 Maybe we'll make a start now. We're just shy of 50. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Hamad Nasser. I'm a curator, writer and senior research fellow here at the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art. Now, whether you regularly attend PMC 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 third panel of the London Asia Art World's program. Thank you for joining us. The Paul Mellon Center is a research institute and an educational charity based in Bedford Square in central London and is part of Yale University. You can find out more about our programs on our website along with details about our research collections, publications, grants and fellowship schemes, learning activities and future events. Now, London Asia Art World is a five-week multipart program taking place across May and June. It reflects on the ways in which the growing field of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with and challenges histories of British art. This event marks five years of the Paul Mellon Center's London Asia project established in collaboration with Asia Art Archive and which is co-led by Sarah Victoria Turner 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 this by focusing on three research strands, exhibitions, institutions and art schools. 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 program has been co-organized as a collaboration between myself, Sarah Victoria Turner, the deputy director for research at the Paul Mellon Center and Professor Ming Tiampo who is professor in the Department of Art History and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Colton University in Ottawa, Canada. Now, before we introduce today's panel, let me walk you through the PMC's online housekeeping guidelines and tell you more about how this Zoom webinar will run. Now, I know most of us are more familiar with these housekeeping slides than they'd ever wished to be, but a couple of things to point out in particular. One is that we really encourage you to use the question and answer session as we're going along. And second, that you are able to access the close captioning button if you so need. Now, this online event is being run by the PMC's events manager, Shauna Blanchfield and events assistant, Danny Conway. We are so grateful and thankful for their tireless work in making all this happen. And they are on hand to answer any questions that you have throughout this afternoon. Let me hand over to my co-convener, Ming Tiampo. Thank you, Hamad. And welcome to all of you for joining us. Oh, can you hear me? Is there a problem? Oh, it appears that we've been Zoom bombed. Our title, London Asia Art Worlds. We hope is suggestive of the approach. This juxtaposition between London Asia of invites a kind of dissonance, a glitch perhaps by bringing a city into proximity with a continent. It is also a claim on London, a city that resists easy nationalist framings and Asia regions so vast and diverse that it complicates any homogenizing categorization. We embrace this ambiguity, the uneasiness of scale and resistance to sharp definition. The project does not propose a comparative framework. Instead, it encourages new perspectives on the entanglements, historic and contemporary, real and imaginative of art worlds. 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. The program will unfold across five weeks focusing on the following propositions. Over the last two sessions, we have been exploring friendship and politics through the lenses of sociality and affect and potential histories and solidarities. Today, we will be exploring the theme of circulation and encounter. Next week, we will be looking at pedagogy and learning, bureaucracy and agency, followed by 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 offer different visual and virtual spaces in which to test the 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. Over to you, Sarah. Thanks, Ming. And I love that your dog is eager to join in with the London Asia Art Worlds community. That's brilliant. So why is all this important? Why are we doing this? Why are we arranging this conference as murmuration? Well, London Asia Art Worlds proposes new ways, we hope, of imagining art history through and beyond national and regional boundaries. 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 can be laid down. Collaborative methodologies can be developed and theoretical concepts are articulated and the seeds of community are planted and grown. And it is really brilliant to know that so many people are out there watching and listening to this session and others across the program. And we really want you to engage through the Q&A and the chat box as Hamad suggested in his opening. So in this way, London Asia Art Worlds engenders art histories that are both entangled and multi-perspectival, proposing new models for writing art history through collaborative practice. Both British art history and Asian art histories are disrupted, their complexities revealed through layered connections via infrastructures such as exhibitions, art schools and institutions, as well as the worlds they carry, friendships and other socialities, aesthetics, politics and philosophy. Offering relational stories that negotiate difficult colonial and entangled pasts, shared presence and possible collaborative futures, the papers, provocations and conversations that are a part of London Asia Art Worlds are an urgent reminder that the contours of nationhood are complex and of the importance of making worlds rather than of closing them. And of course it's not lost on us that this series of events has been co-organised, hosted and funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. And the pressures, challenges and questions such research puts on the framing of art practice and histories through nation. Exploring the pressure points and possibilities of the nation are at the centre of the work that our chair for this session has crafted across his numerous projects. And it gives me enormous pleasure to formally introduce Hamad Nasser who has co-led the London Asia Research Project with me since 2016 at the Paul Mellon Centre in a spirit of critical curiosity, generosity and friendship as well as a boundary bursting enthusiasm. The impact of Hamad's inquiry into the entangled histories of Britain has created an indelible legacy for the Paul Mellon Centre's research culture as well as that of the many other organisations and individuals with whom he collaborates. Hamad is also the co-curator with Irene Aristobal of the British Art Show 9 which will take place in 2021 across 2022 and 2023. And it's the biggest touring exhibition of contemporary art in the UK, organised every five years by Hayward Gallery Touring. He's also the principal research fellow at UAL's Decolonising Arts Institute. Earlier he was the inaugural Executive Director for the Stuart Hall Foundation in London between 2018 and 2019. Head of research and programmes at Asia Art Archive Hong Kong between 2012 and 2016. And he co-founded with Anita Doward, Green Cardman in London between 2004 and 2012. Hamad's also curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions internationally and they include Lines of Control, Partition as Productive Space, Excessive Enthusiasm, Harvick Tran and the Archive and Practice and also Rock, Paper, Scissors, Positions in Play, which was the UAE's national pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. And he recently co-curated with Kate Jessen the exhibition Speech Acts, Reflection, Imagination, Repetition, which was at Manchester Art Gallery between 2018 to 2019. Always on the move, even virtually during the pandemic and ever making meetings and encounters happen, Hamad, it feels very fitting to hand over to you now to chair this session today. Well, thank you, Sarah, for that most generous and warm of introductions. And I think hopefully it also, it sort of embodies the spirit with which both London Asia and the London Asia art worlds has been developed as an exercise in the very thing that we are researching. Friendship as method, solidarities, encounters, messy ways of world-making and sharing. Now, this third session of London Asia art worlds draws attention to the circulation of bodies, objects, forms, institutions, capital, ideas, knowledges and systems. It considers the encounters between Britain and Asia and how they have informed art, culture and society in ways that remain active today. Now, the artistic research, archival and curatorial practices of our speakers for this panel, Hugh Locke, Tim Baringer, Michelle Wong and Sophia Balagambala all contribute to new ways of thinking about the processes through which art meets its publics and the different forms of knowledge and discourse that such encounters produce. Now, this afternoon is structured into sessions, a keynote conversation for 45 minutes followed by a question answers. And then after a 15-minute break, a second session that will have two presentations of 20 minutes each followed by 30 minutes for discussion. Our keynote today takes the form of a conversation between two people, the artist Hugh Locke and the art historian Tim Baringer who have sustained an engagement with the empire-shaped whole in the construction of British identity over many years. Tim will be giving a proper introduction to Hugh later on. So before passing on to him, let me briefly introduce Tim Baringer to you. He is the Paul Mellon Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at Yale. His research focuses on questions of class, race and empire in British art, the art of the British empire and of the United States. His work as a scholar, curator and teacher has been an inspiration to many. And you can gauge the range of his scholarship from the two books that he is finishing right now, Broken Pastoral, Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock. And the second book is called Global Landscape, British Art in the Age of Empire based on the Paul Mellon lectures given in London in 2019. With that, let me hand it over to Tim and Hugh. Thank you. Great, well, thank you so much, Hamad. That was a very kind introduction and it's really a privilege to be a part of this conversation. I'm going to introduce Hugh in just a moment and it's a thrill that I have the opportunity to do that and it's great to be able to share some of Hugh's work with a wide audience. But I want to open with a land acknowledgement. I'm speaking to you from Connecticut. This is a land acknowledgement authored by students communally in our department at Yale. We explicitly name the entangled catastrophes of settler colonialism and racial slavery in relation to the material foundations and ongoing functions of this institution, Yale University, of which the Paul Mellon Center in London is a part. Named after a slave owner, the university's campus is built on the land of Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Shatikoke, Golden Hill Porgusset, Niantic, the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples. And we acknowledge that Yale University was built and has benefited from, built with and has benefited from the labor of enslaved black men and women. These words are relevant, especially in relation to the themes of London Asia art worlds. They remind us of the global globalized nature of the systems which have for centuries linked London, Asia and the Americas. Elihu Yale himself, East India company trader and slaveholder was born in New England, spent his career in Madras in South India, profiting massively and returned to live as the Nabob of Queen Square in London in 1710. Central to capitalism, the system that linked London, Asia and the Americas and still does today was slavery and settler colonialism whose legacies we are reckoning with at this moment. And of course the production display and reception of art took place and takes place within those larger histories. Modern art itself is a product of racial capitalism. I really want to thank the organizers of this month long festival of discussions at London Asia art worlds and also the larger five year project, London Asia, Hamad, Ming and Sarah, they model collegiality and friendship as well as intellectual rigor and creativity. And also I want to thank the amazing team of people who've worked with them through that time for drawing sustained attention to these crucial histories and contemporary relationships. So the themes of today's session are encounter and circulation. Now a conference of this kind is always made up of a series of encounters and there have been many pleasurable digital ones. It would have been nice to be in Bedford Square gathering physically, of course, but there is a danger of reenacting the logic of center and periphery by summoning delegates to the Imperial Hub or former Imperial Hub and creating a kind of post-colonial der bar. So Zoom does really represent the world we do live in, a world of instantaneous digital encounter, the moment one in which commodities and capital can move through space more easily within it than people. And it's appropriate that a conference focusing on the fragmented, the distinct but profoundly linked geographies, London, Asia should have been forcibly de-centered into these disembodied but productive murmurings. Historical cultural encounters between London and Asia have traditionally taken as often as not the form of violent entanglements, occupations, invasions, and it's an unresolved paradox that many canonical objects of beauty have their origin in violence rather than in peaceful encounter. So much for encounter. What about circulation? Global circulation has, of course, been subject to visual representation since the Renaissance. Trans-oceanic lines on the map once marked trade routes determined by winds and gulf stream. Later, the laying of telegraphic cables linked the continents in ways that prefigured our current moment of instantaneous transmission of information and capital. As usual, the first and most perceptive critic of the instantaneous global circulation of information was John Ruskin. And here he is in Forse Claviguera, 1871, the year that the first telegraphic message was sent from Bombay to London. This is Ruskin on London, Asia, art, worlds. Quote, you knotted a copper wire all the way to Bombay and flashed a message along it and back. But what was the message and what was the answer? Is India the better for what you said to her? Are you the better for what she replied? If not, you have wasted an all round the world's length of copper wire. If you had had, per chance, two words of common sense to say, though you'd taken wearisome time and in trouble to send them, if you'd written them slowly in gold and sealed them with a hundred seals and sent a squadron of ships of the line to carry the scroll. And the squadron had fought its way around the Cape of Good Hope through a year of storms with the loss of all of its ships but one. Two words of common sense would have been worth the carriage and more. That's Ruskin on London, Asia, art, worlds. Well, it's my great pleasure now to welcome and to, I hope, engage in conversation with Hugh Locke, one of the leading British artists, one of the leading artists anywhere in the world, whose work involves gold and ships just as Ruskin mentioned, small and large and much good sense. Hugh has spent most of his adult life in London. He trained with the BA in fine art and Falmouth, 1988 and an MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1994. In 2000, he won both the Paul Hamlin Award and an East International Award. And his work has been exhibited so widely that I'll just mention the two Venice Biennales 2011, 2013 and of course is represented in exhibitions, sorry, in permanent collections across the world. And you've been looking on the screen at a work I particularly wanted to start with. I've had the pleasure for the last 15 years or so of spending time at with and teaching with this magnificent object, the prize. It was acquired for the Yale Center for British Art by the curator, Gillian Forrester, who I think joins us today. And that was a fantastic acquisition as part of the Rivington Place portfolio. And it's technically a print, it's a digital print, although it could also be considered to be a sculpture with applied plastic beads and flowers. And this object is three dimensional. You can see the six centimeters of height. It rises up off the card background. You can just make out in the foreground the words get well soon. This comes from Golden Greetings cards, one of the many mass produced sources from which Hugh has made his works over the years. But perhaps the illness we need to get well from is precisely that which I've alluded to in my introduction. The illness of Midas, the illness of global capitalism. Everything has turned to gold yet nothing has value. The glittering gold stars that stand up in a halo above the prize could quickly turn to barbed wire or a crown of thorns. And the image conjures up the sense of a sports trophy bestowed on the winner of some colonial competition but of course it could also turn into a poisoned chalice. Hugh's journeys in life and the imaginative space traversed within his works span oceans and continents. He is both an ironist and a poet of the postcolonial, a sculptor and a conceptual artist whose constructed works in three dimensions offer on first encounter like the prize, a glittering burlesque of the hollow languages of power and authority in a post-imperial world. But closer looking reveals that beneath the fantasy, the pageantry, the baroque visual excess of Hugh's work lies a consistent and haunting lament for the tragic consequences of racial capitalism and a contestation of the ideological truisms and empty icons of our moment. Hugh was born in Scotland in 1959. His father was the distinguished Guyanian sculptor and ceramicist Donald Locke who trained in England where he met Hugh's mother, the artist Leila Locke. The family moved back to Guiana in 1966 just at the moment when Macmillan's wind of change was blowing through the British Empire. Guiana became independent from Britain that very year. It had been a Dutch colony and then a British one and it's a mainland nation of the South American continent which belongs to the Caribbean. It has a complex population including people of South Asian and African origin, indigenous people, Chinese and Portuguese communities. That is the backdrop, the geographical backdrop. I'd like to welcome you, Hugh, now. I've talked too much. We want to hear from you, but I'd really like to ask you to just to speak to us, just move on the slide, to speak to us about those years in Guiana and you made a very interesting comment at one point. You said, as a boy, you wanted to be a historian and I wondered if you are a historian and what the history of Guiana speaks to, how that speaks to the work that you're doing today. So, Hugh. Yeah, well, I wanted to be a historian and who knows why? Maybe I got sucked in by all these good old colonial ladybird books, you know, to me, Judy Beezer and Alfred the Great, Burning the Cakes and all that. I should say that I went to, my primary school was a school run by nuns. And so I'm an oddity in that. Me and anybody my age and maybe a bit younger, we had the tail end of a colonial education. So I didn't learn anything about Caribbean history until I was 12 years old. Everything before that was Henry the Fifth and Alfred the Great and Hector and Achilles and all that kind of stuff, you know what I mean? Which is all fine, don't get me wrong, you know, but it's a bit weird. These images here are images done, I did in 92 when I was at the Royal College of Art and I did a one-way exchange trip back to Guiana and this is me trying to find out what we are as Guyanese, what is our culture? And the image on the left-hand side is octagonal temple, it's a Hindu temple. These things are misnamed by the way. Old Hindu temple, Golden Grove is wrong. So this is a zoom bomb thing, which I messed up myself. I can't blame it on anybody. The mosque should be on the right. Mosque on the right. On the left. So please excuse me for that. But yeah, but what you're looking at is a building and I was talking to a friend who's studied Guyanese within architecture. She's saying, well, the way this would have worked is that an Indian Pandit would have gone to a black estate carpenter and said, look, this is the design I want you to make. Can you make this for me? And for me, this is an example of a colonial society or a post-colonial society, if you want to call it that, where it's quite a mixed up thing. And basically it's me trying to get in touch with something I'd left behind long ago. And with a country I'd seen come into being as an independent country. I arrived in Guyana as a small boy. And I saw the flag being made. My mother was making t-shirts with the Guyana flag printed on it. It was a brand new thing. I went to this technical institute and I saw the design for the Guyana banknote, the dollar banknote. So I saw a country being born. And that was a really powerful thing. And that had a real impact to me, is how things are created, basically. And tell me a bit more about the South Asian presence since we're thinking about London Asia art with the South Asian presence in Guyana. So how that affected you? There's an idea in London particularly about what the Caribbean is. And of course, it's not an accurate idea, in my opinion. Because Guyana is part of the Caribbean. But two-thirds of the population are Indo-Gyanese, Indo-Caribbean. Or when I was growing up East Indian, that's not necessarily used these days. But the original term was still used when I was a kid. And so we celebrated a holly, what we call it Pagwa, and Diwali. These were national celebrations. And that's something which doesn't get talked about enough, I feel. I mean, at the risk of offending him, please excuse me, Frank. But I'm sorry. Frank Bowling's mother ran a shop selling sari material. Now, these things are interesting things to know. It means that the society is more complex than one would think. And the Amerindian presence was a strong thing, somewhat psychologically real. And it was a strong thing, psychologically as well. That's all fascinating. Thank you. So then you moved to back to where you were born in Britain. You moved back and worked in London for many years. Is there a difference between the kind of hybridity of the multicultural Guyana? And the kind of multicultural world that London has become in the last 20 years? How do you feel differently, as it were, about a post-imperial metropolis and in contrast to a country which emerged from colonial status? Guyana, everybody is Guyanes. But then obviously the breakdowns of your background, whether you're from a Portuguese background or Guyanese, Chinese or Indo-Guyanese, it's sort of the differences there. Here, I feel, and London has obviously had a huge impact on me. London here, I feel, it's a bit different. I feel that certain parts of London, that's this area or that's this area. And it doesn't mean that it's separated. I'm not saying that at all, not remotely. But there are distinct changes in culture. And Guyana, it's a Guyanese mix, if you see what I mean, of various different shades. Whereas London, it's a real international thing. London is extraordinary from that point of view. Absolutely. One of the features, of course, of London, which we've all been focusing on recently, is statues. I mean, it's interesting to see a quote from you that imperial statues form an invisible presence in British cities. That's from about 15 years ago. But of course, they're not invisible now. And I think one of the reasons is that you drew attention to them. And we're looking here, of course, at the Colston statue, which has become absolutely celebrated as a sort of case study in a flashpoint, really, of tensions around the presence of colonial and statues relating to slavery. Can you talk to us about this intervention that you made in Bristol in 2006? What's important to understand, this is not an intervention. This is a series which I call impossible proposal. So it's a proposal. So it's a six foot by four foot sea type photograph mounted on aluminium and wood, which I have literally screwed objects onto. Cheap trinkets which look like gold, but they're not gold. In other words, replicating the cheap trinkets that Colston and his guys would have been selling to exchange for slaves, basically. And also the carry shells, because carry shells were what we use in the slave trade. So what it is, it's a physical object. And the screws are acting like fetish nails. You get in certain parts of certain traditional sculptures from the Democratic Republic of Congo. So it's operating in several different ways. And then obviously a heraldic lion, a British lion poking up there, and then they get soon well. So instead of get well soon, it's get soon well. Because obviously, this is a very sick human being. Yeah, carry on, Hugh. These are all shown in a deconsecrated church, which I think as you can see in the background there. So the actual work was shown in a church behind where the thing is. And this statue at the time, well, what to say? I mean, continue, Tim, continue. Well, no, I mean, I wanted to ask you what you thought when suddenly this statue did become the focus of worldwide attention and was being rolled along the ground and dunked in the harbor. Was that the fulfillment of the project that you announced here? Or did you have a different view of it? My view of it was complete and utter shock. I just could not believe what I was seeing. Because what was interesting as well was that all of a sudden, he comes down and he's being rolled along the road. I'm like, wow, he's a hollow man, literally. And a bit of his tailcoat had broken off. And I started getting obsessed with how this is quite well made, actually, all sorts of odd things. But I was truly shocked because I never thought this could happen. I mean, when I was at college, back in the 80s, I remember driving through with a friend of mine was reminding me that while driving through Bristol, I just pointed it out and said, that's got to go. Obviously, somebody listened to me somewhere in the ether. And he said, yeah, no, I was shocked. And then when he was thrown, it wasn't the fact that he pulled down, but then thrown into the river. That was the moment for me. But what upset me was the fact that within a couple of days, he'd been pulled back up. And I was like, leave him down there for a little bit more. Let him sort of get a bit of what he dished out. What he deserved, absolutely, yes. I mean, while we're on the subject of monuments, I know that you were involved in a project for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. And I wonder what you feel the role of the monument is at this moment. I mean, should we be making monuments? Do you want to make monuments? Yes, I mean, I think monuments will always be a thing. But it's how you make them. They don't have to be as a statue to somebody. I mean, obviously, sometimes that's required to keep a general public happy to a certain extent. And there are a number of good contemporary monuments. But it doesn't have to be a figure on a plinth, you know what I mean? Not at all. It can be something much more abstract, something much more unexpected if you see what I mean. Well, I certainly would love to see your construction of an unexpected monument. So I hope that becomes a reality. I wanted to move now to the iconography of power because so much of your work is engaging with questions of how images and objects enshrine forms of power. And then you examine and critique and pull those two pieces in fascinating ways. And I know you'd mentioned that this painting on the left had had a real impact on you, this extraordinary work by Marcus Kroijatz, the ditchley portrait. I mean, how do you engage with it? After all, she has her feet on the globe. This is the sort of founding image of the British Empire in many ways. So how does one respond to this standing where you're standing in London now? For me, what I find fascinating about it, well, technically speaking, I find it fascinating because it's both flat to a certain extent and three-dimensional. So it's this strange halfway house. It's almost like a relief. So that's from an aesthetic point of view. But what I find interesting is that it's just standing. I am a represent. I am England. England is me, to me in Britain. And the dress is like, and this is a symbol of our power. In other words, so I believe that sometimes pearls were taken out of old dresses and re-sewn into new dresses. I am a walking embodiment of this. It's almost like a cult of personality before a name had been given to it like that. Right. Absolutely. So let's look at the work on the right because it's one of a long series of works in which you've engaged with royal heads, with the queen's head, with the profile portrait. Tell us a bit more about why it's called Coignor, which of course conjures up a whole long history and give us a sort of background to this work. I have to say I saw it just a couple of days ago in the Brooklyn Museum where, in fact, the lights were out and it was catching a side light from another gallery. And it was one of the most spectacular visual experiences I've had since the beginning of the pandemic for sure, for many years because this object is both ravishing and really speaks of violence when you see the toy swords sticking out of it or bayonets or whatever they are. And it sort of gives you this double feeling of relish and then horror. That's just my physical reaction to it walking into a darkened gallery. So I don't know if that's what you had in mind, but tell us more about Coignor. The idea is to make something which is attractive at a distance and then you draw in and all of a sudden it gets darker and darker as to what it is, really. And it's an image of Queen Elizabeth II and I started doing royal family images back in the early 2000s. And then slowly but surely I honed in on her as a symbol of... It's almost like an image of somebody who's an image of a country. And it's about colonial history and obviously things like that. And the title, Coignor, fascinates... The whole Coignor thing fascinates me. It's a very long, complex story which... I'm amazed nobody's made a massive epic documentary or film about just about the Coignor diamond. That would make a great film. Anyway, but the fact that it comes... I saw an exhibition some years ago at the Victorian Albert Museum and there was an armlet in there and it was the armlet which was owned by Ranjit Singh in which the Coignor diamond sat. And for me, the thing about the Coignor diamond is obviously... In fact, it was handed over as a spoil of war and it was given by Jaleep Singh. I believe it was Jaleep Singh. As in given, in inverted commas given. I'll make you an offer you can't refuse. And he was a child. Yeah, but it was the fact that it was not suitable for Victorian tastes that they had to be recut. And it shows two completely different sensibilities. It could not have been appreciated for what it was because it was an object which carried a whole... Years and years and years, hundreds of years of history, of conquest of different rises and falls. And then it's changed. And nobody could appreciate that because it was shown at a great exhibition and people thought that's this diamond. It's not shining, it's not blingy enough. And there's something about the two different sensibilities which I found really quite fascinating. Apart from all the conquests and all that. Tell us a bit more about the actual facture of this amazing sculpture and the materials that you used to create it and what the significance is of using not exactly found objects, but objects that you can purchase. They're mass produced. Yeah, so mass produced toys, mass produced swords, plastic swords. Basically mass produced armor. And it just seemed instinctively to be the appropriate thing. And also plastic swords and plastic knives. But so they can't cut you, but symbolically in a sense in your brain, you know these things can cut you. But also there's a kind of overgrown with vegetation and this is some sort of fetish, if you see what I mean, some sort of devide fetish. But a lot of this is, to be honest, was instinctive. This is the right thing to do. This is the right chains. That's what we need, we need chains. And it comes out of years of looking into post-colonial ideas and stuff like that. And too many years spent wandering around museums at the Victorian Albert Museum and the British Museum and Tate and looking at all the prehist 19th century and 18th century stuff. Absolutely. I mean, is it significant for you to replace the precious metals that were a part of a kind of colonial economy of extraction with actually plastic things that are themselves made in Asia, perhaps a different part of Asia. For me that's interesting, but also what's interesting is the fact that these things are plastic pretending to be something much more than it really is. And the fact is that you may be poor or you may not have a lot of money, but you can buy this thing and that will, just in your mind, give you the feeling that, well, this is designed for a king or a queen. There's something strange about that. You too can buy this thing for a small amount of money. That's a fascinating result of the kind of global exchanges that we've been thinking of, I think. Let's move to another icon of at least sort of celebrity, not exactly power, but eminence of a certain sort. And this smile, here you've used very different media. Could you speak to us on materials? Could you speak to us a bit more about why you made the queen mom out of cardboard and marker pens and what the surface implies? Well, the surface comes out of a fascination with what, in that early image of that guy in his mask, the large, the fret work in it is an influence, but the fret work comes from concrete breeze blocks, which are in a sense, also trying to imitate Rajput architecture, the fret work you get in Rajput architecture or mogul architecture, for that matter. So, and I've been working with cardboard for many years and it seemed, I instinctively find myself drawn to it. It's useful and it's disposable and that's really interesting. When I started working on this particular image, it was quite a weird feeling taking a Stanley knife, craft knife and cutting into the face of the queen mother. But once you get going, you get going to me. And at the end, this is what I ended up with. What I found fascinating about her is that what most people may or may not know is that one of her official titles came out when she died and she was the last Empress of India. And I just think that's really strangely fascinating. Yes, Queen Empress, whose body here is made up of fragments of imperial detritus or loot. I think it's an incredibly powerful image and the fact that the smile is still there despite all that violence. I find that very, very powerful. You've been fascinated for so long by Heraldry. You mentioned the Gyanian coat of arms emerging from the lion and unicorn of the British Empire. And I wanted to ask you a little bit more about why Heraldry, which seems to be a kind of a really passe form of iconography, a really sort of lost and forgotten form of semiotics, if you like. But of course, it's still there on coins and when you go into a law court, you see it and all the rest of it. Tell us about this work and again the interaction, I think between medium and message, as it were, the way in which the use of particular form of stuff actually is constructive of the meaning of the finished work. Well, it's just from scouring museum collections and putting it together, putting together. Oh, I should say what the piece is made of. The piece is made of cord. So the dark lines are cord. The lines dripping down are beads. And so what it's forming is a broken tapestry. Right. And it's a lot of pre-Columbian imagery. There's an image which is taken from a Buddhist mask. It's the Nassau Buddhist mask, it's a Tibetan mask. Right. And the loss of energy from what you might call it, from pre-Columbian Peruvian textiles. And Hugh, what about this face enshrined at the center here? I don't know if you can see my... Yeah. Yeah, tell us more. That's by Jean-Baptiste Carpeau. And there are a number of those in existence. I mean, there's one in the, I think there's one in the Brooklyn Museum. And there's one in the Indianapolis Museum. And it's a woman who's basically becomes a personification of the continent of Africa. It sort of is like an abolitionist kind of statement, but it was quite an important statue in its day. And it still is quite an important thing, I think. So it's a bronze, it's a bronze bust. And the words on this say, why born a slave, which are on the base. And you can see it as an equivalent of am I not a man and a brother kind of thing, the abolitionist thing. It's quite a powerful piece actually, because it's quite dynamic and very, very striking. But at the same time, there's something about it which you find disturbing, maybe slightly over sexualized. I mean, I'm not sure what I really think about it. I find it completely fascinating image, hence it's in this particular piece. But the dominant imagery is all pre-Columbian, because again, coming back to Guyana, that's what I grew up with. I would, as a kid growing up in Guyana, we would end, I would envy, think, well, why didn't we have pyramids here? Why haven't we got a, why have we not got this massive civilization, not realizing that it was actually there. It had just been, it just disappeared. And it's a different type of civilization and more of an Amazonian type of civilization from an, anyway. Well, so in short, you did become a historian here. I think the answer is you fulfilled your childhood ambition because this, it seems to me, Vita Veritas Victoria is a work of history. It's an analysis of many histories put together but I find very exciting the way that it appropriates the language of European, you know, social hierarchy and the heraldry and the sort of heredity of genetics which is built into a kind of medieval European worldview and then completely reverses that project and uses this kind of imagery to offer a different view of the world. Just tell us about the title because... Yes, Life, Truth, Victory. For those of you who are sharp, you notice me looking at it because I was like, this is so burnt in my brain that I forgot what the title meant. But of course, no, the title meant whatever man, you know? But Life, Truth, Victory. And it just seemed, I was at a time when it needed a heraldic title, you know what I mean? And that seemed to be the right thing, you know what I mean? And it's very, okay, every country, it seems to me, needs to have a coat of arms, a heraldic coat of arms but it's all based on a European system. All comes out of this kind of system. So I'm sort of trying to rework that type of thing, you know what I mean? Making it sort of more for me personally, you know what I mean? I mean, I think this, one thing that's fascinating about this is that although it is, I suppose a sculpture because it's a three-dimensional object, it really looks like a drawing. It looks like a... Yes, exactly, exactly. Personal, like an old master drawing that's kind of very powerfully from you. And I wanted to move on and think about this, one of my favorite of all your objects. And yet this is a, it's the final work is a photograph, C-type photograph, but tell us about the process and also tiger, tiger, we've got obviously an actual, is it a toy tiger there? And we've got a reference to William Blake, but it seems to me this takes us right back to London, Asia, circa 1790 and to the contest between the British East India Company and Tipu Sultan. So tell us about how all that is kind of... So I find fascination with Tipu Sultan from the point of view of what shows up in museums over here and it's like, for example, I did a piece of work years ago and I referenced a very innocuous object which is part of the Victorian Albert Museum collection and it's big Tipu Sultan's telescope, right? Every looking thing. But the thing is to get that, you have to kill him, you know what I mean? And so basically, and that's what this stuff is about. I went to Windsor Castle once and I do recommend people going, Windsor Castle is quite fascinating. And in the museum, side museum there, there are all these fragments which are ripped off from Tipu Sultan's throne. Basically it's booty, you know what I mean? It's loot, you know? And so this is me watching this television series called Shark with Sean Bean, which I have to say, I really like that series, you know? And it's like, you know what? I wanna be that, I want a costume like that, I wanna be shark. But the thing is, I can't be that because this is not my background. So I come from Guyana, I've got an interest in a whole bunch of different things. This is what I'm gonna make. So it's a photograph of me in costume with all these cheap plastic mangos hanging off of me, these baby's heads hanging off and the holding of staff, which is just almost nothing. It's somebody who's trying to be something, but it's power and powerlessness basically, you know? So it's got the power of the red coat of the English soldier or the East India Company soldier who was, of course, being killed by Tipu's tiger in the famous musical box of the DNA. But you also, at one point, said that there was a kind of shamanic power or you also use the word Obeyah to... Yeah, exactly. This is coming from Guyana, so it's a kind of Obeyah kind of thing. So it's almost like, okay, people were, back in the day, right? People would say to me, where do you come from? And then what festival have you made this work for? And have you been to Haiti? You know what? I love this piece you made here. This is years ago. And boy, you know, it reminds me of a temple in Nepal and straight away, I know that they don't get where I'm coming from at all. I was deep into the... So I started off making work which had export signs written all over it. And then eventually I thought, you know what? I saw it. I'm gonna make fake exotica. I'm gonna embody the exotic myself. So these images here are also a response to country house paintings, these full length paintings of lords and ladies and stuff which you get in national trust country houses. And so the image is quite big. So it's almost presented, almost life-size to embody that type of thing. So it's the kind of guy who is attractive and scary at the same time, you know? It's a fantastic repost to the Reynolds six footer grand man of portrait. That's absolutely... Exactly that. That's where this is coming from. I want to move on because we've very little time left. I may take a couple of minutes from the question time just to finish our conversation. Because I did want to press you a little bit on this question of money and capital which was the theme of my opening remarks and the idea of sort of racial capitalism and the fact that it's the money system in the end that was underpinning the system of empire rather than a sort of political ideology. It was ultimately about cash. And I'm really fascinated that after our great financial convulsion of 2008 which sort of felt like late capitalism was really coming to a moment of crisis. You suddenly turned to this new medium which was actually taking historical objects and changing them. So could you just speak to these fascinating, the series called Share for us? Okay, so just because we're running out of time I'll speak quite, try not to speak too quickly but in 2008, September 2008 I'm doing an exhibition in New York and I left another exhibition in London telling the assistants who are helping me I hope things don't collapse before I managed to find a place for this work. I get to New York and within a couple of days I woke up in the morning and Lehman brothers have gone and that's the beginning of the financial crash. I come back to London, the art world is gone. History, what do you do? Had a conversation with somebody and what are you gonna do here? And I had this inkling of an idea and I thought, you know what? I'm gonna invest in dead companies. And so I started buying up share certificates and working on them. And that's what this series share came about. So the Steel Corporation of Bengal that's an image of Jamset Sheet Tata the founder of Tata Steel. And the Steel Corporation of Bengal was set up to try and beat him as far as my research goes. They were set up to try and, let's get rid of this guy, you know what I mean? So it's set up by the Raj to try and get rid of him. And obviously that didn't pan out and now Tata has gone on to be whatever, Tata now know the controversial thing and all that. But the images around his head, that's Jaguar's, that's Jaguar cars. Because Tata then went on to buy Jaguar cars. And it's about cycles of history, you know? How things pan out. And on the right hand side is Chinese Imperial Government Gold Bonds, 1898. And the fact that it's superimposing a map of South America with cargo, with container ships. It's about how things have turned around. This is China drawing on HSBC Bank, the Imperial Chinese Government, trying to sort of survive, you know what I mean? And if you told an official from the Chinese Imperial Palace then in a hundred years time, things will be very different, you know? It's basically, that's what this is about, about cycles of history. But it's a fantastic embodiment of the themes of encounter and circulation for today's conversation. We're just gonna take a couple more minutes because I wanted to end with this complex installation which you can't really get a great sense of from the photographs because it's a series of 34 model boats. But again, you know, thinking about circulation and encounter, the boat, the ship has been such a powerful emblem for you. And I think you once wrote, you know, Guiana means land of many waters. So you're constantly aware of boats. And I wondered if you could speak to your return to, your constant return to the image of the ship, different periods of history back to the Tudor, Tudor galleons right up to modern container ships and just speak to that emblem within your whole sort of artistic outlook. Well, it's a constant recurring theme, as you said, and it's sort of, it's just what I grew up with, you know what I mean? I grew up with this stuff and I can't get away from it, it's part of me. We, going any long distance in Guiana, you'd often have to come to a river and you'd have to take a ferry or a small boat. So it comes out of that personal experience. But what it comes out of as well is that the knowledge of the whole, the country is built on the idea of trade, you know, coming out of the plantation system, slave trade, then followed by the indentureship nightmare. And so at my school badge, my school crest was an 18th century ship. Before Guiana, speaking, going back to, quickly back to Herildry, before that Guiana's coat of arms, all the heraldic images for British Guiana were of ships, you know? It was about ships and trade, you know what I mean? We're coming, you exist for us for this particular reason. Hopping on the different things, it also references refugees and cruise ships and the fact that all across this world on the sea, there are people in different states of survival, different states of pleasure, but there's something unifying about the sea, you know what I mean? And Wine Dark Sea seemed an appropriate title because of the crisis which was going on in the, which still is going on in the Mediterranean basically. Absolutely, so just in closing, I guess if the image of ships and shipping and sort of trans-oceanic trade and travel carries with it the horror of the middle passage and so much suffering. Is there a kind of redemptive possibility in water and ships as well? I mean, your life has taken you across, I think you actually did cross the Atlantic Ocean on the water, right? You've done that. Is there something redeeming about it or is it ultimately a... Some people, it's hell. I mean, if you fill up in the hold of a ship coming from Libya, you're leaving one hell, going into another hell, you know? So you can't see that. But then again, the ships, model ships operate in a strange way. There's something comforting. Ships are a protector of life, but then they can be a container of potential death. So it's quite complicated. For one person, a ship is a nightmare they'll never want to revisit. I mean, I'm imagining if you come across from Libya, you don't wanna get into a ship ever again, you know what I mean? Right. But then for some people ships are, because ships are a symbol of the passage from the journey of life into death, they're ships a symbol of a container of a soul, you know? It's... Absolutely. Well, Hugh, I think that you couldn't have come up with a more powerful emblem of encounter and circulation than that multi-layered account of the sea understood through your fascinating, floating installation of the wine doxy. So thank you so much for this conversation and I want to now open to questions that we have some time for Q and A. And I think I'm gonna hand over to Hamad to give us some guidance on the Q and A. Well, firstly, let me just share what I'm sure is being felt by pretty much everybody on this panel is how much, how enjoyable and rich that conversation was. And thank you for unpacking some of those that symbolic debts that kind of lurk in Hugh's work. And if I could sort of abuse my position as chair for this session to perhaps pose the first one while we start gathering some more questions. And thinking about the circulations and encounters, I was in Liverpool two days ago visiting the Biennial and I was struck by the work and particularly the title of a work by the Black Ops City and Sound System. And the title of the work that they put was the only good system is a sound system. And just thinking about the various systems that you're taking on in your work of circulation, of value, so what you've done to the share certificates, taking them out of one particular system, I'm guessing from eBay, and then releasing them into another, I'm guessing off the freeze art fair via the gallery. And I'm wondering how you're sort of thinking about how you sort of intervene in these systems that you're playing in, particularly given the kinds of things that intervention of the Duncan Colston, for instance, has this given you some ideas as to what you would like to do with new opportunities within the systems that you operate in? Yeah, yes, I can't talk about it, but there's something on the boil which will become obvious in the future, shall we say? I'm trying to be very, very careful about what I say. So there's something on the go. But back to the share things, what I found fascinating about the shares and what I got obsessed with them, right? Because it became an obsession, by the way. And what was fascinating about the shares is that Bear Stearns goes down, Lehman Brothers goes down, and the document itself, which was worth, I don't know, a canceled document, canceled share, which would be worth a certain amount one day, all of a sudden became worth a lot of money, like thousands of dollars on the next day. It's valued as a share, but it's valuable as an artifact. And what I found fascinating about working with these whole things is that trying to find information about these companies was almost impossible to research them, because, and it's a sobering thought, that these companies, a lot of them are deader than dead, you know what I mean? They're really, really so dead. But still, we as human beings, we go on thinking, I'm gonna start my business and I'm gonna be rich, and my business will last forever. And then I'm going into the archives and thinking, well, that business didn't last forever, but the thing is, but people still go for it, which is kind of weirdly reassuring in a strange way. I mean, it might be just worth adding that, of course, the East India Company is a corporation. It's one of the most extraordinary facts about London Asia is that the most significant relationship between London and Asia from 1700 to 19, well, 1857, was a corporation. It was actually mediated through those share certificates that you talk about. That was the British Empire. And then we're sitting here in a university, I am anyway, and the PMC is, which is also a corporation. Yale is actually a corporation. The Board of Governors is a corporation and we kept going even longer than the East India Company with the same start, because it all starts in the same way. So these corporations do have a long life and they have long shadows. And that's why I think you are- Long shadows. And what's interesting about the people who invest in them is like, I've got share certificates where you think just like regular ordinary people's names are written in, like 60, 70 years ago, and think, God, who is that person who invested in this thing? And now I'm just holding it as a document because it's worth nothing. It's worth like five pounds. And back then it must have been worth quite a bit, you know? It's really interesting. And particularly at the point of the time of the financial crash, it just seemed like a really interesting thing to do. So what I did in the end is I made a graveyard for dead or still companies and it's in Bristol. And it's actually in a graveyard. It's on top, these are grave markers which are on top of actual graves. It had to be installed with the local council archeologist who came along and said, oh, no, no, you can't put it there. There's a grave underneath there. You can't put it there. Strange, strange experience. There are a couple of questions now on here and let me sort of run through a couple of them in the time. I'll start with the Brenda Cobar's question and firstly also acknowledge Brenda's, she's getting full marks for attendance so far, Brenda, we will expect you for the rest of the sessions. And she has a question around the role of the fictive in your work, Hugh. The role of the fictive, of fiction. Fiction, all right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Hugh spoke about how the history he was taught as a child ignored Caribbean histories and the history he encountered in the UK celebrated the empire and ignored the violence that underpinned it. Can he speak more to this approach that embraces the fictive, the fake that he referred to? Yeah. And imagining the possibilities of presenting histories that are not represented? Well, what I found I started doing was, it's partly to do with arriving in Guyana at the time of independence and seeing how a country is made and born. So what I started doing was looking at symbols of Britishness, ideas of Britishness and thinking, right, this is also an invented culture. And I got really interested and still I'm interested in the idea of invented culture. And so that's what I started to make an invented world for myself, which talked to all these complex issues. Cause the issues can get quite complex. And that was my thing, you know what I mean? If people think of me as a certain thing and trying to put me in this particular box, right? I will make the box of my own desire, shall we say, you know? And my own sort of, my own imaginary stories, you know? It's all this, okay, let's say very quickly. All this imagery started with a fascination with Velasquez's infantas. These women, these small girls who in these very, they're powerful, they're dressed in very, very expensive dresses, but they're pawns, you know? They're both powerful and not powerful at the same time. And they're used as trading pawns within European power plays, basically. And from that, I did a drawing of Princess Margaret, the queen's mom, queen's sister, sorry. And that then led on to a whole thing which I'm into now. So if you ask yourself too many questions and question too much about what you're doing, why are you doing something? As an artist, I feel you won't do it, you know what I mean? You need to do it and then think, well, why am I doing this? And then it eventually reveals itself over time. I didn't know why I was doing images of the queen. And then it's like, ah, that's what it's about. Yeah, her head was on the exercise books at school. And you gave her a beard and a mustache and you got into serious trouble. That's the reason, that's what happened there, you know? Well, the beard and mustache has form in art history. Exactly, exactly. I didn't know anything about this early days. I was the guy, I didn't know anything about that back then, you know? We have a number of questions which I don't think we'll be able to get to all of them, but we're gonna steal a couple of minutes from the break if people let us. And here's a question from Jillian Forrester for you, Hugh. And she wanted to sort of talk about this idea of sound and specifically in relation to your self-portrait, tiger, tiger, where you're rendered speechless by the face covering. And there's also silence in the Kovinoor sculpture. Apparently, when Dilip Singh was shown the recut diamond which was radically altered, he violated, he was unable to speak. Yes, yes. Can Hugh comment on these silences? Well, that thing of Dilip Singh, I mean, I was reacquainting myself with that recently. That, his silence said a lot. I mean, Queen Victoria is showing him this thing and him thinking, and thinking she's doing something very nice, and he's in shock. So there's the silence. For me, these things are silent, but they are speaking at the same time, because they're silent because they're not sound pieces and a purely technical thing. But they have to have movement in them and they have to be saying something. And for me, the noise is in the color and the noise is in, for me, Tiger Tigers and the hollow eyes and the hollow mouth of this thing. The fact that it's silence, but it's a bloody loud silence, you know what I mean? Yeah. Maybe one other question is, we have two from Vanda Radzik. And let me sort of pick the, perhaps the shorter one first. Could you say something about the Weiwei chair in the Magna Carta installation? Right. It's, for those of you who don't know, it's an installation of 12 bronze chairs in the middle of a field and it's to commemorate the Magna Carta, ceiling of the Magna Carta, the 800th anniversary. One of these bronze chairs, the back of it, has a YY Amerindian Guyanese headdress. And this, that particular chair is standing for, standing in for the idea of indigenous people's rights and First Nation rights. So that's what that's about. But it's actually, there's a waterfall coming down this, from the headdress over what are, what look like polished rocks, which is actually gold. So basically it's about the fact of exploitation of indigenous people's exploitation of their land. Basically an age old story that's been going on since Columbus, if not before. And that's what that piece is about. It's standing, using the YY situation, standing in for that. When I was a kid, 15 back in the seventies, right? We wanted to go on holiday to a particular lake called Lake Mainstay. And it was just in land which had just been handed over to the, back to the Amerindian people. I can't remember the name of the particular tribe. And we had to write and get permission. And I remember that as a distinctive thing, thinking, ah, we have to write and get permission. This is, you're not free to go on this land without this permission slip. And there was something quite special about that, I thought, I always remember that. And I had a question actually for Tim. I was sort of really struck by the land acknowledgement that you read out with your students. And for those of you who were here yesterday, it was also something similar with the land acknowledgement that we heard from Michael Rakowitz when he started his talk yesterday. And I was just thinking in terms of where many of us, and certainly with the Paul Mellon Center, we are here in Britain and the UK. And this discourse made popular by people like David Goodott and made political by people like Theresa May and this idea of the people who come from somewhere and nowhere. And the fact that there doesn't seem to be an acknowledgement that the somewhere's within the land of the islands of the United Kingdom have also been sort of composed from elsewhere. And I wonder if the sort of land acknowledgement is something that we also need to think through within the context of Britain. Yeah, I think that's a great point. And it's been a very lively discussion locally to our department and the university, but also of course across the country. I mean, this was something which was powerfully introduced in Australia and New Zealand before North America. And I remember 15 years ago, giving a lecture in Sydney and being unable to speak because the land acknowledgement was so powerful and the reality of settler colonialism is actually there, the land you are standing on. It's a different question as to the sort of historical makeup of the current nation and the current situation. But I think I was interested that through the discussion among our students and I take no credit for this, they did that land acknowledgement. It was important for them to acknowledge both what they called it, the entwined catastrophes of indigenous dispossession and racial slavery because those are two stories which work together, which have produced the current United States. It's not simply a question of somebody belongs here and somebody doesn't. And it's not a question of a kind of a pure idea of everyone having a place that they belong. I mean, one of Stuart Hall's great contributions was to think through the Caribbean as a place where nobody exactly is at home. I think that was the phrase he used. The idea that populations are food choice or not mobile and migrant. And so I think we really need to acknowledge that as well as the fact that, especially in the case of settler colonialism, there was a violent appropriation of land. I'm looking out the window now at the place where Native Americans were killed in 1639 in Milford, Connecticut. It happened right here. So that is a slightly different story from the British story, which nonetheless needs an acknowledgement of complex histories which involve violence. So I think it's important. I mean, of course, it can just become a kind of rote. You know, sort of, if it turns into just a ritual, a meaningless ritual, then it's worse than not having one. But I think having a conversation in which you have to write the damn thing, you have to think through what you're gonna say is really, really important. Thanks for asking. This conversation could go on and I will encourage you to join us for the next session because we will have a larger sort of time slot for question and answers. But we've stolen into the break of it and I think it is really important that we do allow ourselves a little break away from the screen. So I would suggest that we take a 10 minute break and come back to join our presenters to two papers. And hopefully Tim and Hugh also, if you're available to join us and continue the conversations with those presenters. So with that, let me sort of leave the applause for Silent, if it may be, for Tim and Hugh for a really rich and invigorating conversation that we will continue in the next panel with after a 10 minute break. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to our second session of the Circulation and Encounter panel discussion. In this part of the session, there will be two presentations by Michelle Vong and Sophia Balagambala. I will give brief introductions to both. We will then have the two presentations and then we will go into a question and answer session with all the panelists. So please do stay with us. And let me first... It's a great pleasure to introduce Michelle, who my erstwhile colleague at ACHAD Archive, who is presently a PhD student in art history at the University of Hong Kong. She was a researcher at ACHAD Archive between 2012 and 20 with a focus on Hong Kong art history and the histories of exchange and circulation through exhibitions and periodicals. She was also the assistant curator of the 11th edition of Guangzhou Biennale in 2016, and she independently runs the long-term curatorial collective project, Sightlines, with artist Wei Lingte. In 2020, she developed a series of episodes around the deliberation of discursive justice with Lantian Shi and Kabelo Malatzi. As part of Afterglow, the Yokohama Triennial 2020 directed by the Rocks Media Collective. Her writing has been published in Ambitious Alignments, New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 1945 to 1990, and the journal Southeast of Now, 2019, on curating and ocular. Michelle will be speaking on the work of Harvick Chun's creative and archival practice. Now our second presenter, for those of you who booked your tickets and registered early, was scheduled to be Vivica Singh, but given the incredibly wonderful weather we were having in Hong Kong, in London actually, until this morning when it started raining, her new daughter decided to enter the world a little bit early. So Vivica can't join us for the happiest of reasons, but we hope to find another occasion soon to share her ongoing research on Ibrahim Al-Qazi. This has given us a chance to screen a new animation by the artist, Sofia Balganvala, a special commission for London Asia Art Worlds. It's selected from an open call and Sofia is one of the four artists and artist groups whose projects intervene in, expand, disrupt and create new spaces within London Asia Art Worlds. In different ways, they respond to the themes that have structured the program. From next week, many of these projects will be available to encounter online on the Paul Mellon Center London Asia Art Worlds website for the duration of the conference and some will feature live during conference events. The projects will also form part of the digital legacy. Let me introduce the three other artists and artist groups to you. One is the Project Queer Asia's virtualizing cartographies curated by Annie Jail Kwon and featuring the work of Abdullah Qureshi, Joel Tan, Sam Reynolds, Sinwai Kin, formerly known as Victoria Sin and Yarlie Allison and Yin Lo. The second artist, also a collective grouping is of Sabah Khan, Shaheen Ahmed and Taran Singh. And the third project is by the artist, Mithu Sen. I will give a short introduction to Sofia Bolligambala. Sofia is a multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Karachi. Her practice explores the space where history meets nonsense and questions how histories are written and disseminated. Bolligambala has a BA from the University of Toronto and an MFA from Cornell University and has previously worked as the lead curator of the National History Museum in Lahore and is currently advisor to the Citizens' Archive of Pakistan. She's founder of Karachi, a platform that facilitates animation, illustration and design collaborations and workshops and is then adjunct faculty member at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. Her short animation, whereabouts unknown, Atapata Malum Nahi, will play immediately after Michelle's presentation. And the animation is part of a wider project that looks at how language, monument making and systems of archiving in this display were used as tools of shaping and understanding identity in the Indian subcontinent during the British Raj and today. And then we will sort of have a short conversation with Sofia and then we'll sort of open up the discussion. With that, I'd like to invite Michelle to present her paper. Thank you very much for the introduction. And I just want to thank Shauna and Danny for taking such good care of us throughout the event. Before I start my presentation, there were also a couple of acknowledgements I want to make, but perhaps not on land, but on time. That my thoughts are with the people and families who were affected by what happened on Tiananmen Square in 1989 and that the second acknowledgement is that today is the first time in 32 years where here in Hong Kong, we cannot gather publicly to commemorate this event. One of the first images that indicated Habitian's interest in being a larger world of art and visuality was a photograph taken in 1950s. The photograph was taken when Ha was still living in Guangdong, mainland China, shortly before he fled to British colonial Hong Kong via Macau. Born in 1925, Ha would have been in his late 20s or early 30s when he was photographed. Standing in front of a wooden chest with flowers placed on top, Ha posed for the camera. Instead of traditional Chinese style dress, he wore a suit jacket, long trousers, and leather shoes. His left hand clutching an English photography magazine has spared a left off into space. There are many of these portraits littered throughout Ha's personal archive, a vast collection of photographic materials and printed matter that he spent the rest of his life accumulating, organizing, photographing, cutting, and pasting. Ha eventually became an artist who worked across printmaking, sculpture. This is one of the sculptures. This one he was making prints in one of his matrices and collage. And he would not receive any academic training in art throughout his life. When Ha passed away in 2009, the archive he left behind would include 50 years worth of exhibition history, including photographs of over 2,500 exhibitions that he took inside and outside of Hong Kong. He amassed a personal library of over 5,000 books on art and other subjects. He also meticulously clipped and organized hundreds of boxes of magazines and newspaper cutouts. As observed by various researchers who have worked on Ha's archive, these clippings are in different languages, many of which Ha did not read or speak. It therefore suffices to say that Ha read these materials visually. He then used some of these cutouts to construct over 300 book collages that he never showed publicly during his lifetime. And this current paper focuses on Ha's collecting as a way to create a link between London and Asia. In particular, it considers the visuality between Hong Kong and London as seen through Ha's collage books. Hong Kong's location as a port city in South China, as well as its position as a British colony from 1841 to 1997, arguably played a key role in shaping Ha's archive and art practices. The relative stability of Hong Kong during the 1960s and 70s is the stark contrast to turbulent man in China, which went through not only the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 62, but also the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 76. When Ha settled in Hong Kong in 1957, Hong Kong's economy and art scene were both in their nascent stages. Exhibition spaces were few and far between, mostly located in colonial clubs and hotels that privileged the English-speaking elite. A few artist groups were founded in late 1950s, publishing magazines and holding annual exhibitions at cathedrals and rented spaces at the city hall. And in 1962, Hong Kong's first art museum, the City Museum and Art Gallery welcomed its public. One of its first exhibition was an open-call exhibition titled Hong Kong Art Today. And this sounds sort of very familiar with what we were hearing yesterday of Commonwealth art today. By the time Ha settled down in Hong Kong in 1957, he was 32 and the father of at least three children. He would go on to have two more, which put him in a much less mobile situation as compared to some of his artist peers. But whatever Ha lacked in travel opportunities, he overcompensated with an appetite for reading and collecting printed matter. 1960s, 70s, Hong Kong was a central clearing house for publications that circulated across Asia and the rest of the world. As commodity goods with a limited shelf life, this printed matter found a second life being resold outside certain department stores on the Hong Kong Island. According to his family, Ha regularly purchased these magazines in bulk. Hong Kong being a capitalist city under British colonial rule and physically close to communist China had offices and publication distribution from both sides of the Iron Curtain. This resulted in the confluence of diverse visuality, not only in the city's public space, but also in the private world realm of Ha's archive. At night and alone in his studio across from the family's living space, Ha processed his finds, selecting, cutting out images that interested him, organizing them into smaller boxes and folders that are labeled in a schematic and cross-disciplinary manner. These boxes and their content are the process and residue of Ha's consumption and digestion of the visuality around him. And these visual fragments in the archive bear witness to our curiosity that was not only satiated, but also fueled by flows of information coming in and out of the city, part city of Hong Kong. It is perhaps straightforward to imagine the position of a personal archive as counter to the narratives and agenda of a state's archive, especially that of the colonial state. However, it may be an overstatement to call Ha's personal archive an anti-colonial project. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that most materials Ha collected are not part of any official or government proceedings. There are however plenty of exhibition ephemera that is part of the British colonial government's public facing apparatus. The same artists who were part of exhibitions organized by the British were the same ones who ran artist groups and organized their own exhibitions. Ha eventually became a regular protagonist in official exhibitions and collections as well. While there is a clear absence of overtly subversive materials in Ha's archives, he did collect newspapers and propaganda publication from both sides of the 1967 riots, where communist sympathizers sometimes called the progressives or patriots attempted to escalate a labor dispute into a large-scale violent protest against British colonial rule. The failed attempt of 1967 riots drove Hong Kong's left-leaning progressives underground and the port city stably developed socially and economically in decades afterwards. Since then, what could be read as political materials also diminished in Ha's archive. Instead, exhibition ephemera, photographic documentation and other visual sources thronged Ha's studio, capturing a slice of Hong Kong's art world and popular visual world. It may be more generative perhaps to consider Ha's collecting and archiving as a paracolonial activity, one that went alongside the colonial reality he lived in and lived with, one that he occasionally, if not often, benefited from directly and indirectly. If Ha's archive is an attempt to consume an expanded world of art and visual culture that converts upon Hong Kong, his book Collages are another result of that consumption and digestion. From 1958 to 2009, Ha created over 300 volumes of collage books or modified books, which are not disclosed and displayed in public until six years after his death. In a World At Studies conference at Hong Kong UN 2016, actually, Ha Ma presented on Ha's collage books as a world in practice, where the books are molds of inhabiting a world through repetition. The volume titled Akeemka Revelation, which you see now as Ha Ma's example, and it can be interpreted as an attempt of rewriting art history of what qualifies as ink art. And you can see the cover of this book is actually not an inkwork, but a painting by Kapogrosi. And Ha, of course, had to insert himself into this narrative here. So you see him here and this is his inkwork, which he started doing sort of much later in his life. The image chosen for this panel's website is from the binder titled Collection of Sculpture. Again, it's an example of how Ha imagined an art world from his perspective. Here, South African artist Fiona Corkwood's 1998 sculpture, Pandemic Patient and Death Resurrection and Libation. And a advertisement of the Japanese-American ceramic artist Jun Kanako's solo exhibition in year 2000 at Chicago. Henry Moore's 1952 sculpture King and Queen and the Unisphere, the symbol of the 1964 World Fairs in Flushing, New York, are put together to form a spread. Here, London figures as part of the cosmopolitan sculpture world that Ha imagined. In her book, On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature of the Gigantic, the Sovenir, the Collection, literary scholar Susan Stewart wrote that for an individual to arrange his or her collection according to time is to quote, juxtaposed personal time with social time, autobiography with history, and thus to create a time of the individual subject of transcendent to and parallel to historical time, end quote. She also writes that to organize the collection spatially is an individual's attempt to perceive and apprehend the collection with eye and hand. Cos book collages are simultaneously arrangements of both space and time. As much as he was disregarding the linear time within the images he was collaging, he was also thinking about them as spatial compositions on the page. And in somewhat displaced way, composition inside spaces represented within the page. Each page almost becomes like a portal, leading the viewer's eyes and minds to travel to more than one place at a time, defying the rules of spatiality and temporality, but never really reaching a destination. The pictures only seem to want to travel, but with no arrival in mind. One of the coffee table book collages titled London Interiors dated 2001 by Ha gives the illusion that it may have some links to London. The book features the home of art and design world celebrities that are still a target song, artists Gary Hume and Georgie Hopton, et cetera. The pages of luxurious properties embody a different information, technological and visual time and world from Ha's earlier collection of cutouts. In these pages, Ha Rihang or redecorated the spaces with his arrangements of art and non-art images. These pages are weirdly seamless, but it is also clearly visible that their visuality come from diverse sources. And on this page you're looking at, it's an already well-decorated living room. And the cutout of a teddy bear here is placed next to a phallic wooden sculpture next to a cutout of a Picasso featured in an art magazine next to the portrait of the Dutch painter van Velde and a nude model from a Cantonese tabloid. The teddy bear and nude model likely came from Cantonese magazines such as Apple Daily and Nix Magazine. Established around the turn of the 21st century by the now imprisoned media tycoon Jimmy Lai, these printed matter exploded Hong Kong's visual world with glossy pictures, juicy celebrity gossip and the occasional soft and hard porn as the city's economy soared. The circular and network of the images in the society of Hong Kong had shifted. Although the 1997 handover of Hong Kong back to Chinese sovereignty left anxious traces in Ha's archive through his correspondences with family and friends, it didn't really significantly impact the collages he made. By 2001, the year Ha signed and dated London interiors, he was 76. Ha's awareness of his age and mortality arguably became more pronounced. And this finds form in bold, aspirational, sometimes ironically self-help Cantonese quotes and slogans in his collages. In this current spread, the entire bottom right of this page reads in Cantonese Chinese, 每個人都有夢想, 每人都有夢想, 每個人都有夢想, 每個人都有夢想, what are yours? And above that slogan, an image of a youthful lingerie model is pasted over the centerpiece of the living room. And on the left page, a piece of design of furniture. A museum goer looking closely at a half canine half human sculptural form. And next to that, a Nobel Prize winning engineer opposing with his safety suit. What if we read this page as a juxtaposition of Ha's biographical time and social time? A personal reflection on what he explored and achieved or not achieved as a sculptor who grappled with the human figure and sculptural forms. One could say that London interior symbolically shows how London, the capital of Hong Kong's former colonial government, receded to become barely the skeleton that holds Ha's visual and social worlds. But I hope what comes through in this paper is that the visuality collected and created by Ha are social objects. Susan Buck Morse wrote in her contribution to the 1996 October visual culture questionnaire. The visuality we have seen is part of a larger social world. They entered the life of social beings such as Ha and in turn shaped him by paying close attention to the shifting visuality of Hong Kong and that of Ha's collection collages. I hope we can not only see how London and Hong Kong encountered each other or how Ha attempted to remake the world, but we can also articulate Ha's subjecthood with more exactitude and nuance. Thank you very much. Thank you, Michelle, for that really rich evocation of Ha's world. And we will come back to you shortly. And for the audience, please do put questions for Michelle into the Q&A box. But we will move now to Sofia Balagambala's short animation, whereabouts unknown atapata maloon nahi. A special collection of highly regarded objects and artifacts are to be unveiled this Friday at the National Museum. Preparations are in full swing with all kinds of strings being pulled and with no expense being spared to ensure that the museum is in tip-top shape for the grand opening. In regards to the special collection being unveiled, one piece appears to be missing. Director Sahib seems to have borrowed it for an important reception at his residence for some highly esteemed officials and dignitaries. But it's whereabouts since then seem unknown. The aim of the project is to put more of the museum's special collection on display. Founded in 1850, the museum holds many important objects and artifacts that celebrate our national and colonial heritage. Some of the objects date back to the 1600s with the arrival of the East India Company to the Indian subcontinent. We interrupt this report to bring you some breaking news. The bust of the Supreme Leader, only revealed on special occasions, will also be showcased. This will be on public display for the first time. The statue of Queen Victoria and true lions also appear to be missing. This statue, once on display at the Freer Hall Gardens, then moved to the underground storage at the Karachi Port Trust Pindel and then to the Mohattar Palace Museum, cannot currently be located. Can I invite Sophia to join me on the screen? Welcome, Sophia. Thank you so much for that wonderful animation and for joining us for today's session. Hi, Amad. Thank you so much for having me. I'd also like to thank Danny and Shona, but I'm very grateful to you and Ming and Sarah for trusting and guiding me with this project. Our pleasure. What we'd love to do in the next maybe just about 10 minutes or so is to unpack a little bit of some of the things that we have just seen, a real sort of melange of the fictive going back to Hughes earlier conversation, the documentary, bureaucracy, confusion. And maybe we can start with the source of this project. I mean, what planted the seed that has blossomed into this work? So I think it's been in the making for a few years. It's been in the making alongside some other sculptural works and paintings. And all these works have emerged relating to my research in archives and exhibition making and working within these museum contexts. But as objects or as cultures or as paintings, they've been about a specific object or a specific story or instance. And so I was in search of a form that allowed for me to tell a number of stories in a number of languages with a number of materials and something that could almost shape shift between history and present, but then also between fact and fiction and linear and nonlinear. So I think this work emerges as a requirement or form almost to be able to carry and contain all of these various elements and requirements. And can we talk maybe about a couple of these elements that you just mentioned? And maybe I'll start with language. Because one of the things that really struck me when looking at this work was that slight sort of syncopation that goes on. It doesn't quite gel. The sound in the Urdu that you can just hear and for those who can make meaning of it, there's an element of mistranslation going on. At the bottom of the screen, the script that runs, it's actually in a script that's not usually used for Urdu. It's usually used for Arabic. So it seems like there are lots of different narratives or lots of different symbolic meanings that are playing out in just this one seemingly simple tool of language that you're playing with. What were some of the things that you were trying to do with this? So I can start with the typography. So the script that you mentioned. The script is that I work with two typographers, Momina and Shumail. And the script we use is not, you're absolutely right. It's not the Nasteelik, which is usually used for Urdu. It's the Naqsh, which is usually an Arabic typeface. And the script that's been developed for this animation was developed. It's been produced by a typographer who has produced it for Arabic. And then Urdu versions have been accommodated. So the idea is that if you want to use, if there's a word that has a closer likeness to Arabic than Urdu, then you have to manually put it in. So I was interested in this idea that English is a very, very important language in terms of hierarchy, in terms of what you can hear. It's the loudest. But then also as a subtitle, even the Urdu is trying to be or has a great influence from the Arabic, as opposed to the script that's made for Urdu and Persian. And then language is also important that the translations are all so my English is much stronger than my Urdu as a product of my education in Karachi. Even though I've been here all my life. And so when I work on projects with translations, I work with translators. And then also after we go through working with translators, we ask different people what they think, what they understand. And then some of the translations are literal. Some of them are not literal. And often language, it doesn't cut it. So Google Translate doesn't cut it. The translators can't understand. There's just a lot of confusion. And then what often happens when the translation falls short is that you kind of pick up on, or you take from a popular culture reference, which is what the title of the film is as well. Atta pata maloom hai. It's not a literal or direct translation of the title whereabouts unknown. It's actually the line from a popular pop song, Koko Kureena. But when we were in this process of translating the film, one of the suggestions was, could it be atta pata maloom hai without knowing where it came from, but then finally placing it. So I'm very interested in this idea of when you're doing this process of translation, you start somewhere and sometimes it's literal and sometimes you get lost. And then sometimes you end up in this completely new place or space. Maybe if we can also look at this recurring idea of the museum, the monument, missing objects, unacknowledged histories, in the context of your wider project and end with a question on how your curatorial experience and your involvement in archival projects have shaped or informed your practice. So I think because I was working with photographs and oral histories and objects with the archives, I think for me, well, number one as a painter, I had this as a painter, you often have this need to, you think that if photography is doing one thing, what can the painting do? So you think about form in a different way. But then the other thing is, sorry. Could you repeat your question, please? Sure. And I was just asking you as to how your curatorial experience has informed your practice with particular reference to these ideas of the museum, the monument, and the missing object. So I mean, so one of the things is that looking beyond the archives and looking beyond the photographs, because of the violence associated with the history of our coloniality and the photographs. So then the solution that I found was that the way that things appear, they need to not mimic reality. They need to be a completely different form. And then the other thing is that in terms of actually working as a curator in this field of museum making, I mean, there are so many that this constantly, every time you put a story on the forefront or you choose a narrative, you exclude others. And there's this constant cycle of telling one person's story, excluding the others. And museums are, I mean, the spaces that I've worked in, there's so much power that is given to designers and curators in terms of what they put out there as creators of culture, as creating these spaces which the public encounters. And they use these museums as spaces to think through their identity and to understand their own identity. It's especially with this heavy title of the National Museum. So that's something I constantly think about in terms of the power that you have as curators in this space, in terms of stories that are left out. And then the other thing is that a lot of the things that make themselves into my work. And this is why I work with fiction as well because a lot of the, I mean, objects do go missing for various reasons. They go missing because of mysteries but also mismanagement. And objects are separated from the other objects that they should be within collections because of bureaucracy, but then also because of borders and decisions made by men. And then other objects are missing from the places that they belong because a long time ago they were carried away. So I'm just interested. And then the objects in this story or in this animation, so the bronze statues, they did actually, there was a search for them because they did go missing and there were three very large, very heavy bronze statues. So some of the stories that seem like they might be fictitious are actually real. And these objects move and they were actually moving from one place to the other. So, yeah, mute. So I was gonna say that maybe on that note of moving objects, of circulation, of those encounters, it's a good moment to invite Michelle, Tim, Hugh and my co-conveners, Ming and Sarah, to join us in an overall conversation. And while we're waiting for everybody's screens and videos to come on, maybe I can pose a first question to Michelle. Michelle, it was great to see, you know, the work and the thinking that you've been doing on an archive that I recall in its sort of formative stages on research. And one of the things that really struck me at that time was for somebody so invested in world-making, how in these books, and you showed some wonderful examples ending on London interiors, there was this air of mystery as to why these worlds were not shared or were they shared. And I wonder if you've managed to crack that code in the last few years. No, but I can say a little more. I mean, you know how much when Walidra found those collages, found those books, we thought there were maybe around 25, 30, right? And by sort of earlier this year, there are over 300, and I think just the volume of it sort of messes, like what are these things? You know, what are they meant for? And I mean, but to your question of, you know, why had and show them or, you know, I have some sort of preliminary sketches of ideas. One of them might sort of is related to maybe of, you know, his definition of what is art or what should an artist do or what should an artist make and put out in the world. And for some reason the books was not what he chose to put out in the world, which I think explains sort of my interest in sort of looking at the biographical time and sort of the time of the art world that he puts himself in. I think that's one sort of possible way of looking at it. And I don't know why he didn't show it. Maybe I don't know. I think we all really like them now or, you know, it's also possible that, you know, he saw them as sketches, which then, you know, again, go back to, you know, what is an art object or what is art form for him in that time, sort of as a modernist artist. There are a couple of further questions that have come in from the audience. One is from Ivan Kuhn, who wants to continue that idea of fictiveness that we started with talking about with Hugh in the first session. And she wants to ask you as to how much do you think that fictiveness is used as a deliberate organizing tool by Ha, the way he undercuts time and space and what sort of implications does this have on how you think of his collection of stuff as archive? It's an ongoing argument or conversation you and I have had about, you know, whether it is an archive or it's just stuff. And I'm sort of moving sort of on the fly right now. But I think the fictiveness probably could be seen as a tool of navigating sort of so many different sources in time and almost as a liberating tool, but maybe it's also a tool that Ha as an auto-direct feel that he can use because no one was telling him what he couldn't do. And yeah, I do think it probably then challenges, you know, what is what he collected really in archive or did it become an archive when Asia archive started working on it and like packing things into the series and all that. And I think the fictiveness probably gave it that space to sort of freely be this generative resource for more creative work and inquiry to come from. And the one connected question on that about that these archives becoming generative is Sissy Lee wants to know, well, firstly that the archives in your presentation are excellent and how are these archives? What's their role in guiding contemporary Hong Kong art? What's their role in contemporary Hong Kong society? I think it's a question that I think the person who asked has there has his or her own answer. I think it can become incredibly important and productive, especially at this time when, you know, what does it mean to be living and thinking about Hong Kong in this space and time? I mean, I can't speak for everyone nor should I speak for everyone but I think it's the archive now has archive now lives in many different places with different institutions. And I think that offers a possibility of further usage and different lives. And I think that, you know, the very fact that this question is being asked means that it can have a huge impact. What I can't say and I would sort of hope to say that I don't know because it will be great because it would be things other than I saw it. And I think that's a great place to be. Super, so we for the moment have run out of public questions and answers. So I would encourage everybody to kind of, oh, Ming. Well, thank you everyone for your wonderful contributions and the conversation that has come out of the past few hours. It's been incredibly rich and has been building a lot on some of the themes that we've been exploring over the past two sessions as well. I'm wondering if I might sort of address us to our Zoom bomber and to ask the question of what it means to remake the colonial map and to sort of use this as a framing device to think through, you know, all of your work and the conversations that we've been having, especially in this session around the question of fictiveness, does fictiveness play a role in remaking the colonial map? And here, Hugh, I'm thinking in terms of the ways in which you're appropriating shared certificates and monuments and remaking them, what operation is taking place and how do you see that as remaking the colonial map? In terms of Michael's talks yesterday, this question of restitution and forcing entanglements, how do those two concepts, restitution and appropriation sort of butt up against each other? And in terms of Sophia, I'm interested in the ways in which you think about how curators shape public spaces and the disappearance of objects and circulation. And of course, for Michelle, this question of world making. So I'm wondering if maybe you could all sort of think together with us about this question of, you know, how do we remake the colonial map? Because clearly that is one of the projects of London Asia art worlds. I mean, for me, I can speak about the statue thing and that when I started doing that, it took me a while, it didn't take me too long to realize what I was trying to make visible, things which are people walking past every day, which were invisible, people weren't looking at this stuff at all, not remotely. But yet it was part of the heritage that people were selling tourists from the top of tour buses. So that's Nelson's column, that's that. And by me starting to take these things on, it's basically a way of controlling your environment about feeling empowered, you know what I mean? You're giving yourself the permission to do stuff which you're not supposed to be able to do if you see what I mean, but why not, you know? And then you invent your own fiction as Sophia was talking about earlier, you invent your own thing, you know? Well, one of the things that I thought was interesting about how you were speaking about fiction earlier, here was the way in which you talked about making your own fiction, but then the ways in which that made you reflect on how British identity and history itself was its own fiction, right? And so it sort of came back in to infect British history as well. Yeah, well, I mean, it's, you know what? You follow your instincts, you know what I mean? And at times you don't realize necessarily why you're doing something. Like, I wonder whether Ha had a clear idea is that I'm doing exactly this because some of those things seem to be random. Basically, he was using the internet before the internet in his brain, you know what I mean? And like, this, and I really had a feeling for that okay, somebody I've never met, don't know. I'm discovering this guy today for the first time, wonderful stuff, man, you know? And it's just taken me back to the days when that type of thing would arrive from my grandmother to Guyana. We'd get a month's worth of observer magazines all wrapped up in a bundle. This is the 1970s we're talking about. So what am I trying to say? That was our form of internet in a sense, you know what I mean? And no television. So your form of the world is kind of a strange one. I'm not really explaining myself very well, but I'm trying to connect this thing back to this thing about the password, which is, well, it's just intriguing, but it's like random, but then it's not random, I don't know. I just, that London interior thing is just wonderful. I mean, it's just great, you know? The best things I've seen in a while, and it's a history, but then it's talking about the particular moment. That London interior thing, you could swap that for any kind, today for any kind of interior coffee table book and just have a go with the same kind of style, you know what I mean? It's just, it's a stand-in for that particular type of lifestyle, you know? And I don't know what his financial situation was, but it's almost like, you know what, I'm gonna superimpose myself onto this. Let me create my personal fiction in a range of drifting into childhood memories. So I gotta watch myself. Well, I was also interested in how Michelle, you talked about his work as being para-colonial, rather than post-colonial or decolonial. And I think that's an important point, too. Again, addressing our Zoom bomber, to think about the ways in which artists thought beyond what we expected of them as historians, right? That we want him to be post-colonial or anti-colonial, but actually he's doing something very different. That's a little bit more difficult to categorize and to analyze. Maybe you could speak a little bit about that and with respect to remaking the colonial map. Well, I have to thank my friend who, Angie, who's also in the audience today. Actually, it's something that we came up with in one of our sort of self-disciplining writing sessions where we just have to like write and was discussing with Angie about, you know, it just seems not really, it just seems so sort of simplistic, you know, to just say for a colonial subject to just be anti-colonial because often it is not. And I guess because, you know, I've worked on this group of Hong Kong artists for a number of years now and the more you look into their biographies, the more you see them actually being quite co-operative and collaborative with the colonial government, whether they're civil servants, whether they eventually got, you know, Ford Foundation or Rockefeller grants to all that, you know, these are choices that they made that may or may not be politically driven, but I think also means they were deciding to not see certain things or sort of make certain things not important to them. And perhaps sort of a stance towards, you know, the colonial government was one of them, you know. And you know that I also was very struck by what Professor Lila Gandhi was saying for the, in the first keynote about the epist, sort of the not visible, like not knowing and not visible. And perhaps this is also something sort of linked to that. And yeah, it's a very preliminary sort of idea. I just don't think these artists who we are working with, who I've been working on in Hong Kong, who has this sort of visual language of abstraction, but, you know, we're framed very differently. For example, in Hong Kong or in Southeast Asia or even in the States, you know, just a post-colonial framework when Hong Kong at that time was clearly still a British colony isn't necessarily doing it. And of course, you know, we can't speak of post-colonial in current Hong Kong either. So, you know, like what is it then? Sophia, thank you so much for that answer, Michelle. It provides a lot of food for thought. Sophia, did you want to take a crack at that? You're on mute. Sorry. So going back to try to connect making fiction with the kind of makings that are happening in museum. So I think a lot about this idea of... I had read this... There's this essay called... It's called The Notional Museum. It's by Shuddhabrata Sengupta. And he says a lot of great things. I recommend you read it. But one of the things that he said that really stuck with me was that museums change the stories we tell about ourselves all the time. So, you know, this idea of the public going into this space thinking they're getting the truth or the fact or the true history. But actually, it is a selection and omission of a certain number of narratives. And selected due to certain circumstances, due to certain ambitions. So I find the frameworks within which all of these curatorial decisions are made very interesting. And the museum itself as this space where you're seeing, in terms of a national museum and this post-colonial museum space seeing yourself as a... Like seeing a representation of yourself on this splint or in this display. So I find that something very interesting when I'm thinking of making the work but then also thinking of the way that these narratives are presented in museums by these specific stakeholders. And I wonder, I mean, thank you, Sophia, because one of the things that you've just highlighted is that histories like maps can be at least two things. You know, they can be texts, but they can also be tools. And we're so used to reading them as texts that we sometimes kind of sort of forget their usefulness or the possibility of them being tools. So that histories are really just a collection of stories and you write new ones and they're, you know, it's narratives or similarly for maps. Sorry, Tim, you just were about to say something and I rudely stepped in. No, not at all. It's a slight change of subject, but it actually speaks to what you've just said, Hamat. I wanted to... First of all, Sophia, I thought your video was absolutely beautifully done and very... it had me smiling, but also, you know, obviously, it speaks to all sorts of treacherous possibilities in the museum and the archive. But it reminded me of a conversation I was having with Hugh recently when, you know, Queen Victoria, she just keeps coming up and there she is. What are we going to do with the sort of pasty, what Wyndham Lewis called the pasty shadow of Queen Victoria, right? The pasty shadow of Gigantic Berm, I think it was the statue outside Buckingham Palace, because there's Queen Victoria and she's missing, right? She's gone missing and she's always moving. There's a wonderful essay by Petrina Dekas, a whole, you know, 30-page article on the Queen Victoria statue in Kingston, Jamaica, and it's sort of gyration, from being this object of celebration to being, you know, vandalized to then being kind of rehabilitated. And it seems to me there's a fantastic case study here, but I'd love to know where you wanted to go, Sophia, with the Queen Victoria, because we just saw her feet, I think, she was kind of off-camera in a really interesting way. And also, you know, asking you as a curator to, what are you going to do with Queen Victoria? And then I want Hugh to tell us what he wants to do with Queen Victoria, because I just feel like if we could figure out Queen Victoria, we've got this whole subject sorted. I think when, well, first just when Hamad stopped, right before Hamad stopped speaking, he had spoken about, you know, writing of histories and then, like, different tools of doing it. And then I just wanted to add to that, that within the context of the museum, it is so, it is even easier. You don't have to stop the publication of a book or, you know, call it back from the libraries. In a museum, you just get to change the words, so strip the title or put it on or put up a new structure, and it's just really slick and fast if it needs to be. So, you know, it's just a very, it's a very violent and quick but effective way of writing history in the present within the context of museums. Tim, I really, really enjoyed your joint presentation with you. It was great. What do we do with Queen Victoria? Actually, while we were discussing the animation, while it was being made, Hamad had said something. He'd said, well, you know, it's just, it ends, it's uncertain about what happens to her. It just ends in this, like, she's there. It's not fully there, but you know, it's inconclusive. And I think that's a, because I'm still exploring the subject, because I'm still having these questions with my work. I think inconclusive is a good place to be. I think things have been provoked, but many more questions still need to be asked about Victoria and all that she did and the consequences of all that was done. So I think in conclusion or indecisiveness for the moment. I think that's brilliant. Thank you. Yes. Yeah. Hugh, I want you to, I want you to share your memories of, of Queen Victoria. I mean, as I said, work I do, I can do something and not necessarily know the reason why and then I figure it out after a while. The statues thing came from when I was a teenager in Guyana. And in 1970, Queen Victoria statue was stood outside what was then the Victoria law courts. And it was dumped to the back of the botanical gardens on its side, head broken off a bit like a kind of what happened after the end of communism. In the former Soviet Union. And then it was stood up. It was stood up and his head was put back on, but it's still out in what we're saying guys behind God's back in the middle of nowhere, right? So after the president dies, right? Things, relations with Britain come better. She gets resurrected back in front of what is now the Guyana law court. So she's back where she is. No nose, no hand, broken scepter, because what I didn't realize is that she was in a bad way anyway, because she'd been dynamited by, by independent struck in the, during the independent struggle. So she's been blown up, but nobody knows who blew her up. I have a friend who's, who, who's still told me that everybody thought he was his father, but his father insisted it wasn't him. Long story short, it gets back in front there and it's just a part of history. You know, it has no power because it's been already been removed and put back. It doesn't have no power. So after the, the vandalism on the, or the rearranging of Nelson in Barbados, which was painted in yellow paint, somebody poured red paint on the Queen Victoria. And for me, that was the shock because I was like, somebody's upset about this still in Guyana, because the point is that it's in, as you said, it's inconclusive, but I thought it was conclusive. I thought that, that isn't, I thought that, you know, it's like, it's just, it's a long time ago, man, we're not worried, but obviously it's not, there's still, it still niggles in people, you know, there's still bugs of people, you know? So I've done a number of work about that particular piece because I found that, I find that thing quite fascinating. And the fact that it's been centered around the world, like Andy Warhol multiple, you know, is that you, you could have one in marble, I want one in bronze. There you go, no worries. We'll start that out for you. You know what I mean? It's a strange, fascinating relic, you know? But I don't know what it means. And it's this one guy who did most of them, you know, a guy called Thomas Brock, you know, one guy, you know? But I don't know what it's like. I'm curious to know what the thing is like in, it's called Kolkata. There's a big Victorian memorial there. I don't know what the reaction is, how people think about it, you know? How people think about them? I think, well, it's actually, I think it's an interesting contested question right now as to the, you know, as to exactly what the status is of those histories in contemporary India, you know, in relation to a current nationalism. And the status of Luchin's Delhi and the status of the Victorian Memorial in Kolkata, you know, these are profoundly contested. But it's not to say that there is no voice in favour of their preservation, because I think there's quite a strong lobby for, you know, for a kind of culture industry, heritage industry treatment of these, of these structures, which are in their own way quite magnificent. I'm Sarah, you'd know more than I do about them. I was just sort of linking it as well as something that came up in the panel specifically about the etymology of the word monument as well, which seems to sort of link to this discussion. And again, through Michael Rakovitz's work and talking about his new sculpture, which is in Margate in Kent, April is the coolest month and, you know, a work that speaks about war and Iraq. But we're talking there about the word monuments and, you know, with it coming from the Latin to remind, but also to warn, and that these objects somehow, you know, can remind one of the past, but speakers, sort of physical alarm bells as well, or push forward as a, as a warning of what is to come as well. They do have this kind of dual function of looking back and pushing us to think forward as well. So again, I think this is, you know, to enter into this debate as well as what's the work that public statues do? What can they do? What should they do? Do we need them? I think there's something quite interesting in that sort of the reminders of history, the not forgetting and the processes that we have to go through to remember. And then what do we do with that knowledge? How does that impact on what we do in the future? And, you know, what are those, yeah, the impossible proposals here as well. But I think as well that, you know, that not knowing what to do is important, isn't it? As well, it's not saying, you know, because we've got this knowledge, we now know what to do. I think what you said there about the impossibilities, the, yeah, they're not knowing where to go or going somewhere and, you know, trying to find out as you, as you're making and as you're researching as well. And this is, this is a, this is a recent thing. I mean, people have obviously felt, may have felt problematic about statues or like may have complex reactions to them. But this, this, this, this looking at it, this is, this is a recent thing, you know, and I think without COVID and other other issues like that, you know what I mean? There's something out of the pressure cook out of the situation that we've been through in the last year. And there I say the horror, horrible horrors of George Floyd. It's, it's somehow to me linked in with, with, with, with, with a whole bunch of different things, you know. Yeah, sometimes I just think without this particular period of COVID-19, it would, we'll be, we'll be thinking different, put it this way. Colston would still be where he is, right? You still be there, you know, that happened in a very particular moment in time, you know. And I think actually what that did you is, I think it's has Kristen Anne's words when, when she talked about monuments or as memorials really as mechanisms. So this idea of the memorial as a mechanism through which you can make promises, you know, from to the future about the past, you know. So this idea of, you know, which mechanisms do you use? And I think the sort of the currency of, of the temporary monument probably hasn't been higher. Certainly in sort of in the last 20, 30 years, then since I've been sort of following this, then it is that there are those, those questions around the fourth plinth and what does this mean or the, or the commission that that's taken on and what happens, you know, what happens to, to where they end up. The temporary monument is a thing because it lives in people's minds, you know, to me, or did you see that thing, you know, to me and people will, it becomes a memory, even though the physical thing has gone away, you know, and that's, that's, that's kind of interesting, I think, you know. So I'm doing that bad thing about sharing where I'm getting carried away in our conversation and forgetting the question and answers to the questions from our audience. So let me quickly pop a couple at you. This one is to Michelle by, well, an anonymous attendee who wanted to ask on, you know, could you elaborate on why high heart like to photograph himself and, and writing on that topic of fictiveness. Could you speculate what harsh collages would look like in 2021? I also have something to say about Victoria temporary, temporary monument. I mean, I mean, until this year where the sort of public gathering to honor what happened in Yemen is no longer allowed, what people do gather every June 4th as a temporary monument is sort of people gathering in Victoria Park in Cosway Bay. And our freaking harbor is called Victoria Harbor. So that's a Victoria for you. As for why sort of half photograph himself, I mean, one, one way of thinking about it is maybe it was a way of him teaching himself how to be an artist. And this is, you know, something that a lot of us at including Hamad have also discussed that, you know, the photography as a self-instructing tool where you can then see yourself with your work. Picasso posed like this with his work. Maybe I can also do that. And so there, there is sort of probably this sort of self-instruction through photography. We like to joke that how had I photo before I photo existed has Photoshop before Photoshop existed and took selfies before selfie was a thing. So maybe that was that and be very keen sort of, and this has been really useful. So I want to thank everyone in sort of sketching some of these ideas out. So the photography definitely as a tool of self instruction as well as collages. I don't know what his political leanings are were. So I can't really say what kind of collages he might make now today, depending on how he views the event of 2015 or 2019 2020 how he thinks about vaccines. So it could go either way. Yeah, I don't, that's, yeah, I'm also, I'm not entirely comfortable thinking about it that way either because I feel I don't have that. It's not my, yeah, I'm not, I just don't want to speculate it that way because to speculate it this way is so to foreclose possibilities in some ways. But I thank the audience for the question. There is a question from Pamela Kember to, to Sophia and you on whether and then she sort of putting it in juxtaposition with her, whether you see your own practices as being archival based in some respect. Sophia. Sure, I can go first. Archival based I mean definitely emerging from the archive, because a lot of the, although the imagery becomes very either simplifies a simplified or satirized or completely changing it looks unreal and fictitious the source of almost everything that I work with is from an archive of either objects or oral histories. So, so yeah, so my research and the imagery definitely emerges from the archives and then it warps across the way and becomes something else visually. It's the same thing for me. I mean, I, back in the day before the internet and before I had a computer, I would spend a lot of time in the local library going through Victorian London illustrated magazines and working with imagery from that and that was and today I would do that online but I still regret the fact that I don't do it physically enough. And what I do is I build up my archive of of transparencies, hand drawn transparencies and stuff and that becomes my, my practical a practical archive to work from images should I return to time and time again, but I've got a drawer full back at the studio of my other, I run from obsession to obsession and the other obsession, which I mentioned before is the chair, share certificates. So I've got loads of these things. And when I discovered that I could buy Confederate government share certificates from 1865, I got wildly excited. So I've got the collection which I've worked on some of them, a collection of Confederate share certificates which are printed on really thin crappy rice papery stuff because back there was a time when the Confederacy in the US was just about to die. So everything was cheap or I don't know but what I'm drifting off here but I mean I just briefly say what I find fascinating about working with this stuff and researching these companies and all that is the way things change is change. A Chinese share certificate which I bought 10 years ago for 40 pounds today I've got to spend 300 pounds because there's a whole rebirth of people buying history if you're from Hong Kong or China it's a whole, anyway I'll stop talking I'm going on a bit too much. Can I hear you Hamad? I've just unmuted myself I was just saying that we could go on talking forever we have unfortunately reached our timeline but for those of us who do want to carry on talking for a little bit longer because these Zoom seminars though fragmented and differing the risk that Tim pointed out to us of recreating the Darbar they are rather brutal in cutting us off immediately once we hit leave so you will get shared with you a link to another Zoom room where we could have the virtual equivalent of a drink or a coffee together after the event so please feel free to join us for a few minutes, a few seconds just to wave high or say hello and apologies that we've not been able to answer all the questions but perhaps you can come and post them to us what remains is to thank all of you for your wonderful presentations Hugh, Tim, Sophia, Michelle that acknowledgement of land and time and our entanglements as we sort of circulate amongst them and encounter each other thank you to Dany to Shauna for the brilliant way that you nurture us through the complicated terrain of Zoom conferences and thank you everyone who has spent this afternoon with us again next week where we have another double header for you on pedagogy and learning on Thursday the 10th and bureaucracy and agency on Friday the 11th and for those who can't get enough hop on to the other Zoom session and do say hello, thank you so much and acknowledging my wonderful co-conveners Ming and Sarah, thank you all for today