 Okay, good afternoon. Sorry, good afternoon. Yeah, maybe good evening if you're in Singapore. Good afternoon if you're in London and welcome to the second of this lecture series decolonizing trading and the museum in Southeast Asia. This is jointly run by the Asian Civilizations Museum Singapore and the SOAS Southeast Asian Art Academic Program. My name is Stephen Murphy. I'm going to be moderating this panel today. I'm currently the senior lecturer at SOAS. Yeah, and just quick beat just before we start. Oops. Yeah, we have six lectures in total in the series. So the four upcoming ones in the every Thursday. Just to note that there is a little bit of a time change for the last two because because we're working over different time zones. The clocks go forward and back at different times and different locations so the last two will actually be at 11am in UK time but remain at 7pm Singapore time. Okay, and there was questions last week about and where the recordings will be and they'll be on the Center for Southeast Asian Studies homepage. So as there's the link there but if you just Google that as well will take you there. Just bear with us because sometimes it takes us a few days to get the recordings up but we will get them up there within the space of hopefully a week at least at the latest so without any further ado, I will stop sharing my slide. I want to introduce today's speakers. They will both that's Pamela and Corey and Vera May to present for about 40 minutes. And then we have a discussant Shabir Hussein Mustafa. And then for the last 25 minutes or so we'll open it up to a Q&A to the audience. So without further ado, let me just introduce the first two speakers. At this point, Pamela and Corey is an assistant professor in art and media studies at the Fulbright University Vietnam. She was previously lecturer in Southeast Asian art at SOAS colleague of mine we crossed. She passed for about six months. She is the author of the city and time contemporary art and urban form in Vietnam and Cambodia that's been University of Washington Press 2021. And the other speaker tonight is Vera May and she's actually a PhD candidate here at SOAS but she's in New Zealand right now so again, thank you for another time zone difference I know it's late at night as well so we appreciate you joining us. Before this she spent several years working as a contemporary art curator at St. Paul's Gallery at UT Australia, sorry, at UT University in New Zealand, and the NTU Center for contemporary art Singapore among many others. Today, this evening is called Mining the Museum contemporary art and decolonial practice in Southeast Asia so without any further ado, Vera, I'll hand over to you. Greetings. Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much, Stephen, and to the Southeast Asian Art Academic Program for having us as well as the Asian Civilizations Museum and to Conan Chong for organizing on that end. So our presentation today is called Mining the Museum contemporary art and decolonial practice in Southeast Asia. And first I'll be discussing a little bit about some of the inspiration I guess for this talk before we divide into our respective inquiries into artworks from the region. So in 1992, the American artist Fred Wilson worked with the Maryland Historical Society and the contemporary organization to excavate materials and objects from the society's collection. What resulted was a profound exhibition Mining the Museum, which disrupted a conventionally polite and passive museum display of beautiful things that celebrate American history. The artist dared to exhibit what is often hidden in plain sight, the evidence of the invisible force and violent labor that enables wealthy settler colonies like the US to produce beautiful objects. When emerged from a period in art history, where women and people of color in particular, were expanding ideas of conceptual art to include direct and biting forms of institutional critique. Seeing inherent blind spots and existing art historical and institutional representation. These artists use methods of intervention performance and direct contact with museum and gallery structures to critique and update museum representation. Sorry. In 1989, the American artist Andrea Fraser staged museum highlights at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she posed as a museum tour guide and pointed out unseen aspects of the museum or overlooked aspects of the museum such as the shop the toilet the cloakroom and witty and ironic language kind of parroting the idea of a museum docent tour. So Wilson exists in this lineage of artists who have been underrepresented by the museum and uses the museum itself as a medium. In Mining the Museum, Fred Wilson uses careful choreography of objects to create jarring juxtapositions. For example, upon entering the exhibition, as seen in this image here, visitors were greeted by the busts of American statesmen, Henry Clay, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Andrew Jackson, a supporter and profiteer of slavery. Directly opposite empty pedestals labeled Benjamin Bannaker, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, all freed slaves who are crucial to advancing freedom for African Americans. The absence is highlighted by Wilson through the absence screaming at the biases inherent in museum collections. Perhaps the most well known of this exhibition that often circulates is the artwork intervention metalworks 1793 1880, where iron slave shackles were inserted into the same cabinet as opulent silverware, which undoubtedly belong to slave owners. It also highlights objects from the collections as anthropomorphic forms such as cabinet making where these sort of beautiful pieces of furniture were positioned as people standing around a whipping post watching something brutal take place. The effect is an unease and discomfort at how both of these objects often segregated from each other are actually related. The end of the spectrum is cruel violence and on the other hand is objects demonstrative of beauty and Wilson's exhibit they exist to directly and visually on the same spectrum. Wilson's artwork was a display of epistemic disobedience because it disrupted the exhibition complex showing a direct correlation between an immoral means of production and its beautiful output. A simple yet profound gesture of insertion disrupts a civilizing civilizing mission of the museum. It was a form of speaking back to power from the voice of an outsider smuggled in, forcing museum goers to confront a painful past and listen. Okay, I'll pass on to Pamela now. Okay, thank you, Vera. Wilson's intervention was hailed by established literature scholar and theorist of decoloniality, Walter Minulow as an exemplary act of aesthetic and epistemic disobedience. For Minulow, the exhibit established a decolonizing perspective through its intervention into the logic of knowledge and the logic of beauty intrinsic to the didactic work of museums. As such, it turns the museum into what Minulow describes as an alternative site of learning, learning to unlearn the principles that justified museums and universities, and to formulate a new horizon of understanding and of human living conditions beyond the sacred belief that accumulation is the secret for a decent life. With the notion of disobedience Minulow is referring more to the process of unveiling and in so doing, undoing the rhetoric that sustains a relationship between the aesthetic and the epistemic, particularly as they have long been defined by and in turn define universal structures of taste knowledge and subjectivity shaped by historical developments and ideologies linked to the colonial project. Perhaps the artist himself most succinctly described this kind of work. So this is a quote from Fred Wilson. I'm interested in beauty. If you think of beauty as an ultimate visual experience, but I'm also interested in beauty in that it can hide meeting. The world is complex and often we try to separate out all these experiences. This is beautiful. This is ugly. This is a beautiful experience. That's all it is. There is no meaning for the meaning is not important. People have to deal with the fact that there is meaning and beauty. There is meaning and ugliness. So in a lot of my work, I try to, if I can bring out that tension, the whipping post and chairs is a perfect example because the chairs are really beautiful. But that whipping post is certainly not. It's a very traditional display in a certain way. There's no manipulation of the objects other than their positioning, and that changes the meaning or their relationship or how you think about them. Looking at high end decorative arts in the chairs and the whipping post, they have a very different history but it relates very directly in that those people who sat in the chairs had some relationship with those who are on the whipping post. At roughly the same time that mining the museum took place at the Maryland Historical Society. Another example of aesthetic and epistemic disobedience was unfolding at various museum sites around the world. One of the most satirical performances titled the couple in the cage to undiscovered Amerindians visit the West by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez Kenya. The artist performed and exhibited themselves as representatives of an indigenous peoples from the fictitious island of Cali. One of the performances took place at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which had displayed human subjects during the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition. The performances and footage and interviews with audience members were filmed for a documentary titled the couple in the cage of what's an Audi Odyssey. The documentary showed that the satirical nature of the performances was not read as such by many, if not most of the audiences, thus demonstrating that there were colonialist residues of cultural essentialism, racism and ignorance that continued to inform the ways in which people encountered and accepted such a spectacle, especially when sanctioned by the context of the museum setting. In addition today, Vera and I will share additional examples of contemporary artworks inspired by and or set against the museological context works that ask questions about the gaps and historical narratives constructed through objects, the performativity and materiality of such objects, as well as non objects in relation to decolonizing discourses of reparation. So I will ask things over to Vera now to share a work by Prachaya Pinthong. Thanks Pamela. Okay, so how do we create and listen to decolonizing practices in Southeast Asia? What are they exactly? Southeast Asia is a region where by and large colonial emancipation has been gained. So decolonization can be defined by the need to bring about reparations of indigenous land and life, then we're in a situation where lands have been returned but we still have not disentangled from the colonial matrix of power, as Menolo suggests. So decolonization in this context must surely operate beyond the nation's strict contours and involved unlearning from what theorist Franz Fanon might consider the colonized mind. Methods of colonization are also not only the takeover of lands but also can persist in insidious forms. A region so vast with different religions languages and not only different colonizers but different methods of colonization deserves much more nuanced scrutiny. The etymology of the word culture comes from the word cultivation or the tilling of the land, the act of preparing the earth for crop, hinting towards an idea that all forms of culture can carry colonial dimensions. The theorist Walter Menolo cites the Bandung 1955 Asia Africa conference or the Conferency Asia Africa as the moment where decoloniality was first thought of as a conscious delinking to Western power. This watershed event is uniquely when Asia and Africa politically gathered without the West and were unified through the mission of anti-racism and anti-colonialism. Bandung was a refusal of economic subordination and cultural suppression and the emergence of the third world as not a place but a project. After all Bandung enabled Asia and Africa to and I'm quoting here the scholar Vijay Prashad produced its own image. Although often remembered just as much for his failures as well as it's somewhat mythic and romantic political union of two unlikely partners. Bandung set forth a symbolic precedence for two mutually subjugated continents to meet together and develop a lateral connection. And it's with these connections in mind I am going to attempt to think through the project by the Thai artist Prachay Pintong, which is called Broken Hill and was exhibited at the Chisholm Hill Gallery in London in 2013. I should disclose that the artist himself has not framed this project as consciously decolonizing. This is my reading and because it carries gestures of speaking back to power through highlighting the human agency of objects. This project echoes the legacy and epistemic disobedience that Fred Wilson set forth. It also speaks to other timely issues within this discussion of decolonization, not least because I argued activates a form of resource distribution, which is critical to the task of decolonization. And it does this through the act of study via the covert action of smuggling and these are ideas that I'll continue to delve into. So Broken Hill began with the artist Prachay Pintong's visit to Zambia, accompanying his friend and filmmaker, Jack Rawal Nymtarong upon hearing about a replica of the Broken Hill man skull in Kwaabe which is an established mining district in Zambia. The skull is the first historically significant human fossil found in Africa. It was retrieved through an extraction mission by Australian miners in 1921 and found by Swiss miner Tom's Wiggler, who was accompanied by an unnamed African miner and historical documents. The skull amassed curiosity for its shape conforming to evidence of Homo heidelberg genesis and is approximately 299,000 years old, which according to experts is actually quite a young skull. And this shape of the skull and the cranium in particular would give further fuel to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution that we human beings are descendants from apes. The skull was taken to London by the British British colonial authority somewhat dubiously and entered into the natural history museum's collection. So true to Prachay Pintong's style of working closely with other people, he commissioned Zambian filmmaker Missola Catherine Cascetti to make a short film about the skull and gave her free reign to decide the content. And it's in this short film that the artist visit the Lusaka National Museum, which is the site of the replica of the skull. And it's clear from their encounter with the tour guide that there is demand from local authorities for the skull to be returned. And he also notices that the guide at the museum, Mr. Mr. Kwanfa Chishala, seems very exasperated at having to tell the story about the skull, but having to use a replica in order to illustrate the story. The voices in the film respectfully refer to the skull as the Broken Hill Man's skull, which contrasts to the natural history museum's reference of the Broken Hill skull. And the simple semantic shift already reveals, I guess, the different relationships between the different specimens and human agencies involved. And in Zambia, a local playwright also refers to the skull as Kasanda Malombe, which means wealth multiplier. So that also adds a kind of another meaning to the skull as well. At the end of Kasakiti's film, for a patreation, speaks directly to this urgent tasks that I think museums are facing around object restitution. However, there are also other interesting aspects at play within this exhibition, particularly as it sits within the framework of a contemporary artist project. So the objects from Zambia, Pintong for the exhibition at the Chisholm Hall, required a formal loan agreement and a museum guide that had to travel as security with the object from Zambia to London. Pintong adhered to these requests and instead of passively putting on the exhibition with just the replica skull and the museum guide is just a sort of travel vessel. So I actually invited Mr Chisholm to travel to London for the duration of the exhibition and to directly give the story of the skull to visitors. So when audiences visited the Chisholm Hall, they would not only see the replica skull that had moved to London and interestingly was now only seven miles away from the original skull, but they also got to meet Mr Chisholm. So in its place at the Lusaka National Museum, Pintong also bought another replica skull from the internet, which stood in place of the borrowed replica. So during the time in London, both Pintong and Mr Chisholm visited the original skull at the National History Museum Collection. Mr Chisholm also took photographs of his time in London ranging from really touristic shots of London to things that he was interested in during his stay, including the Natural History Museum but also just touring London. And these photos were added to the exhibition in a kind of cleaver reversal of the lens from being kind of mess specimen to having command of the gaze layering the replica skull at the Chisholm Hall with biography and subjectivity. And it's these moments of communion, working with Prachaya and you know visiting the National History Museum throughout these projects that has resonances with the act of study. And the idea of study that I'm drawing upon is defined by theorists Stefano Hani and Fred Moten is this idea of getting together with those that you care about and figuring out what needs to be learned. Moten in particular defined study as not only the formal site of institutions but rather that it's an inherently collective and political activity. Something that he says means and I'm quoting him here being committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It's talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name or speculative practice. And that's the end of the quote. So upon Pintong's initial visit to Zambia for example there was no immediate output or exhibition in mind per se it was more of a process of listening to those. You know, in particular Mr Chisholm and the filmmaker that he was working with and listening to what they wanted to do and figuring out what would happen if this kind of story was placed on I guess an international platform like an exhibition at a contemporary art space. So Pintong the artist of the exhibition is mostly in the background and looking through documentation. Some most of the images, you know, he's kind of a reflection or in the background or yeah with Mr Chisholm very much kind of a figure that isn't prominent. From my understanding it also gave little instructions both to Mr Chisholm and to the filmmaker Kazaketti saying only that it all belongs to you so it all belongs to them. And the artist sharing of resources opens up the entry passage often needed and in some respects was smuggled in through the framework of being a contemporary art project. And working with Mr Chisholm Pintong says that giving responsibilities away is a platform to share possibilities. The idea of smuggling is seen as a curatorial tactic by scholar and curator Eric Rogoff where it can be defined as a quote, a form of surreptitious transfer of clandestine transfer from one realm into another, and a principle of movement of fluidity and of dissemination that disregards boundaries within this movement. The identity of the objects themselves are obscured, they are not visible or identifiable. They function very much like concepts and ideas and have it a space in a quasi legitimate way, end of quote. So it's a space of contemporary art and the fluidity of a contemporary artists projects that facilitates the transfer of the replica skull from Zambia to London, along with the subjectivity and the experience of its guide and guardian Mr Chisholm in a way that I believe, you know, a much traditional museum like the Natural History Museum, for example, would probably not facilitate or allow. So the simple yet radical act of sharing space symbolically and bringing Mr Chisholm to London and facilitating and resourcing his trip and experience to London adds a very direct layer of resource distribution. I'm not sharing the resource of this exhibition platform and the financial resource of producing the exhibition with the guide and the filmmaker also acknowledges that it can be a challenging act to find a podium in which to speak and to speak in a way in which others will listen. This contrasts quite heavily with the often extractionists and transactional curatorial practices of international museums and galleries, which often just take objects or parade the final product of acquiring objects or staging exhibitions as a kind of window dressing exercise of diversity. And unanimously from all accounts that I've heard and read about from about people who visit the exhibition is that audience often remark how lovely it is to meet Mr Chisholm and how passionate it is to hear the story about the broken helmet skull from him. We could unpack further aspects of Prachay's involvement as a Thai artist from, from Thailand, a country which had no formal colonizers but has been described as internally colonized by Thai scholar Tongchai Winnachikul or we could even further try and understand how resource refusal for example has been a strategy of keeping independent nations like Zambia and other African countries dependent on these international stages. Both of these aspects I guess speak directly to the sustained interest in Pintong's artistic practice around circuits of economic disparity and the distribution that often edges between what is visible and what is invisible. However, the task of decolonization is not simply structural it's also human. In Pintong's broken hill exhibition, we don't just see the act of attempting to delink from the West but actually a relinking to other contexts and people's outside of the West's borders. Broken Hill stretches what is permissible in the exhibition order and in doing so is epistemically disobedient for the sake of studying together through the contact zone, which ultimately disentangles us from the colonial predicament of a world divided between ourselves and invisible others. So we'll pass on to Pamela now. So, I like to open a discussion of the work by the London based British Singaporean artist Erica Tan by sharing something the artist said at a seminar organized by the University of Arts London decolonizing Arts Institute. I would like to respond to the question, what should the point of a collection be to this she responded by first asking, what is culture, and what are we collecting, taking a cue from a recent text by Coco Fusco titled, Institution's not new art. Erica emphasized that there's so much cultural activity and artistic production that is never collected and thus never receives institutional, hence historical recognition and representation. As such, it is inherently impossible for such institutions to reflect culture, and we should not pretend that they can. She then went on to consider how museums and institutional collections can attempt to address this through alternative modes of collaboration and curation through the active creation of opportunities and situations that present new ways of working with materials that in her words, don't sit too happily and comfortably on walls. The underscores here the problematic notion that a museum collection can be decolonized or serve as the basis for cultural representation when the very notions of incompleteness and misrepresentation are fundamental to the Constitution of an object centered collection. For interest in objects with no shadows, or those things and practices which are formless fugitive ill defined or that remain unilluminated, unactivated, unperformed, due to their perpetual residence and storage and the archives threads through much of her practice. The project that I'm sharing here titled The Forgotten Weaver 2016 to 2019 hinges on a spectral historical figure, Halima Binti Abdullah, a Malayan weaver who performed her craft at the 1924 British Empire exhibition in London as part of the Malaya Pavilion exhibit. Following their work together on the 2011 to 2013 exhibition, Camping and Tramping through the Colonial Archive, the Museum in Malaya, Erica was alerted by our discussant, Shabir Hussein Mustafa, to Halima's presence as a footnote in archival documents that noted her participation in and her death during the Empire exhibition, and her burial in an unmarked grave in Woking, England, which he encouraged Erica to locate. Her subsequent work on Halima developed in various iterations as she continued to collaborate with Mustafa on another project come cannibalize us why don't you, undertaken at the National University of Singapore Museum in 2014. I'd like to emphasize the interesting use of the metaphor cannibalism with its complex dimensions of violation and incorporation that underscored both camping and tramping in 2011, and then more explicitly income cannibalize us in 2014. When Etaio pointed out, museological cannibalism describes the museum turning on itself by subjecting its own institutional foundations to radical fatigue. This is a decolonial provocation that is worth thinking further, but for now I'll return to Erica Tan's work on the forgotten weaver series. In stage debates and filmed performances as well as for alongside installations with moving at weaving looms and digital projections iterations of the project were shown in Venice Holland China Singapore Malaysia and UK from roughly 2015 to 2019. So many of the series are questions about the gaps in historical and art historical narratives alternative definitions and modes of repatriation and the fluidity of artistic presence and subjectivity. Now most agree that a central definition of decolonization concerns notions of reparation of persons of objects of land of rights, contrasted with this tangible material and juridical definition. The concepts of decoloniality and D imperialization have been theorized as holding the potential to reach into deep ideological terrain into imagination itself as crucial to affecting lasting change. Scholars and artists have cautioned against the notion that restitution and the reworking of territorial methods serve as acts of actual acts of resolution. As art historian Nana do say Poku has argued, quote. Museums that adopt this language don't have to deal with their inherent racism. They merely need to find different ways to display collections of stolen indigenous art and the question here is that such museological solutions are palliative stock gaps, or a way of filling absence that actually perpetuates for getting and erasure. This is where I find the material presence of absence, an absence that is at times exacerbated by an excess of performativity and presence. In Erica's Halima series to be provocative and unsettling, and it is the latter that must describe the work of decolonization work that is intentionally troubling and difficult. In the Halima series voice in particular is foregrounded as metaphor and material in staging discourses of repatriation reconstitution and agency. There are two components in particular of the project where voice is used as a form of performative excess, and as a means of giving form to historical representation, but also to presentation itself. One is a staged debate integrated into the 2017 moving image work at the Giga the misplaced comma commissioned by the National Gallery Singapore for their experimental digital platform unrealized linked to their permanent displays of modern art from Singapore and Southeast Asia. The digital platform sought to provide new ways to open the displays to multiple perspectives and tangents of inquiry. As described by the artist at the Giga quote takes the form of debate as central to the discussions around Halima's relevance in a national institution currently engaged in post colonial reframing of modernism. The work is cited in a former colonial law court in a country where open debate and freedom of speech is highly monitored. The video brings together the displaced deconstructed loom. A performer of Malay dance and a group of young Chinese female debaters who deliberate on the legacy of the Empire exhibition, the position of craft, the validity of archival returns and the notion of representation. Another component I mentioned titled presentation by proxy is striking in that it was originally created as supplemental to the project, but I think it is now interval to it. It is a single channel video lecture performance presented in Erica's absence when she was unable to attend the 2013 Singapore book launch of come cannibalize us why don't you, published as an extension to the N us museum exhibition. She created the persona of Halima through a digitized computer voice with an Indonesian accent, the voice expressing apologies for Erica's absence and speaking on her behalf to present Halima story to the audience. Erica was conscious of the tensions and risks at work in these attempts to resurrect the historical figure through such contrived forms of speech. In Apigika, the misplaced comma note, when you try to speak as those who cannot be present you risk speaking for them representation as super imposition and performative resolution. Speaking as and not for Halima is a central quandary in the work, a task literally realized in tans efforts to recreate Halima's historical presence through the computerized reenactment of her voice. We can gesture both melancholy and deliberately right tan scripting of Halima's monologue and digital constitution of her voice asks the question of not just how she is ventriloquizing Halima through vocal configuration. But to what extent does the artist want Halima to ventriloquize her. We might see the artist here as a medium in both senses of the word. This this compulsion to speak as and inevitably for Halima is a fraud endeavor, and the question of the ethics of representation is an immediate concern. The use of the computerized heavily accented voice with its occasional semantic glitches and its mediatic anachronicity make this tension self evident. The ever presentness of this predicament also manifest in the debate form at its dialectical progression progression of statements that recur in cuts throughout at the Giga. In the debate staging in Singapore, set in the conjoined buildings of the former city hall and Supreme Court building chosen to serve as the architecture for the new National Gallery Singapore, which opened in 2015. There were various choices of performativity, including monologue dance and debate, each of which rely on the body and or the voice interact with the structures history, and its transformation for tan. This moment of transition represented a liminal moment between a theoretical architecture that performed Singapore's modern identity, and the opening of a museological institution that it firms its historical and national modernism. As described this was a site in the process of becoming akin to the status of a work in a studio for performances in the process of rehearsal. The form of the debate itself becomes the sorry form of the debate itself performs the possibility of open speech and public dialogue in a context where such a discursive form may at times find itself subject to constraint. The theater's attempt to sound out a logic of representation for Halima by performing orality as juridical process, returning to the historical premise of the site and of the enlightenment based rationale of the voice as a medium of justice. If one of the central questions at the heart of tans project is that of Halima subjectivity, and how to make her present when all we that we know of her exists in a footnote. This is more than a medium. It is one of the metaphors of incompleteness that recur throughout the project from the filmed installation in progress of the Cham loom in the Singapore galleries of the National Gallery Singapore to the very issue of art historiography and the place of women and craft. The voice scripted performed constructed provides a compelling hinge to the works throughout the project. The digitized voice in particular gives unsettling form to absence, whereas embodiment or the live presence of bodies and action, as often played a role in museological efforts to provide context for their objects, for example, using craftsman to perform the production of objects on display. Which Erica stages voice throughout the project as both embodiment and disembodiment sustains and at times uncomfortable sense of spectrality and indeterminacy. Such liminality also underscores the shape of the multi year project as a series of fragments and its iterations of incompleteness. So I will leave it there and hand it over to you, Stephen, to introduce our discussant Mustafa. Great. Thank you both Hamlan Vera for a very enlightening, very interesting talk that took us from Africa to Indonesia to Singapore to Thailand and back I think. Yeah, so anyway I will hand this over to to our discussant Shabir Hussein Mustafa is probably no stranger to many of you here he is a senior curator at the National Gallery of Singapore. At the gallery he leads the curatorial team overseeing between declarations and dreams, multi year exhibition that survey set the station perspectives from the 19th century to the present. And I can think of no better person than to respond to this, this presentation so yeah Mustafa over to you. Thank you. Thank you Stephen and thank you to the organizers for having me. Of course, Vera and Pamela for allowing me to share some thoughts about their presentations. I've sort of prepared a short text, which I kind of go through and as I'm kind of making my way through it. I'll offer some some some questions for for our speakers today. Over the past few days as I said about attempting to digest Vera and Pamela's thoughts, a friend suggested I take a look at Julieta sings a recent and not so recent book on thinking mastery dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. This study of how mastery as an ideological material and dialectical concept works across a range of contexts from the private confines of the home to the classroom in humanitarian projects, neoliberal networks, and in relation to our conversation today, anti colonial movements and their reflexes. And thinking mastery is a sprawling and fantastic read. And from my point of view, offers such incredible insights into a range of matters that I have been invested in as part of my own curatorial work. And what I also offer today are coming from the space of the curatorial space filled with contradictions, but also possibilities within the ever evolving constantly evolving context of Singapore and by extension, Southeast Asia. This is an incredible work that is informed by what I call the insults of the colonial and something I critique in my own humble way as a worker who operates through its kind of resultant mechanisms and provincialism. But going back to I'm thinking mastery. I want to highlight that the book is not alone in its enterprise of seeking change, but is couched within the disciplinary formation of post colonial studies something that is also at the heart of what we are trying to do today. And it draws from the white spectrum that has emerged in light of anti colonial revolts, you know the so called spectrum that stretches across an array of speakers from sadness and alathas to God. What makes I'm thinking mastery particularly intriguing for our conversation at hand today as well is the authors refuses to offer a definition of mastery itself. Instead the book offers three key features through which mastery may be identified by mastery mutilates mastery subordinates and mastery requires hierarchized relations I hope I got that right. In order to highlight the thesis sing conducts discourse analysis, you know in a classical kind of Foucauldion sense, I suppose, leaving in her own biographical positions along the way on two figures, Franz Fanon already evoked by Vera earlier and mohendaskar and chan Gandhi, the, the, the, the, the, the, the liberator of India in one way or another. And I quote, I quote saying here, across anti colonial discourse, the mastery of the colonizer over the colonies was a practice that was explicitly disawak. And yet in their efforts to decolonize anti colonial thinkers in turn advocated practices of mastery, these could be corporate linguistic and intellectual towards their own liberation close call sing then continuous. For thinkers is diverse as mohendaskar and chan Gandhi and Franz Fanon decolonization was an act of undoing mastery by producing new masterful subjects. I argue and this is still sing speaking that this discourse of anti colonialism which was geared towards the future did not interrogate thoroughly enough its own masterful engagements. It did not well enough in other words on how its complex entanglements with mastery would come to resonate in the post colonial future it's so passionately anticipated with fan on sing sing sing breaks down his thoughts to discuss forms of political and political masculinism and the universal male subject he desired as an alternative to the colonial subject, who of course came at the expense of gendered subjectivities with Gandhi and this has been of course discussed in the literature by by a range of scholars from the subcontinent as well, his notion of Swaraj or self rule involved the reconstitution of a male post colonial subject that came in the face of women as keepers of age or practices without agency. In effect mastery and our constant attempts at countering or resisting it have led us to create a series of regimes being established such that the colonial formation just came to be replaced with a post colonial shape. Despite all the inclusive aims of figures like Gandhi and fan on a range of groups have come to be left behind and I quote sing here again from colonized women, indigenous peoples, the uncivilized groups of the emergent nation state, the animal and nature itself close Long story short, I'm thinking mastery says, and I quote again, there is an intimate link between the mastery enacted through colonization and other forms of mastery that we often believe today to be harmless worthwhile, even virtuous close coming. I think the use of the word virtuous is an interesting choice something we could keep in view as we make our way through the conversation today. The word virtuous and it's related now in virtuosity also has a tradition within art history, marking great technical skill. Suffice to say the argument being forwarded here is critical in reading present times. If you are to recognize the complexity and contradictions within the colonial manures, we need to recognize the paradox of mastery itself. I'm doing can enable insights into contemporary practice, something that is at the heart of our conversation today, and globalize life itself right so the movement of beings bodies knowledge systems ideas in much more fluid ways than than we had expected 300 years ago. And although saying refuses to define mastery I want to kind of stay with this for just a little longer. The theories does offer some way out of this double by by adopting a stance of the humanism, which is provisionally defined as a practice of recuperation, stripping away of the foundations of colonial and neocolonial mastery that continue to render some beings more human than others for the humanism to take effect. The subject would need to engage in. And this is an expression I borrow vulnerable reading by inhabiting ourselves differently and allowing for these vulnerable subjects to speak to each other in modes that are ambivalent and grounded in a kind of a really mess of contradictions and entanglements. So the mess is a good thing in this sense is a productive thing. The final effect being an unlearning of human subjectivity itself with the hope of a better future. So here comes my first query for our speakers today. In our surveys of the projects you discuss and I'm not asking you, or asking both of you to speak on behalf of the artists but as sort of channels that think through the artworks. When we think about subjectivities, as they are presented in the works, are there moments when mastery is unlearned or rendered ambivalent. So where are you alluded to this by saying that all forms of culture carry colonial dimensions. This is a quote from you. Pamela you call it after Walter Mignolo, and I quote undoing the rhetoric that sustains a relationship between the aesthetic and the epistemic. I wonder how we may read Mr. Chisala, the Broken Hill Manstall, and Juan Halima Binte Abdullah, and the Charm Loom today. What are subjectivities as represented within the art gesture towards who the contradictions and entanglements that inhabit their representation, offer some sort of an insight into a more equitable future. Or is this too much to ask from contemporary art. So question I have. I haven't resolved it myself. Maybe that's why I keep going to work every day. Thank you. With regards to the Broken Hill Manstall and by extension, the entangled Mr. Chisala, and the figure of Halima Binte Abdullah and the case of the entangled Charm Loom is guided by this quote, actually, which comes from from the teacher of the Persian poet Rumi. And this is a quote. It says, one person makes a thousand efforts to show something from himself, and another hides himself with a hundred tricks. I would contend that the artistic projects we grapple with today suggest to us that the figure who shows himself and the figure who hides are indeed the same. They are merely shades of the same combination. And so the more one attempts to make them apparent, the more trouble they create. So let me repeat the quote again. One person makes a thousand efforts to show something from himself, and another hides himself with a hundred tricks. And actually, this is precisely the point. And perhaps it is here that we should stay with the trouble, so to speak. I mean, of course, modeling from Donna Haraway, the suggestion to stay with the trouble, so to speak. I now want to move into a second feature of my response and kind of reaching the end to dwell deeper into the methods of working that are being discussed in your respective papers. I draw upon my own limited sort of competence in the field of curating. Goes without saying that the curatorial is standard to the cultural object in its myriad shape shifting forms from painting, sculpture, installation, archives, art, artifacts, photography, to basically all forms of the culture cross. And also intertwine in the circulation of these cultural objects in its treatment and conservation contradictions and also the cultural objects ability to open up space for challenging perceptions of what it means to collect speak and distribute them today. At the heart of this work is a struggle for power between a range of vulnerable and less vulnerable human and non human beings. I sometimes wonder in late stage capitalism as older conventions are undone. I have also wondered what is left in its wake. What stays and what departs. How can we develop modes of working that exercise sings call for an active vulnerability and ambivalence. How can we make the transitional space for the circulation of objects this space, which is at once inhabitable but also mutable known and yet to be known seen and unseen. As a result, two further questions emerge and and I suppose this is really a kind of an invitation to unpack observations that you've already made in in in your papers. Prachaya and Erica are both filmmakers. Could you talk about the role the filmic medium plays in relation to the two projects at hand, that is, for the broken hill and the forgotten. The purpose of making film become a means or maybe even an excuse to go places and explore paradoxes. What sort of potencies do the films in particular generate in relation to the, the, the decolonies and kind of something that is locked no between the medium. And the site within which it is produced, you know, in quite literally as well. Second, both projects engage with museology in a in a direct manner right there is no ambiguity here and it is really a kind of engagement with museology however one wants to define it context to context variations. And as a result actively intervene into the process of exhibition making itself. Now could you both reflect a little bit more upon the performative elements, both projects generate in relation to the museum is the aim here to kill the museum, while trying to revive it at the same time. Is it a kind of a kind of a double bind I guess, or is the museum and an irritation. I, I, I liken the museum to a sort of a headache that refuses to go away, whereby the headache is not verbal or visual or emotional. Although it is all of these things. It's a kind of a condition whereby you can work, eat, drive, nap, write, but the headache remains. There is no remedy, except the realization that in all the cultural objects that surround me, they simultaneously carry and denounce all previous identities. Yeah, that's maybe a kind of a response, I suppose, to the question of the museum and and and what what we may do with it today. So maybe I'll leave it there and perhaps. Yeah, love to hear from from our speakers. Thank you. Great thanks. Yeah, I'll hand this directly to Pamela and Vera. Vera, do you want to go first. Or I can't. Sure. Maybe you go first. I'm formulating so. Thank you so much, Mustafa, for your questions. I confess I have notes, because I had to read through your script a few times because the questions are so incredibly profound that I'm not even going to pretend to have sort of satisfying answers to I didn't intend to read that. Yeah, no, sorry, sorry to disturb. No, I love it because you actually you pulled out some of the things that I hope to dwell or spend more time on in a longer piece on Erica's work. And I actually wanted to go back to an earlier part before you sort of formally gave us a couple of questions you gave us some things to think about. A question of representation and subjectivity. You were, you asked, I wonder how we may read Mr. Kamfua Chisala and one Halima binti Abdullah today, what do their subjectivities as represented within the, the arts gesture towards do the contradictions and entanglements that inhabit their representation offer some sort of insight into a more equitable future or is this too much to ask from contemporary art. On that note, I was just thinking about the difference between subjectivity and representation. And, you know, we can, we can think about artistic subjectivity. That's one of the advantages of contemporary art is that we have a chance to actually get to know artists in our time, and we can sort of formulate ideas about their subjectivity, but anything of the past. So in terms of historical or art historical, you can only construct a representation. We can only make guesses or estimations about subjectivity. And really, you know what we construct these representations they have more to say about our subjectivity today than subjectivities of those historical figures who will always be kind of spectral. There's a lot about the Halima project, which the artist, which Erica has even explained has a lot to do with herself as a mixed race British Singaporean artists based in London who is often sort of categorized in curatorial ways as a kind of hybrid subject or you know she was exhibited in the diaspora pavilion at the Venice Biennale. And so there's ways in which she's kind of speaking through Halima right and so that's why I use this analogy of ventriloquism. So think about the way she's constructing that voice and thinking okay she ventriloquizing Halima's issue, or she's actually trying to have Halima speak for her, give her a voice as to these quandaries of subjectivity and identity. And then you had also commented about you mentioned various quotes. You said that all forms of culture carry colonial dimensions. And, you know, me quoting me know low about. And, you know, sort of undoing the rhetoric that sustains a relationship between the aesthetic and the epistemic is crucial to decolonial work. And I guess this is something I continue to grapple with this is the idea of undoing as an impossibility. Right. Is that enough to say that exposing something is an act of undoing, you know, undoing meaning, you know, giving us the sense that something can be reverted, you know, we can revert back to a previous state that we can undo. Can we ever undo learning you can never undo learning you can learn more things you can accumulate new ideas they can't unlearn or undo things. So I guess it just along those lines I was thinking about also what is what is the crux of decolonial work and decolonizing work and we know what it is on the one hand as something that is about restitution and reparation and it's about justice and rights, but in terms of the ideological work. It's about bringing certain forms of rhetoric certain mechanisms of ideology into focus to the point of disturbance right to the point where one is profoundly unsettled, and something happens there. But it's not a form of undoing, you know, so I guess this is where I. I grapple with Minulo's idea of delinking. Right. Okay, so as for the question about filmmaking. So narrative is so crucial to Erica's work and movements and duration speech script dialogue. It's really hard to imagine it taking place in any other medium, especially because the sound is so important to her work. Right setting, you know it's hard to the power of the debate is amplified by its setting. And yeah I mean I guess. So for me it's just hard to imagine her work taking any other form. And then I guess one can also talk about film as something that's presumed to be a kind of inherently democratic medium that you know it's not an object that has to be contained or just, you know, put in one place that it has the potential to travel the open access or accessible and sort of mutate into new forms. And film can also be cannibalistic in a way right. It can reuse and edit and, you know, sample from other films and things like that. And that's where a lot of ideological critique can can take place. And then the question about the formative elements that both projects generate in relation to the museum. Yes, I think it is it's a crucial context for the Halima work, even though it's not the same as the menu low interventions or you know, couple in the cage, and it's not centered around a specific object. It really picks up on certain fragments of things. I think the museum in a sense it's a kind of aura for the work. And is the aim here to kill the museum while trying to revive it. I don't think we should ever kill museums. I think they're so historically and ideological loaded that they're valuable, and they are, they are still, you know, probably they are the number one sort of public resource of art, you know, they are a public art historical resource it's still, you know, the place where, you know, sort of transformative encounters can happen in terms of, you know, audiences and objects, and there's still so many possibilities for alternative ways of engaging with those objects and one thing I was going to bounce back to you as a question. One of the things that I was, if you could talk about unrealized the digital platform, maybe after there goes because I'd love to hear more about the conception of that which I think it's fantastic. So I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to stop here and I'll pass it to Vera. Thank you. I also took notes but needed to digest a lot of the brilliant response that you formulated for us. I guess I wanted to think about the text that you reference by Julia sing and thinking mastery, and you know can't help but think about, I mean some of my own research but this moment in Bandung, we're in the opening communique President Socarino who's Indonesian independence president who opens this sort of historic conference opens with this line which is we are masters of our own house again. And, you know, we all know how this turns out right when one colonial regime leaves it's not like this sort of. Yeah, this decolonial moment in some senses was short lived but I wanted to think, I guess more about your the, the term or the methods that sing users is this method of vulnerability, did you say, or like how to be open. And, yeah, using that to think about, I guess, in some respects, Prachayas work and his, you know, his friendship has, yeah, I don't know what else to call it I don't think, you know, don't necessarily think collaborations the right term. But it's a very sort of human encounter that happens between them and that happens when you visit the exhibition it's not just an encounter with an object but something happens in this face to face interaction which you know I guess I could draw upon from live in us like that we owe an ethical responsibility to when we have a face to face interaction. I'm not sure how that links to this idea of dehumanizing because in some respects I feel like that and trenches the kind of human aspect of, of ethics and responsibilities that we have. Yeah, towards the material when we know that it comes from, you know, this encounter with a person. Oh, and that yeah and that this idea of vulnerability that sing talks about. You know, the term vulnerability I guess I was interested in looking at it but it, you know, the etymology of it translates as an openness to being wounded, which is kind of actually similar to this idea of exposure, and which comes from the word exposition which you know in French means exhibition as well so there's a kind of interesting I guess relationship and in these kind of methods. But yeah in this exposure and empathy happens and you know in this exposure to the kind of face to face encounter that I think. Yeah as a methodology it's, it's, you know, yeah, I guess, yeah again, this idea of decolonization is not simply kind of structural or conceptual but you know how do we kind of, I guess implicate these like very kind of human needs. Yeah, for justice but also for, I guess understanding each other within this process. In terms of. Oh, the ambivalence that you cite. Yeah to stay with the trouble and I think in original notes. We say how can we develop projects that exercise things call for an active vulnerability and ambivalence. And I think that's what's really kind of wonderful about contemporary curatorial practice at least as a kind of, there's so much you can, you know, hide behind in a way that you can kind of mask as an artistic project, but maybe is actually operating as something else entirely that might not be material at all. And you know, and I think in some ways, Prachaya bringing Mr. Chishala to London which is something that he wanted to do it's an opportunity that Mr. Chishala had that he would never have had if it wasn't for this project. You know, which I was telling me that he'd never left Sambia before, you know, he'd never get to see the original skull without, I guess this kind of, you know, this mask or this charade of a of an art project. Yeah, again, is why I kind of like this idea that there is this kind of smuggling capacity of curatorial practice and that, in some ways I think you know we have a responsibility to sort of, I guess as curators to sort of play to that, you know, and to sort of be disobedient ourselves within these institutional structures that were often employed by. Oh, in terms of the filmmaking, so Prachaya didn't make the film, he commissioned a Zambian filmmaker to make the film and I think in both instances with the project so as part of the project Broken Hill, he also gave Mr. Chishala a camera that, you know, he then took photos around London and then those photos were exhibited as well. They were left in a stack on top of the box that the replica skull came in that people could kind of peruse. But you know he has no sort of ownership or copyright on any of those things, but this kind of very direct action I guess of, of giving the camera and giving the kind of resource away to this filmmaker, you know, directly from the voice of the place that they're working. I think, again, it speaks to this idea of resource distribution at which I, you know, I think it's really going to become more pertinent within like sort of direct decolonial method it's you know, it's going to be, I guess, yeah, I feel like there will be sort of more demand for like really direct as opposed to sort of conceptual methods around decoloniality. But yeah, I think maybe I'll stop my response there. I'm conscious of time must find you want to quickly talk about the project they both alluded to and then I think we should take some questions from the audience. Quick one. Now I just wanted to kind of respond quickly. You know my, my, my earlier kind of provocation. We got to kill the museum and revive it at the same time. I actually do think that if we are to exercise vulnerability. This is the space for contemporary practice however one chooses to define it. He's quite ideal in this regard, largely also because emphasis is, I mean this is this is kind of connected to the unrealized response as well that the emphasis is on on processing itself, and the outcomes are somewhat mutable, I suppose, and kind of left to form or unfold, right, maybe even see and maybe not see. And and and but as a result generate a conversation, even such as this. And just going back to unrealized. It started off when myself and colleagues at the gallery were developing the inaugural hang off of Singapore Gallup. So I was affiliated with Singapore galleries in the first couple of years of the National Gallery. And we were kind of wondering what exactly was at stake and whether the formation that was happening within the gallery was something that needed analysis and critical analysis and as a result we invited three artists, we might even even Chong, Ho Zun Yan and Erica Tan. And we kind of said to them hey you know you can you can find ways to generate whatever it is that you feel is required at this moment in time this is what we're doing. They also had access to the galleries and so as you kind of see that to some extent in in in Erica's films and also in Zunyan's films. And he responded by by saying that he wanted to manage a Twitter feed. So he would kind of treat on a daily basis with kind of cannibalized titles of past exhibitions that went all the way back to 2018 19. So the formation of Singapore I suppose until 2015, right, which is also the year in which the National Gallery opens Zunyan, on the other hand, responded with this print that has been at the center of debates in his own work. It's a print of a tiger, kind of pouncing out of out of the Singapore jungles and, and in a sense seemingly attacking GD Coleman kind of a colonial surveyor engineer who built some of the colonial structures in Singapore. But the print is made by a German engraver by the name of Heinrich Leuterman. But Zunyan actually looks at the Indian convict labor that surrounds GD Coleman, and then that's a result began to develop conversations with migrant workers at Singapore. So it's all then from in a kind of surrealist way and then Erica's work came out of that. But right from the start, it was a formless project. In a sense, it was never meant to be displayed. Eventually we resolved that it would be kind of exhibited through the gallery's app. This was all the way in 2015. This is not like now when apps are the rage or whatever. And that was sort of it. There is a kind of a publication that I've been making but never finished shows my degrees of competence, I suppose. But it's actually called this is not a publication, which is essentially just boxes filled with archival documents that have been gathering on museology and curating in Singapore since the 19th century. So these are kind of things that I'm just doing on the side which are connected to these methods of thinking and working. And they materialize. Sometimes they don't, but that's okay. We don't have to push everything out for the sake of productivity. Right. So I think it's trying to kind of grapple with these questions. I did have one question, Stephen for both our speakers if, if I could squeeze it in. Okay, we've got to be quick though. Yeah. I have one question I maybe we don't need to address it, but it's just a question, both Erica and which I actually work through proxies. And this is interesting, I think, and maybe it was something that we could discuss at some point. Yeah, just just a comment for the moment. We could go through Q, Q and a, I think just is just a comment. Okay, sure. Yeah. All right, let me let me take some of the questions. And the first one is a specific question about from Malenka about Fred Wilson's work. She says, they say the artistic method of juxtaposing. How would you comment on the fact that the audience misinterpreted the whipping pole as in relation to slavery I find it important because it reminds us of the manipulating nature display. And then this is a quote from Fred Wilson that says, although the post was built around 1885, and had never been used on slaves, many of those who saw the exhibit left the museum, certain that it had been employed for that very purpose. That's my doorbell. I don't know if that diminishes the impact of the work to be honest with you. I mean, even if it had never actually been put to use. I mean, it's the power of the symbol, right. This, this sort of the force of the symbol and juxtaposed in such a way I don't think that there's anything sort of manipulative or insidious about about what he's doing. That's just my opinion. I don't think it diminishes the work. It could reflect the effectiveness of it actually that even, you know, that that this post wasn't used in that manner but the creative vote that the belief in the visitors. And does anyone follow up or I feel I should move on to this. Yeah, I think the second question we've talked about it a bit but if anybody wants to maybe jump in again. We've had the key museum practices which are relevant to the process of museum decolonization. Also, what would you say are the main areas for future research and practice of museum decolonization what is the next step. What needs more work. I mean, most of us has talked about that quite a bit. Do either of you want to follow up a little bit or it's a big question, obviously. All right, I think yeah, we, you know. Okay. All right, Phoebe Scott, one of most of his colleagues has a question. Thank you for the excellent presentation. I think that perhaps was not discussed at length was the type of contemporary art projects you describe are quite often commissioned by museums are supported by museum residencies. I was wondering if you might say more about the implications of this. I also wonder if, despite their intentions these kind of initiatives can run the risk of devolving the museum's responsibilities to decolonize onto the artist. I'm not referring here specifically to National Gallery Singapore, yes, good disclaimer yeah this is something I wonder as well myself you know I don't, I don't deal with contemporary. But I sometimes I feel that as well that that you know artists and empire springs to mind for me and where you know the critical voice of the decolonizing voice is sort of sidestep by curators and put on to the contemporary artists so I think that is maybe going to spend a few minutes discussing right now. Well I think this kind of goes back to this methodology of vulnerability, perhaps that is suggested through the Juliet is saying where, you know, ultimately, we have to put like curators have to put themselves on the line and not kind of hide behind an institution. You know, be direct in the authoring and the challenging from within and make that a bit more transparent and obvious I guess that would be my. Yeah, because I do think it is problematic to outsource risk on to an artist. Yeah, that would be my response. Yeah, I mean I think this is a this is a question and critique that has been circulating in a lot of debates and discussions right where it just seems that the work of decolonization on behalf of the museum through such commissioned forms of institutional critique is a kind of performative armature for the museum, right. So that's where people are asking, you know what's really going on behind the scenes in terms of, you know, how many curators are people of color, you know, and who holds the power and what kinds of, you know, who are stakeholders in the museum so that's where you know it's not just about what's, it's not just about the museum putting on these exhibitions or inviting these forms of institutional critique but it's also about what kinds of forms of material. And even political change are happening at the heart of the museum in terms of the power structures, right, and the sources of capital that are supporting the institutions so I think, you know people do see beyond the exhibition making in the curatorial aspect and our levy and critiques at the power structures behind the museums. Yeah, must have had any follow up or will I go on to the next. To say that the context in which we operate Singapore is rather unique. I think, you know, as far as I know Singapore have not colonized another nation straight. So I think the space from which the curator speaks is also quite important within all of this and of course the work itself. I mean the exhibitions must also advance these questions. And I mean personally I do influence these questions in my projects in one way or another so I think it comes down to that. It's a kind of ethical space I spoke about it a little bit earlier in my response as well I mean of course the vocation of vulnerability but also the ethical self that he's confronting I think. So I think this is an ongoing work, maybe museology I guess in different ways but curatorial work at this moment I mean the debate is already ongoing amongst curators I think so I think this is an ongoing ongoing matter. I think. Yeah, as I say, let's, let's fight. Let's do it. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Yeah, I absolutely hopefully this this series will contribute in some small way. Yeah, okay, we have time for a few more actually did the next question. Something that I was thinking about as well actually from Mustafa and you're referring to on thinking mastery. Yeah, I mean, you know is the museum does the museum then in the post colonial become a form of mastery as well right. Probably one of the criticisms that could be definitely maybe has been level that museums within Southeast Asia as well in terms of sort of what narratives or sort of nationalism they promote. And but either sounds question would be yeah would it be culturally appropriate to say that cultures contribute to some form of colonization in regards to indigenous cultures. And how do you argue that statement, it is having more power over animals and land, given how they've been at the worst end of European colonialization. Right so this, maybe a bit unpacked there but anybody wants to respond. Oh yeah so yeah obviously yeah I was meaning that specifically I guess this idea that all culture can carry from dimensions of colonization insidious or obvious you know, the taking of and oppressions of peoples into systems of power that are foreign to them. But yeah, specifically I was thinking about, I guess situations in Southeast Asia where the colonizers leave and the indigenous people do take power and enact that power and territoriality over other peoples often other indigenous peoples as well and how do we negotiate that tension. Yeah, that's what I was, I guess, alluding to because, you know, yeah, we all know that after independence happens, it doesn't mean that the task of decolonization is over. Yeah, that, you know, formerly colonized peoples, sometimes enact colonial power through new regimes as we've seen. Yeah, very firm examples in Southeast Asia, I think so. I think question and I think it's a historical question too because I don't know if there's anywhere in the world where you look at historical examples of territorial expansion and state formation where some kind of imperialist or colonial project is not at work in terms of the infringing on, you know, other people's lands and attempts to culturalize them, you know, so it could look at Vietnamese history, for example, you know, Vietnam is very well known as having been colonized by China for 1000 years and then by the French and then you know American occupation of the kind. I think Vietnam also has the history of territorial expansion and Vietnamization surrounding Khmer lands, Chan lands, so I think I mean it's a question to investigate historically, I think this kind of violence happens with any kind of territorial expansion, right in state formation. Right, yeah, and I think, I think, in terms of Vietnam, hopefully you and presentation a few weeks may touch on some of those points. So one final question and then we have to wrap it up and it's from Faisal who's going to present next week with Conan. Yeah, so he's asking with both examples broken Hill skull and Erica Tan's work, the artists do not come from the communities presented and represented in the works. I think that the artists probably earned money through the commissions of these works by the respective institutions from presenting another community's narratives and histories to the conversation on decolonize in the museum. And I apologize if it's improper to be talking about money and no need to apologize whatsoever it is very appropriate to to go straight, I think to raise the issue of, yeah, financial renumeration as well in these issues. I'll leave it at that. Anybody want to follow up on that question. I guess I was trying to enter that when I meant resource distribution I mean literally money. You're more subtle about it. Maybe I want to diplomatic or more elegant in my language but I'm yeah you know, for example, yeah funding. Mr Chisholors trip to London and his stay there. I think is a form of resource sharing. I mean, I don't know the exact nuances of that but you know that was not without significant. You know, yeah. So I think yeah, this is a very direct form of resource sharing. Sorry, Mustafa go. Where I'll just add a kind of footnote to that resources. Not just in terms of money but also the power of passports. Yeah, yeah. So we'll get to go there is a real question. And I think I think this is as connected so I think it's a good question. We need a symposium by itself. Totally and how to facilitate a visa, you know, I don't know if Mr Chisholors work would have seen him without this loan agreement, you know what I mean. Yeah, so I think that's one way I guess another way of smuggling that I like to think about it at least. Great yeah I think on that note I'll probably have to call this really rich and fascinating session to close I learned a lot I think it's in maybe the best sense it's raised as many questions as it has answers and things for us to keep thinking about throughout the series but also in our practices and in our research and I hope the audience found it worthwhile as well and the recording will be up on the SOAS Center for Southeast Asian Studies website. Just bear with us sometimes it takes a few days, there's been a backend work we need to do to get it up there. And so it will be up. So thank you again. And yeah so that just leads me to on behalf of myself and Conan. Yes, I'm sorry at the start I forgot to mention that of course Conan is my partner in this endeavor, and he'll be presenting next week with Faisal. Yeah, so on behalf of SOAS and also the Asian Civilizations Museum. I'd like to thank Pamela Vera and Mustafa for a really wonderful talk presentation and discussion today and of course the audience. So thank you everybody and hopefully see you again next week. Thank you. Thank you so much.