from stability from roots that grow deep into a native soil. For South Asian and Afro Caribbean artists resistance to such racialized assumptions was facilitated by the abstracting properties of abstraction. Abri William stated of art specifically abstraction he says it's another word for freedom. According to the mimetic traditions of traditional Western art shimza and one of his journals writes that painting has lost the significance of inner truth as it gained an outward resemblance for shimza abstraction was closer to reality and truth, and in another section from 63, he refers to his abstract practice as a search for reality, reality being visual truth. For Ahmed Parvez abstraction as he claimed had the potential to go beyond the material and perceived realities of things seen. In this personal experience, another kind of material existence for shimza that refutes archers quest to identify nationalist intent in his own practice. He recounts recounts an off sighted experience of attending a lecture by Professor Gombrich, in which Gombrich claims all exam all Islamic art was purely functional. Indeed, similarly to archers claim that Islamic art is logical abstract abstract and austere and not sensuous and humanistic, which conversely characterized so much of shims is calligraphic abstraction, as one might see in his your lyrical book, the author's BND, which he likened to the marble screens in the shishmahal of Lahore Fort in paintings like palace gate shimza writes, quote, I found myself in the Egyptian section of the British Museum. For the first time I really felt at home, no longer was the answer simply to begin again, the search was for my own identity, who was I, the simple answer was a Pakistani, but this wasn't enough. The celebrated artist was lost at last, as was also the beginner at the slave. What's more, I have lost my home, I was an exile, homeless without a name. As Barbadian novelist George Lamming has succinctly put it, Britishness was inseparable to the identities of its colonials, aside from being at times an unwanted heritage, it was nonetheless a part of one's colonial education and identity. The collections, however, spoke as loud as the words of many British critics who codified universality as fundamentally British and European, or politically, by which the uniformity of material existence only truly applied to the British and the white cellar dominions of the Commonwealth. In the 1960s, it was clear that the continuing rise of more politically motivated, motivated collectives like the Caribbean artists movement or the artists for democracy. That refuting a European universal humanism attached to the notion of a universalizing abstraction was as France the non stated in 1960, and in passion to claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different. In the 1970s, such issues which had preoccupied black artists since the Second World War were finally brought to the forefront of mainstream cultural politics. Kenneth Coots Smith, who like his new vision counterparts, Bowen and Wilson, have been vocal about the problems of a globalizing industrialism, but largely remained silent on the role of colonialism, decolonization and race, and would in 1979 pay as a black artist and critics that had come before. Regarding the writing of art and cultural histories and the absence of artists within the canon, Coots Smith corroborated the quest for the universal as a deeply flawed power structure in his essay cultural colonialism, published in Rashid Arendt's black Phoenix. He writes, traditionally historians of culture in general, and art critics in particular have tended to base their analyses and their theoretic platforms upon the assumption that art somehow represents the embodiment, or the concretization of basic values and fundamental truths that exist somewhere outside of history, beyond social mutation, external to political and economic reality. Art as a universal notion residing beyond the valences of historicity, births, homogeneity. Universalizing art then is, and I quote again, tradition that is largely restricted to the European cultural experience, ideas which are not merely in a clear reciprocal relationship, but would seem to be mutually dependent upon the other. As Coots Smith reminds us the dynamics of culture do not only lead in this way towards the fluid identification of a collective identity within a society, they also tend towards the freezing of concepts, supportive to the interest of a dominant minority within that society. Although the Commonwealth Biennales of Abstract Art like the Commonwealth Arts Festival were intended to become regular annual and biannual events. That idea was short lived illustrating the failure of the Commonwealth is both both a cultural production, and a significant cultural force to engender any sustained interest from the British public. The Commonwealth painters like the young Commonwealth artists disbanded in 65 and 62 respectively, going to a lack of general interest and support. But conceptualism and performance based art ascended and pain and painterly abstraction declined in popularity, ultimately contributing to new visions closure in 66. One journalist offers another possible anecdote for this decline in his review of the Royal Academy's pressures of the Commonwealth and he writes, Why aren't West in cinemas showing Commonwealth films. Why are so few shops displaying Commonwealth goods in their window has no suburban dance hall thought of inviting the local West Indian band for the evening. Perhaps one manager's reply summed up the prevalent attitude. Nobody's interested in your British Commonwealth. It's a dead bore. Thank you. Thank you, Maryam for drawing attention to an overlooked Commonwealth artist group and the crucial role that they played in giving visibility to many artists from the formerly colonized countries. I'm going to start with two questions that I have for David. One is, am I audible. So the first question is why the stress on the form of exhibition format. How does that relate with relate with potential histories and solidarity. So, would you like to address that first. Yeah, it's a good question. And I could say a lot about this, but I'll keep it short. So I suppose the stress on the exhibition format as a way of approaching art and the activities of artists and the other actors that go into producing art beyond as a kind of collective, collective endeavor, collective experience in a particular place and time, which is part of the part of the idea that drives the work on exhibition histories and exhibition studies that I mentioned at the top of the talk. I suppose it's a focus on the moment of publicness. And I think what that has to do with the question of solidarity I suppose in particular is that it necessarily involves a kind of interpersonal or inter-agentual kind of exchange. So it's in contrast to a kind of historical approach that might focus on particular individuals and particular objects to maybe draw a crude line around it. So it's more focused on relationality and the collective. You know, in your presentation, David, you concluded on an affirmative note that the failures destroyed by Medalla, Arang and Bikuna may not have been totaled. I was wondering as to how does one retrospectively take stock of movements like art for democracy in terms of success or failure, because there's a difference between what the narratives from the artists tell you and your own reading of them. So how do you make sense of that. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's a complex one, but I suppose I perhaps put a little too much emphasis on the idea of failure because I don't view it as a particularly productive lens to view these things, but I think it's interesting to get a sense of the project, like what the stakes were for these for these individuals and how they're how their interpretation of failure of the project kind of what that tells about what they, you know, what success would have meant to them. But but certainly, I mean, the, you know, the affirmative note, I think, you know, one, one must try to be, I don't know, one must try to draw kind of the potentials out of these moments of kind of, you know, conflict and I suppose, yeah, I think so what I was trying to do in setting up the epigraphs at the start was really to try and express the distance, like the distances necessary to travel in doing this in doing this research so and the kind of you know the many phases that have sort of passed since this this moment of, you know, the third world project as Vijay Prashad describes it so this kind of, you know, how to how to relate to these, these histories with, you know, all that we know now or all that we need to learn. Thank you, David. I have a couple of questions for Mario. You know, Mario in your presentation you pointed out the contradiction between the realism of the dioramas, which we're kind of descriptive of climate, the scene race occupation, etc. at the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, and the paintings that were shown in the Art Gallery, which were partly abstract, subjective and experimental. So how do you explain this contrast across to contemporary institutional science. Right, so it's really this sort of conversation that I think really occurs. During this period really generally between the politics of abstraction representation, this sort of hold over from sort of inner war, you know, thinking of representation sort of realized sort of being related to fascism in thinking about in the wake of something like the Degenerate Art Exhibition. So you have this sort of kind of period, you know, this AIA, another sort of collective of sorts, another sort of artist group, having these sorts of exhibitions, artists against war and fascism in 35. And then in the 60s and 50s, you still have representation being talked about in this way by somebody like Dennis Bowen again who says why should you know people want to look at dust buns when they've been seeing it, or doing it all day. And then you even have this sort of conversation that continues later with the Caribbean artist movement in the 70s where, you know, we think about social responsibility being attached to representation, and rather abstraction being some units too personal of a visual language for people to understand. John Berger, for example, who, you know, very much about, you know, representation, reviewed the new vision center and actually said this about abstracting to personal how could it relate a visual message, whereas at the Commonwealth Institute, and the Old Imperial Institute when they were rethinking the displays and re-envisioning new displays for the new institute, they were bringing over a bunch of old Imperial Institute displays. But they are also the argument did come up whether or not they should allow abstraction in some form to be part of that display, and the resolute answer was no, they thought that people could not understand that you couldn't you couldn't have that sort of narrative related to you in that sort of visual language of abstraction. Yeah, yeah. And a related question just occurred to me at the moment, as we're speaking, because you know, the way in which one is looking at these abstract artists, they are so heavily framed by the status narrative. As a researcher, how do you rescue them from that space? From the status institutional narrative that because these artists, they really represent the country before they arrive, saying London. So they're all carrying the heavy burden of, you know, what are states involved as far as their nation is concerned and the country that they're coming to. So, this is my curiosity, how do you, when you're doing your research, is there a possibility of moving them outside of these heavy status narratives? Right. Maybe give it a thought and we can come back to it later because we have a couple of questions for you. Would you like to answer them now or later? Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, carry on, carry on please. Well, as for the sort of state connection, you know, it's, it has to do with the nature of, I think, archival, you know, the nature of the archive itself. But when I think about these artists like Shemza, who was a celebrated artist before he came to London, before his arrival, and many of these other artists at the local art circle as well. And, you know, he comes here and it's sort of hard to disassociate Shemza from the, from what I, from what I have just uncovered in the archive of the Institute, which is an institutional, you know, place. And the fact that the Institute was a place where there was hospitality, where the high commissioners of these Commonwealth countries would come and go to the art gallery and actually purchase these artworks to come to go back to their national collections. So I think in that way it's sort of hard to disassociate them in terms of the Commonwealth Institute in this particular moment at least during this period. I'm not sure I answered the question but I think, you know, time I'll, I'll be quiet a lot and Sarah. Thanks a lot, Mariam. There are a couple of questions which have come I would like to read them from Cece Lee, who asks, How do African and Asian art deal with the relationship between universalism and nationalism. So as to reflect national identity with the garrisons. I think it was performance art by, by an artist, which kind of appropriately addressed some of the issues that we are raising right now. So, let me just finish the question. How do African and Asian art deal with the relationship between universalism and nationalism. So as to reflect national identity in Western galleries. What do you think is the relationship between universalism and nationalism. I think that is the question. It's a broad question. Yes. In terms of something like the Commonwealth Institute, and these exhibitions like Commonwealth Art Today, this the sort of the inaugural exhibition of the Institute. It wasn't just abstraction that was shown as also representational works like by Sam Nitero with a Tangany Confestible scene for example, and I think it goes back to that question that you that we were kind of talking about before about about artists to the sort of representation and abstraction being the sort of way of kind of showing where you are your origins who you're from, and having that burden. When you come to a country when you come to the comp, you know when you come to London, having that burden by by institutions to tell them you know to sort of show your national identity in that way. So I think, in terms of this relationship between universal, personalism and nationalism. This is a question that comes up with the Caribbean artist movement in the 70s, for example, whether or not a national art, whether or not someone was able to understand it was abstraction, and the sort of reason that was no I mean, we should be able to paint when we want to paint and abstraction is sort of the way I mean this is somebody that like are we willing to says this. So I don't know if I fully answered your question, but that's something really to think about. Yeah. anonymous. Yes. Good. Mariam. Please speak to the ships connections and tensions between the commonwealth, the analysis discussed, and the intentions of contemporary beyond Alice, perhaps, but it's not a lot there documented 11 as examples. Sorry, I just froze their for a moment. Um, can you hear me. Yes, you can tell you. I'm not, I'm not really well versed on documented, or many of these being always but I do have to think that there's some there's some sort of connection there definitely between this rise of internationalism that's occurring. And this idea of having an annual or a biannual biannuale of commonwealth art that really doesn't, you know, falls flat in the 60s, you know, 65 was the last one there's only to be in always. And I think going to, you know, the sort of demise of abstraction necessarily in the 60s. And also, you know, Britain, joining the EC and 72 or 73 is sort of this idea of a commonwealth being sort of pushed forward as something significant for for Britain's, you know, status as a world power really gets diminished in this period. And I think, you know, with these with this being always I guess what I'm saying is I think that there is definitely a sort of connection there between this idea of internationalism and these other biannuale and the fact is hope with these two being always that they would that they would continue in some form or another patient. Are there any similarities to the commonwealth art exhibitions and use of abstraction, as the United States did with pop abstraction minimumism around the same time, be it political, social or global influences. And I think in the brackets, I'll be from your paper we see the decline in the commonwealth at the rate of failure. So any similarities to the commonwealth art exhibition and the use of abstraction. As it was used in the United States, did you get between the two sides. I'm not as well versed about the US but I do know and I think, you know, we've had, there's a sort of this notion that you know the CIA, for example, was really promoting abstraction as as a way of showing actually going back to thinking about this idea of like so the sort of hold over again from, you know, the dinner or exhibition, that there's this notion in the United States that abstraction is a democratic language and represents something like the Cold War represents, you know, McCarty, you know, the what McCarthy, McCarthy is almost writing, you know, to be against a sort of red scare. So that in that way I see that sort of similarity there. We can't hear you at the moment. Feels like your sound has gone. No, no, we've suddenly lost your sound. Can you hear me David. And now, I couldn't before. Oh, you again so I can't hear you can anyone else. It seems like we're having some sound issues on the on the line him I try again. Well, I, I had a question, I can, I hope people wave at me if you can, if you can hear me and then hopefully everyone across the zoomers fear can can hear to but I was interested as well in thinking kind of across David and Mariam's paper and in thinking about the spaces in which solidarities are constructed or potentially constructed as well and about the kind of architectural environments for exhibitions and projects and sort of gatherings and how how significant that was or perhaps it wasn't David I don't know that you could start to just again it's sort of kind of giving us some of that environmental flavor which we again through the archive images we started to get but whether you feel that that's particularly significant for the kind of the kind of gatherings the kind of communities that you're you're researching as well. I'm afraid I'm sorry everyone I feel like we've got some technical issue going on here that's affecting the sound across the webinar, which is a shame, but at least it's happened right at the end. I mean, can you, can you, if you, yeah, can't hear you so I think I'm in a way actually David, one of the, one of our attendees has suggested if you could type your answer. And we all turn our videos off and come back on that just might help. We'll try that, if not, we can draw things to a close but if we're just going to stop our videos and see if that does help. And then, if we come back on David do you want to just try. You know, it seems that we have lost the sound across the webinar but I'm not quite sure what the technical reason for that is but like I say it's reassuring that it's towards the end of the panel and I'm sorry that we had to curtail the question and answer session here a little bit, but we will be meeting tomorrow. Someone saying, one of the attendees saying that they can hear other people so it seems to be a little bit sporadic about who can actually hear the sound or not. We have got another session tomorrow so we hope that we will carry on conversations if anyone has any specific questions for David or for Mariam. They can send them to the Paul Mellon Center events email address, which is events at Paul Mellon Center, we'll put that on the, on the chat. Yeah, someone else is saying that they can hear it must be the panelists who are having the problem so David, maybe I will just hand over to you to say your answer and everyone else can let us know whether they can hear it might be worth just giving it one last go. You know, I was halfway through typing but it's a question of space is a really interesting because particularly the sort of absence of real and certainly with the Whitfield Street sort of second kind of invitation to send whoever whoever wants to propose things to use it. That was the space itself it's kind of interesting looking at some of the photography I've seen of different iterations of it so in the, in the Vietnam festivals case for example. Oh I'm coming and going, maybe. It's coming in and out for me David so. Mary and do you want to just give it a go and whilst it so we can give David chance to type his answers because I know what it's like being on these webinars it's quite hard to be looking at the screen and trying to type so. I don't know whether you want. All right, could you, could you repeat the question again. Sorry, it was asking you about the architecture of the space is actually how significant that was. But what's, I think, most significant about the Institute in the first place the Commonwealth Institute art gallery is the fact that it was at the time the only purpose built art gallery in London at least that's how they build it. Build it, or build it to the audiences and it was a place that people frequented that you know, I mean the Institute and the art gallery really gets left out of these canonical narratives. I think Lawrence all the way who are going to, to see shows you're seeing David Sylvester is going to see exhibitions there. And these, and these are also, you know, there are other artists like Victor Passmore who is in the Commonwealth Art Today exhibition Graham Sutherland Henry more I mean, this was a pretty exciting gallery and I think maybe one of the reasons that the exhibition was sort of connected so much to it was because of that wonderful space. As that being said, I have no idea what the inside of that looks like I know that now that Commonwealth Institute is now the design museum, not actually sure if the gallery is still there or if it's been completely stripped as well. But I think that it that you know that it was important I think to signify. You know, again, you have these really old fashioned dioramas, you know these like you go into like the, you know, the Natural History Museum and Kensington Road or whatever and you've got these the same sort of dioramas that you have at the Commonwealth Institute these old funny duddy dioramas and then you walk into this modernist space, and you see these abstract paintings. I think there is definitely something he said there for that architecture. And as for new vision itself. I have no idea what the place looked like I know that it was in a basement and or that part of it was in a basement and not until Kenneth Smith came along. Did they start showing sculpture regularly as well. So, yeah, I haven't seen really very many images of the inside of that particular space. But that's something to think about as well. I hope you heard me all. Thank you I did that was loud and clear and David thank you so much for typing your answer at speed I know that was quite difficult but I think I just really hear you about your your point about spaces together as well which seem rather distant in in these times and as we're finding out obviously zoom gives us this incredible way of connecting internationally but they can be frustrations and barriers and challenges with it anyway so. I don't know whether we can hear you still. Can you hear me. Yes. I think, I mean, this was a very, very rich panel, starting with, you know, the two presentations the keynotes. And I just wanted to, I mean, all the sessions were too rich to be summed up, you know, in, in a paragraph or so, but I'm going to just give it a try. I just wanted to raise this question how to construct specific concept of solidarity which involves a new methodology of seeing the world. And what is crucial to note is how the scene happens to the lens of decoloniality. And this is the question which our, you know, speakers had wonderfully addressed. The scene involves history memory that recognizes art and aesthetics as double edged. So if they can be used as tools vampire and enslavement. They also work as powerful tools for resistance and emancipation, and it is this ambivalence which I thought was most important to be present in Michael Dracobitz's work, which came out in the discussion. You know, on his works. But going by the presentations today by David and Mariam based on new archival research and oral histories, which were collected off, you know, from his organizations like artists for democracy and the young contemporary Commonwealth artists. They actually give us a kind of a somber and a realistic picture in spite of all the informal community and sociability around food for political solidarity. There were so many roadblocks, which, you know, one has to also take into account the discontent between the cultural workers who had little knowledge of politics, but they saw it as an opportunity to take a bit. On one hand, on the other hand, your political radicals were not really interested in art and poetry. And I think this gaps made it very, very, you know, challenging for, for the actual kind of organic political art to kind of really emerge. However, I would really like to conclude that despite all these odds which were faced by the artists in the public, they were in our ground for intersectionality across anti imperialist feminist and radical artistic concerns. And I think we can see some rays of hope, even within the claims of failures made by the artist and the critics of the time. And I think to conclude on a positive note is actually good politics. Thank you. Thank you very much, Carol, for some incredible chairing as well and weaving these threads of connection across the papers and also into the future. I think that was, yeah, a kind of resounding note to end on and echoed actually some of the things that Michael was saying as well about an Omar about what it means to do this kind of work and looking into the past, digging into archives to think about what is ahead, and what kinds of futures we want to make through our work and our research so thank you for that prompts and, and to all our speakers today for such rich papers. And to you the audience for joining us and staying with us we had a little bit of a technical hitch at the start and then a few things throughout but it's brilliant that so many people stayed on the on the line, and were part of the conversations. And, and hopefully you will join us as well tomorrow, and throughout the next few weeks for future London Asia art world panels. We've also got an informal zoom meeting after this webinar if you want to join us just to say hello we realize that webinars are quite formal, you know we can't have that conviviality that we would if we were meeting together in another place but the zoom meeting allows us to do have a bit more informal chat so you're very welcome. Shauna and Danny have put the link up in the chat so please do join us even if it's just for two seconds to say hello to to us and to some of our panelists. That would be lovely to see you there but yes thank you all. Thanks to Hamad and to Ming for all their core organization and of course to Shauna and Danny for all this amazing work that goes on behind the scenes to make a gathering such as this happens so thanks everyone for joining us today.