 Diolch journalistiaid.fa'r dreif iawn, pan yw'r cyflwytaeth fadau'r cydwysig neu'r cyflwytaeth. Yn y byddai'r cyflwtaeth, mae'r chilyniadau'r cyflwytaeth gwymedd o'r hyn yn dquarteredig. Mae'n gwybod eu bod yn diolch ar y ddechrau. Felly, roedd yn ddechrau. Mae'r cyflwytaeth gwybod wedi'u gwirioneddol I'm delighted to welcome so many of you to the third of this year's Paul Mellon lectures, which all take the form of free live webinars, and which are devoted to the theme of the museum and gallery today. Before telling you a little more about this programme of lectures and introducing today's speaker, Yvonne Blaswick, I thought I'd quickly describe the format for today's event. And you'll see a holding slide coming up on your screens now. The event will begin with a presentation lasting approximately 45 minutes, and this will be followed by a brief in conversation and questions from the audience. As audience members, you can type your questions using the Q&A function and we really encourage you to do that and to engage with what you're going to hear. And I look forward to asking those questions for you to Yvonne on your behalf. This session will be recorded and will be made available to the public after the event. Close captioning is available, and you can click the CC button at the bottom of your screen to enable captions. And you can also keep in contact with us during the talk using the chat function, which you'll also find at the bottom of your screen on our events assistant, Danny Convy is monitoring the chat there and will be able to respond to you. The Paul Mellon Lectures take their name from the philanthropist and art collector Paul Mellon, who some five decades ago set up the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in order to support research into the history of British art and architecture. The lectures, which are sponsored by the Centre and are organised in collaboration with our partner Institute, the Yale Centre for British Art were inaugurated in 1994. And since then they've been delivered by Emily by distinguished historians of British art and some of you will have come to our last series in the spring of 2019 or watch the recordings online. When Tim Barringer spoke to us on the topic of global landscape in the age of empire, and he delivered that in person at the National Gallery in London, and then in New Haven at Yale. Given the context of the global COVID pandemic, this series of Paul Mellon Lectures is a bit different and responds to a very particular moment. Rather than ask a single speaker to give the whole series, we decided to invite a group of museum and gallery directors to address the theme of the museum and gallery today. Reaching out to the people who run some of the world's most distinguished museums and galleries and asking them to discuss their own institutions and other such institutions and how they were responding to the challenges of this moment and reflect more broadly on the issues that really concern them as they shape the direction of their organisations. In this series so far we've heard from Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery in London, Cainwyn Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. This evening's lecture will be given by Ivana Blaswick, director of the White Chapel Gallery in London. Ivana has held that post since 2001 and is also a curator, a critic and a lecturer. She's someone who bridges many worlds, particularly those of curating and publishing, and she's also created through the programme that she runs some of the most thought provoking connections between historic and contemporary art. She is formally at Tate Modern and London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, as well as working as an independent curator globally. Ivana is series editor of White Chapel Galleries and MIT's Documents in Contemporary Art and she's written monographs and articles on many contemporary artists and published extensively on the themes and movements in modern and contemporary art, exhibition histories and institutions. Today Ivana will talk to us on the topic of what our collections good for, and I'll hand over to her now to pose some responses to that really intriguing and thought provoking question. So Ivana, it's so great to have you with us, welcome, and we're really looking forward to your lecture and I'll join you on screen afterwards for the Q&A session. Thank you Sarah. It's a great pleasure to be here this evening and I'm only sad that I can't be with you in person. So, before we embark on our voyage through collections, Mayor, just quick disclaimer, terrible on tech. So if anything goes wrong, please bear with me except my apologies. The Mullen team will rise to my aid so now I'm going to start sharing my screen and hopefully all will be good. So what are collections good for. 25 that cultural historian Andreas Heisen observed in his book Twilight memories that quote, perhaps for the first time in the history of avant-garde, the museum has changed its role from whipping boy to favorite son in the family of cultural institutions. The museum's role as a site of an elitist conservation, a bastion of tradition and high culture gave way to the museum as mass medium as a site of spectacular mise ence and operatic exuberance and quote. If we look at the figures that the number of people that attended museums this is in 2018 you'll see this tremendous shift from the 20th century avant-garde rejection of the museum as a mausoleum to the public embrace of the museum as a civic platform, albeit a contested one. These figures are a testament to this extraordinary popularity of the museum indeed as a mass medium. Can we propose therefore the museum or the collection as a theater of representation. It was in 2018 that an official and profoundly unorthodox museum tool repositioned the British Museum as what the QC Jeffrey Robertson has claimed in a recent book, the museum as a receiver of stolen goods. The stolen goods tour was organized by the activist theater group BP or not BP and was led by Palestinian Iraqi Greek and indigenous Australian scholars and activists. The tour started with the Hall of Enlightenment where Rodney Kelly and indigenous campaigner explained how his ancestors shield had been taken by Captain Cook quote the shield tells the story of that first encounter in 1770. We had everything stolen shield speared everything. It's important because Australia is a racist place that didn't treat us as humans from the start. People need to know the real history of what happened. Drawing hundreds of visitors the tour continued to the exhibition. Ashwbani pal, King of Assyria, King of the World, where Shala of Iraqi descent expressed her anger at seeing artifacts from Iraq's cultural heritage being used to promote BP, the old company which had supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The tour finished at the Parthenon marbles known for centuries as the Elgin marbles after the man who negotiated with the Ottomans to have them ripped from the temple's facade and brought from Athens to Britain. These tours have played a key role in generating debate about the return of treasures from colonized or subjugated peoples. Here the collection becomes a site for expression, protest, a place where those whose cultural heritage has been appropriated can directly address an audience. Raising consciousness about the origin symbolism and history of objects. They also exposed the political role of global corporations whose profits continue to be based on extraction, pollution and exploitation. The collection becomes an arena for representation and the site of its own critique. However, we also understand that collections can be magical vehicles of time travel, where objects ancient and modern, where historic and contemporary works of art are made available to generations of viewers through the scholarship and display skills of curators. This is a work by the American artist Michael Rakowitz, who himself is of Iraqi Jewish origin. And he pays tribute to the curators of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, who in the aftermath of the US invasion of 2003 hid and protected thousands of precious artifacts from damage and looting and the iconoclasm of ISIS. The invisible enemy should not exist is a quote from an ancient Mesopotamian text, and it's the name of his versions of all the archaeological objects stolen from that museum and presented as contemporary works of art. Rakowitz's reconstructions are made from the packaging of Middle Eastern foodstuffs and local Arabic newspapers, all of which can be found in corner stores across the United States. The objects are created using the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute database, as well as information posted on Interpol's website. Rakowitz's artwork is part of an ongoing commitment to recuperating the 7000 objects that are still missing today. We presented this exhibition at the White Chapel Gallery, it's also travelled to Turin and to Sharjah, and it's a collection of objects that will grow as long as those objects are not retrieved. So, in a way, they're both stand-ins and reminders of what has been lost. Collections offer a duty of care, presenting a haven for objects that would never have survived the ravages of time without the skills of conservators and the protective environment of the museum. But what's this? These fragments of rare textiles from the Antonio Ratty collection in Como appear to have been invaded by moths. These beautiful and rare pieces of fabric have been marched across and eaten by a series of arthropods. In fact, there is a caption in this display, which explains what's happened. More and more notes to the reader. In 2018, a conservator on the Fondazione Antonio Ratty in Como opened five drawers holding beautiful and rare textiles and was stunned to find numerous arthropods there, equally mind-boggling with the shapes being carved by the beasts. Five isnic motifs, thought to be extinct, became manifest. Numerous studies have yet to reveal how the arthropods got into the drawers, let alone how they carved the isnic motifs into existence again. This is, of course, a work of art. It's by Lebanese artist Walid Raj, who opens a ffisher in the threads of these textiles to reveal their ancient origins in the muddling world. In a way, he cites himself as being like one of those moths. For anyone who owns textiles, let me reassure you that this didn't actually happen, but these are exquisite facsimiles of the real thing. In 1979, Walid Raj co-founded the Arab Image Foundation, an organisation whose mission is to collect, preserve and present photographs from the Arab world, the Middle East, North Africa and the international diaspora. Over the last 20 years, he's used the conventions of the exhibition space of the academic lecture and the museum collection to open gaps or, in his words, disavowls to expose histories rendered invisible by Western institutions. He also explores the amnesia that can be a necessary strategy for surviving trauma and the civilised bails in which culture can camouflage power. As American art critic Alex Kittnick commented in a recent article in Art Forum, many artists and art workers have occupied the museum, sometimes to drain it but just as often to re-energise it. Indeed, the museum today is expected to be a centre of attention and an active agent in culture to satisfy the needs of the present. After all the museum, and here I will substitute the word collection, is one of the few devices that can make the Royal Democratic, the private public and the sacred profane. It can switch contexts and create distance, it can bring things to light. So we can see here how the collection has a privileged position not outside but adjacent to life, a place where life might be seen, queried and discussed. The collection is a travel agent. In an interview with the Financial Times in 2020, the Ophizies director Ike Schmidt described the current situation in Florence. There were people eating on the streets, leaving their garbage, the cleaners couldn't empty the bins fast enough, we have reached the limit. In 2019 over 4 million people had visited Florence. But the following year the city went into lockdown and it was the pandemic that gave him pause to think. Here is a quote from Schmidt, wine shouldn't stay in the cellar, it needs to be drunk and art was made to be seen. Schmidt has developed a radical plan which he hopes will provide a model for other metropolitan tourist centres that was inspired by Italy's Alberti Diffusi, hotels in which rooms are scattered among a variety of different buildings in a historic rural village. He wants to tempt people away from Florence by making Tuscany into a giant gallery for the Ophizies collection. By examining the origins of many of the masterpieces in the collection, Schmidt and his team have identified around 100 regional venues that represent the locations, either where the artist was born or lived, or where the work had originally been commissioned. The project starts this year with a terror deli Ophizi where exhibitions will define the territory across which the collection will be diffused. For example, this painting by Nicola Monti relates to Dante's Divine Comedy and it will be presented at the castle of the Guidi Carrants who hosted Dante in the 13th century. And whose lands and histories provided the poet with his storylines and characters. The challenge to the people and administrations of small towns such as Poppy is to restore and renovate their historic structures and to embrace new visitors by promoting local hotels, restaurants and other activities like walking and sightseeing. It's an inspired way not only to share the collection but to use it as a catalyst for regeneration, collection as mirror. For many years all of us who do not identify as a white male heterosexual have been asking ourselves whether collections of art reflect our experience or our creativity. The resounding answer has been no. Here the gorilla girls have asked do women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum. This question was asked by a New York based group of activists, the gorilla girls who are by terms subversive, satiric and quite polite. Here is a letter that they published as long ago as 1986 dearest art collector. It has come to our attention that your collection like most does not contain enough art by women. We know that you feel terrible about this and will rectify the situation immediately. Will I love gorilla girls? You'll note the gap between that first letter that poster drafted in 1986 and the subsequent poster 2012 and yet the situation is still not inclusive enough. There has however been a kind of major I think a radical shift in museum collections and in their quest to truly reflect the society that they that pays for them and that visits them and that they should represent. It was the question that we asked of the tape collection as it prepared for its reinvention as tape modern at the turn of the millennium. This the birth of tape modern gave tape curators and I was privileged enough to join them in 1997 an opportunity to pause to stand back and really look at the collection and ask many questions of it. The question was that representative but could we devise a different model for presenting it that could appropriate that could embrace change. We know that all museums of modern arts have used this diagram as the basis of their collection displays throughout the 20th century. It was advised in 1936 by Alfred Barr to explain the genesis of abstraction. I think that still every art history student will remember this wonderful chart, which represents a chronology and an evolutionary model of isms. Each movement a progenitor of the next. And so up until really the year 2000, any museum of modern art that I visited would have tended to group its collections according to these movements and in a chronological succession, as if there was a trajectory towards the ground zero of abstraction and inevitable journey. But what it also includes is the trajectories of individual artists because it didn't stop working until his death in the 1980s. And yet he becomes defined by a moment, but which moment cubism surrealism. There are many artists which have made this kind of definition. So what this included was the idea of simultaneous of an artist evolving beyond the movement in which his or her work had evolved. It also represents a shift from the manifesto defined era of 20th century avant-garde to the 21st century of heterogeneity and of a global art world. When we started thinking about how to install the collection at Tate Modern in 1997, we embarked on a series of speculations about whether we could move away from this chronology from this model that had defined collections for since 1936. We came up with a whole variety of different models. There were four of us, myself, Francis Morris, Carol Howell and Sarah McKinley and we were basically experimenting with ideas as the team led by Nexarote was busy building the new building and raising the money. We were left to our own devices in an empty dormitory on the site of what is now Tate Britain. It had been a hospital building and we were up where the nurses had once slept and for two years we experimented with a huge range of ideas. Here are four of them. As you can see, many of them were more successful than others. We looked at the collection, the 20th century collection of Tate and we wondered whether we could tell the story of its social context, whether we could see it as a historical metastructure. And we looked at it through, for example, decades, taking, say 1900 to 1918, could we look at themes like speed dynamism, spectacle, revolution, progress, utopianism, optimism, fragmentation. Was this kind of too didactic? What do you do in that story with abstraction? We looked at it in terms of geographies, cities as crucibles of modernity, Paris, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Moscow, Milan, New York, London. These were some of the great metropolitan centres which attracted avant-garde really through the 20th century. But then what about cities like Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Bombay, Tokyo, Lagos, Vienna, Cairo? It seemed quite arbitrary. It did reflect what was in the collection, but it could only ever tell a partial story. We looked at the collection as something that was symptomatic of a zeitgeist of ideas. We wondered whether we could connect our displays to a century of thought. Whether we could, for example, look at the nature of ontology, of being in regard to, say, abstract expressionism. Ways of knowing that were disrupted by movements like the Dada movement or the conceptual art movement. Ways of understanding the physical world that were really kind of pinpointed by minimalism or art of pervera. Ways of relationship with praxis, with society, the noise-sachlikite movements like feminism, teleology spirituality through geometric abstraction or land art. But again it seemed to be taking advantage or taking hostage of works and forcing them into a kind of cosmology which may not have related to the intention of the artist. We looked at the way things are made about strategies of production, automatic art, representational figurative art, conceptual art strategies, constructivism. Yet again there were certain figures that would evade any of those or relate to all of them. Bruce Naaman, for example, Joseph Boyce, Louise Bourgeois could be defined by any one of these kinds of categories. Finally, we turn to the 17th century and to the legacy of Reynolds and the Royal Academy. So it was ironic that as we approached the 21st century we looked back to an abiding series of definitions within art history of the genre. And as you will all remember, they were in a hierarchy at the bottom was the still life, then came landscape, then the nude and top of them all was of course history painting. And strangely this was actually the most fruitful line of our inquiry. It opened up extraordinary vistas because what it made us look at was the content of the work, the subject matter. And as we developed this idea, we became more and more excited and we started sharing our discussions with fellow curators, with our historians, finally with our boss, Nick Sarota. And we also of course crucially talked to artists. And as we tease these out, they became more and more protein, and it was actually Nick, who led us to expand these themes in this way. And they indeed became the paradigm for the opening displays of the 20th century collection at Tate Modern in May 2000. And here are the four areas that we defined through the levels three and four of Tate Modern 21 years ago. So we expanded the term history through into memory society, the nude into action body, landscape into matter and environment, still life into object and real life. And once we'd had this overwhelming category, we found that we could jettison chronology and start juxtaposition and start the juxtaposition of works across time and space and across geographies. The issue of movements suddenly became redundant, as we were able to tease out poetic aesthetic and political connections across different bodies of work from Matisse to Marlenna Dumar, for example, from Monet to Richard Long. It was a liberating exercise. It was controversial. There was something lost, I think, for the uninitiated viewer and not being able to see chronology. But on the other hand, what it did enable us to do, and it was a structure that remained in place for five years, was that as new works of art were acquired, they could take their place alongside the historic collection. It meant that individual displays could be changed without disrupting a chronology. And it meant that our fellow curators had had agency that they could author individual displays that brought new perspectives, new sensibilities, new ways of understanding art into this broader structure. It was a way, really, of creating a possibility for a more heterogeneous and a more diverse and inclusive form of representation. And that work, the Tate itself then started establishing panels of experts and funders to enable it to become not just international in the word, in the use of the word that we had in the late 20th century international then I think meant a few cities a handful of cities in northern Europe and New York to be truly global to incorporate the global south to to look at works from every continent, and recognise that there was not one Western but many multiple modernisms. And from that, I think, has come a really a reevaluation of how we encounter collections, and the possibility that they offer of truly representing our lived experience. The collection's work of art is an extraordinary phenomenon I think that we've seen evolving through projects such as Michael Rackavitz or Walid Raj. And we can see how artists act really as curators and that the curatorial project becomes a work of art. And because it's the collection as an active imagination, it imagines the work of curating as a creative act of authorship. Perhaps one of the most influential figures in this movement, excuse me, was has been the African American artist Fred Wilson, and his legendary project, Mining the Museum of 1923, sorry, 1992. He was trained as a museum educator and had created small installations called Moku, Moku museums that revealed how non Western cultures were transformed into Exotica by Western institutions. He was based in New York and in 1992 he was invited by Lisa Coran, curator of a public arts organisation in Baltimore, to create a project for the city. He was the director of the Maryland Historical Society. Having persuaded the director and staff to gain access to its archives, he discovered a trove of objects and documents relating to the history of slavery in Baltimore that had never been displayed. The museum, this slightly dull and very proper historical museum into one of the most influential artworks of the late 20th century, inspiring generations of artists to work with collections as found objects, and to critique their institutional settings. He worked as a museum educator. He had developed an understanding of how to see objects that had become almost invisible, how to illuminate them literally in a way that would give us a new understanding of them. And he did this with one painting, for example, in this collection of Henry Darnall III and his slave by changing the museum lighting. He simply shone a spotlight on the black figure who stands to the left of this white landowner. He took a series of pedestals and on the right hand side you can see these white male busts and on the other on the left hand side the empty black pedestals. Without any kind of didacticism with no labels, no texts explaining his interventions, he alerted visitors to a new perspective on the collection. At the centre of this introductory display you can see a globe and on it the artist had inscribed the word truth. What he was indicating was a different way of understanding what was there and the truth that had been obscured by what had been kept in store and what had been put on display. Here we'll see, we see a collection of very valuable silverware. But what Wilson discovered in the archive of the museum was a pair of manacles made out of iron that had been used on enslaved African Americans and he placed them in juxtaposition with the silver. Very controversially, he found a Ku Klux clan robe which had been donated anonymously to the historical society in a baby carriage. In his account of the project on its 21st, 25th anniversary in 2017, a local art critic, Ker Houston wrote, Folded carefully into the diminutive stroller, the robe proved to be an especially haunting detail, as it suggested that racism is learned, inculcated or even nurtured. The master's house has been dismantled with the master's tools, and of course the consequences soon spilled beyond the walls of the MHS. Wilson still recalls his astonishment at realising during the opening reception that the descendants of both the slave owner and the slave named in a 19th century broadsheet were both in attendance. It became a personal form of consciousness raising that proved both influential and controversial. A local dentist in an exit survey complained that he believed this would lead to an increase in racial tension. But for many local residents it was a revelation that led to serious reflection about the legacies of contemporary racism. This is another example of a collection as a work of art. It's housed in this narrow historic building in Istanbul and was created by the author of noble laureate Orhan Pamuk. Through the love story of Kamal, a wealthy businessman and Fusun, his poor but beautiful relative, set in Istanbul between 1975 and 1984, Pamuk explores how Western notions of culture have cross-fertilised with Turkish cultural traditions, and how the notion of the collection as a form of hoarding relates to the imbalance of power between Kamal and the woman he regards as his possession. Pamuk has established an actual museum of innocence based on the museum described in the book. It is housed in a building in Beolu, Istanbul, and displays everyday objects from the period in which the novel is set. We see them in almost like a poetic assemblage. Through these display cases he puts things together that all relate to one another. You'll see here coins or medals, clocks, bottles, perfumes, all sorts of associative links are made, not through words, but through the juxtaposition of artefacts and documents, it becomes a different kind of reading. It's associative, it triggers memories, and of course meanings. So he uses each display case as a kind of chapter in the book, and he immerses us as viewers, not only in a period of time, but in a series of discourses about the West and the East, about the role of women, the constraints placed upon women still in his local culture, and in the object as a kind of springboard, a platform for reverie. It's a kind of proustian project in a way, but it also has many, many other valences depending on the subjectivity of course of the viewer. Anyone who comes to the museum with a copy of the book should open it to the 83rd chapter where they will find a ticket. The usher will stamp the ticket and allow them free entry. The collection is Guest. The White Chapel Gallery was founded in 1901 and we think of it as a museum without a collection. It's a cross I would say between a Kunsthalle or a temporary exhibition space and a museum in that we have a number of different galleries, we have a great archive, and we have permanent works of art distributed through the building. You can see here the beautiful work by Rachel Whiteread, which was commissioned for our façade, and she takes as her inspiration the Tree of Life, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend that you can see here. She's taken the leaves of the Tree of Life and scattered them in bronze across our façade. You can see what was the former library built by Passmer Edwards in the 1890s. It was the first lending library in Britain. And when it was owned by Towerham that's who decided that it was no longer fit for purpose in 2000. And my predecessor Catherine Lampert was very prescient and very kind of tenacious in persuading Towerhamers to sell it to the White Chapel Gallery so that we could preserve the building and expand it as a cultural institution. When I joined the White Chapel Gallery in 2001, the very first week I was there, I had to sign a contract to buy the library for a knockdown price of £1 million. So I thought, thank you, I'm going to be the director that bankrupts the White Chapel Gallery. The next seven years were spent in fundraising and then we closed and reopened as one institution in 2009. When the Heritage Lottery Fund agreed to fund us, they said, and of course you will have to restore the weather vane. There was no sign of a weather vane and we had to do a lot of research and discover that indeed the first plans had imagined a weather vane that was never actually constructed or installed. A few weeks later, an artist we'd exhibited from Canada called Rodney Graham came by for lunch. Now I asked him what he was doing in London and he explained that he was making a weather vane. I nearly fell off my chair and I said, really, what's the subject and he said, it's a statue of a Rasmus riding a horse backward, having written in praise of Folly and I said we'll take it. So we acquired that statue and now that is part of our permanent collection. But we do not collect art. And so we have started a programme in our new building of welcoming guest collections. It has become clear to me over the years of working in a curator as a curator that there are literally hundreds of extraordinary collections that we never see. Some are owned by government entities, state entities like the British Council or the government art collection, fantastic collections that we pay for with our taxes that work very, very hard, but that we rarely ever get a glimpse of. There are also a number of extraordinary private collections. Great, great collectors who are dedicated with passion scholarship expertise in supporting contemporary living artists by collecting their work. And many of them of course are very, very generous lenders, but it's rare that we see their collections as an as a whole as an entity. We started in 2009 of inviting guest collections from all over the world. The gallery that we have dedicated to this project is not terribly big, but what we can offer instead of space is time. Over the period of four displays, we present one collection from four different perspectives. One of the most, I think, remarkable displays was in 2011. And importantly, it was curated by an artist. Artists do what curators dare not do. Cornelia Parker was given free reign to explore the government art collection. It's a collection that was started over 100 years ago, and it was actually started by a civil servant who had to find a solution to the redecoration of the empire's outposts. The British at that time had residences, embassies and ministerial buildings or buildings of colonial power all over the world. And there was a real problem with redecoration. And this official famously decided that cheaper than wallpaper, we could buy art. And that's the great origin of the government art collection. It's a fantastic body of work, which works very hard in representing Britain all over the world. The government art collection is displayed in embassies all over the world. But it also takes its role in being an advocate for British creativity and culture. It decorates the walls of 10 Downing Street of ministers offices of parliamentary buildings. And so it's linked in a way to a kind of state pride, if you like, in our cultural heritage. It's a collection which also is very, very active. It has a very modest budget, but it spends wisely. And under its current but outgoing director Penelope. Penelope, oh my goodness, sorry, I just had a blank spot. I've been a way of supporting emerging artists by using our modest funds and I did serve on the advisory board to support artists crucial moments in their careers. Maybe before they've even found gallery representation. What Cornelia Parker did, however, was to take a selection of works from this great collection and transform it into a great work of art. I'm old enough to know what the mnemonic of the title means Richard of York gave battle in vain is of course a way of remembering the colours of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo violet. And she installed the collection according to these colors. We got this beautiful polychromatic environment. It was a visual wrap around immersion in colours of the rainbow. And then when we looked more closely, we could see the extraordinary sorry, the extraordinary relations that she was mapping out. We see images of aristocracy. We see discussions of class. We see the British landscape. We find strange partnerships and enemies. There was a painting of Queen Elizabeth the first looking eyeball to eyeball at Mary Queen of Scots. It was a fantastic display that read in many directions, almost like a kind of puzzle or crossword puzzle of images and associations. It was hung salon style from floor to ceiling. And of course, something that the conventional curatorship would never tolerate to have something that was so high you had to strain your neck to see it. But the key thing about having curators as sorry artists as curators is that they have license. This is apologies for the poor image. The great British sculptor Mike Nelson. And here we were working with a collection from Russia called the VAC collection. Mike went to Moscow and was given free rein to explore the hundreds of works of great art that is held by the VAC collection. And he made his selection and titled it again more things a table ruin. He brought a studio, an old studio floor that he'd recycled from a building that was being demolished. It's covered in paint. It's splashed. It's born the traces of creativity over decades. And instead of putting great works of art by, as you can see here, Henry Moore or Brancusi or Louise Bourgeois or Giacometti on plants in the protective enclosure of a perspex case. He made the daring proposition of putting them on the floor on this artist's floor on the floor where their creativity first took place. It's a return to origins. It was also there was something theatrical about this at the center of the display was a work by Pavel. Pavel Kinski from Poland, who has this series of what can only be described as drunks. They're made out of extruded plastic and they appear to be sitting around a campfire telling stories. And Mike Nelson proposes all of these sculptures which are in some way figurative and which include tribal figures from different African nations are all gathered around this campfire for this fantastic moment of storytelling as these three derelicts share a bottle and share stories. When the owner of the collection Landon Mickelson arrived at the opening he had no idea what to expect. He walked in actually with Nick Sarota and I could see his eye line was looking for his sculpture. He was of course, I think first surprised then possibly horrified to find all of these things were on the floor. And he took a deep breath, walked around and to all our relief he finally he smiled. It was a huge sigh of relief for myself and the artist. But it was a fantastic experience to see these works about being animated to see them almost as a group of individuals of perhaps mythic beings attentive to the business of storytelling. The painter Lynette Yadon Boachy was the next of our artists selectors. And she went through the collection and found all the paintings to do with the world of nature of landscape and the representation of our relation with nature through the still life. Richard artist Fiona Banner, a conceptual artist, then found a group of works that were in some way either relating photography about painting or painting about photography. And she made perhaps the most radical of all the proposals that we've presented at the White Shackle Gallery as part of our guest collection programme where the entire display changed colour. You'll see on the right here, a photograph by Andres Gursky next to a landscape by Monet, above two photographs by Christopher Williams. On the left hand side Sharon Ebner is on the same space as Rudy. Oh God, sorry, sudden blank, can't remember the name. But what she did was she looked at the colours of printing yellow, maroon, magenta, blue and black, and the whole display changed colour. The extraordinary effect of that was that view is also changed colour. So when the whole gallery was plunged into yellow light, visitors became black and white. And when the display turned blue, there was one image of a building which simply disappeared. It was an extraordinary effect and piped through the gallery was a sound installation of a cinematic soundtrack. It just transformed the collection display into an audio visual installation that had drama, it had emotion, it had hilarity as the soundtrack explored different cinematic genres. And again, it was something that no serious curator would have a dream of doing, but it was so exciting to experience this and to understand it both as a collection display and as a new work of art by Fiona Banner. Finally, here is a moving image artist called James Richards and we sent James to Moscow. When 700 objects that were available for his display, he came back with just one. And he reassured me by saying, but it's a hefty work. And sure enough, it was a Francis Bacon study for a portrait. He took this one work of art and used it as a springboard for a remarkable new work of art, which was an entire installation and sound piece. He presented the work in a gallery that was now carpeted and curtained. Francis Bacon had once worked as an interior designer. He loved carpets, wall-to-wall carpets, and this was a kind of signal to the life of Francis Bacon. And in the space, we had speakers that were playing a soundtrack inspired by Francis Bacon, by the making of the painting and recorded by James to include the sound of scraping and making, to include pop tunes from the 1950s, from the era of that painting. And to include a new choral work that was inspired by the kind of existential themes of Francis Bacon. And the entire installation is now in the collection of the VAC in Moscow. I'm going to finish now with a discussion about the collection as a kind of laboratory. Earlier this year, we presented a display that was curated by our youth forum, Duchamp and Sons. They were invited to make a selection from the Hiscox collection. Hiscox, as many of us will know, is an art insurer, but its founder, Robert Hiscox, is also an avid and brilliant collector. And he's been building up the corporate collection since the 1970s. And it's again a collection that works very hard because it's seen every day by thousands of employees who work for Hiscox all over the world. These works of art can be seen in offices, meeting rooms, foyers, and it's also an active lending insurer collection. We presented two displays from the Hiscox collection, and one of them was selected by a group of young people. They're aged from 15 to 20, and they have no professional experience of working with collections. Indeed, they're not art historians, and they've only studied art often until they're 15 years old. But they've joined our youth forum because they're interested in art, they're motivated to find out more about it. And we can offer workshops, debates, and opportunities for them to meet artists and to understand what our profession is all about. They made their selection during lockdown, and they had to make the whole thing virtually. They presented two galleries of work. Their display was called Home, Live in Room. Many of them live in public housing where there's literally, they spent lockdown in one bedroom. And so they used the collection as a kind of mode of escape. And in the first room, they presented works by Edward Bartinski, Peter Doig, Barbara Carston, Agnieszka Caron, Llanlundson Bell, Trevor Pagdan, and Lisa Oppenheim. And here the works were all about travel, about escape, about breaking out of the four walls of their bedroom or sitting room, and exploring the world through works of art. The second display, which featured Richard Billingham, Gregory Crudtson, and Cornelia Parker, went back inside to the domestic realm to the sphere of the family and of the kind of tensions, the constraints of domestic living through lockdown. You'll see the famous series by Richard Billingham of his family life, his perhaps dysfunctional family life, but one, his parents, who live in very straightened circumstances but survive an extraordinary work by Gregory Crudtson of a small American town with something very strange happening. There's a figure walks in twilight, there's a sense of drama. In making these curatorial displays, I'm sorry, in that final display, there's also a work that no teenager could resist by Cornelia Parker after Philip Larkin, they fuck you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to, but they do. It's a beautiful work inscribed on a stone by Cornelia Parker after Philip Larkin, and it's called Elegy for an English Country Graveyard. Through this collection display, we were able to work with those young people to tell them what it is a curator does. We were also able to explain what is a collection. Whitney Hines, who's the director of the collection, was able to tell them the story of how works of art were made, what motivated their acquisition, and what a collection can do in terms of its relationship with the employees of Hiscox, with conservation issues, how you look after them, how you interpret them. One of our missions, I think, should be to excite and inspire young people to become involved with collections and to provide the next generation of curatorial expertise. It's very disheartening at the moment in the United Kingdom to find the lack of support for the humanities at universities, they've been cut by 50%. And the paucity of young people taking up art subjects at an advanced level, at A levels. We have the dreaded acronym here, which is STEM, which signs for science, technology, engineering and maths as being the keystone of education. We must campaign for steam. The arts are a vital part of education. And these kinds of projects, I hope, will offer a kind of education for young people, which is participatory where they have agency where they themselves can express their understanding of art and how it relates to their lives. And I'm going to leave the final voice, in fact, to Maya, who's one of that group, and here's a narrative that she created inspired by the work of Peter Doig, an image of a canoe with a single figure at sea. It's gone completely. We found our way through tsunamis, wild pools and sea storms. They seem insignificant now as we approach the big gloom. We took down our sails long ago. Let them sink to the seabed. So now we just drift. I'm sorry. We took down our sails long ago. Let them sink. They're almost gone completely. I'm just going to put that back to the beginning. I apologize for that. We took down our sails. Sorry. We took down our sails long ago. Let them sink to the seabed. So now we just drift. There are six of us, although on a grey day, a few more appear. A face blurred into abstract. They're almost gone completely. We found our way through tsunamis, wild pools and sea storms. They seem insignificant now as we approach the big gloom. A heavy blue haze settles on my shoulders and condensates on my eyelashes. The palm fronds wavers goodbye and we're holding hands now, drawn closer into the unknown with each rising fall of the tide. What are collections good for? We can see that they're about the pleasure of an encounter with the aesthetic, philosophical or poetic registers of a work of art. At the same time, they can be compendiums of difficult histories, but also of representation. They can affirm the vision of the artist, but also inspire creativity and experimentation. Thank you. Thank you so much, Evonna. Now it's absolutely wonderful and one of the major benefits of doing a tour like this on Zoom is that over 200 people could join us this evening from all around the world. But I guess one of the downsides is that you can't hear the reaction of the audience and I could just feel, I think, through the screen that people were cheering you as you were talking about your defence of the arts and how we should think about think differently about education and the role of the arts and humanity in our future as a society. So hopefully you maybe could have heard or felt some of that energy penetrating through the screen towards your office from where you're speaking, but thank you so much and thank you for being so frank. I think what I really felt as you were speaking was something just of the humanity of being a curator and a director and being part of, not projects really, but conversations and each work, each collection, each exhibition that you work on. Obviously has a cumulative effect and changes the direction of your thinking or adds to it in some way. So it was really great to have behind the scenes, I think, glimpse into some of your thinking and I told everyone in my introduction to you that you were someone who really connected worlds and you did that in that talk, really bringing together the historic and the contemporary and that connecting thing being the idea itself, pursuing something because it's worth thinking about, it's worth exploring a bit further. So thank you so much for doing that and for sharing those thoughts in such a honest and really inspirational way. And I think that we've got so many questions lining up that I think I should probably reserve any further of my comments and questions, because we want to give space to the audience and again, thank you to everyone from joining us from around the world. There's been such great chat, as you've been talking, and I'll just open with a question here from John Hings, who says to you, many thanks for such a thought provoking talk. The juxtapositions you showed and talked about, especially of museum objects are very stimulating. But John says, I just wonder if by creating new context for artefacts, we are in danger of losing sight of the original context in which they were created and used. And interpreting them for a present day audience. Do you agree that it's a difficult balancing act? Yeah, thank you very much. That's a really interesting question. I suppose it's impossible to recreate the actuality of an object's origins. I mean, we know that there are wonderful, for example, house museums, where we can see things in their context within an interior, or with the kind of decorative aspects of, you know, where they were used and presented. And clearly there is a role for a kind of anthropological way of explaining, you know, whether something was worn or the symbolic use of it, say in a ritual or whatever. But time itself is a kind of detachment, isn't it? And I think the distance that we've travelled is inevitable. It's a kind of filter through which we lose touch with the meaning of that thing. It also accrues, I think, weirdly, it accrues a different valence, something that can be very everyday in, say, the Roman world. When it travels to us in the 21st century, it becomes quite magical. I mean, I think there's an alchemy in this as well. So you may lose the kind of authenticity of how a hand held a vessel, for example, in Pompeii. But when it arrives with us on the shores of the 21st century, I guess it takes on a different resonance. And that really has inspired so many artists. I think they've seen them as having an almost surreal quality as having something wondrous, mysterious, of course. And I think that's probably the kind of bargain that we make with them, is that we seek to understand them through scholarship, but we also appreciate them through their presence in our kind of everyday reality. And I think as you touched on in your lecture as well, there's something about the alchemy of display, what lighting can do, and when you put something under glass or change the context, the aesthetics of display as well. Sometimes we see the display case as a neutral container, but actually when you put an object, see it out of it and then put it into a different display environment, there's something happens there, isn't there? Something changes the object itself. And I think that's what Pamuk shows, is that they become like words in a sentence, you know, that when you, when you frame one object with two others, they take on a new and different meaning. Yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much. There was a quite a straightforward question, but I think it opens out into some larger themes that I know you're interested in. This is a question that asks you, was there a catalogue for the Richard of York gave battle in vain exhibition because I know publishing and the words that wrap around an exhibition or go beyond its walls are something that you've been extremely committed to. So maybe you can give the simple answer to the question then we can open out into catalogs and words. Yeah, in fact, the government art collection published an amazing book which, which lists everything that they own and which, which tells the stories we also, I published a monograph on Cornelia Parker in 2014, I think. So, you know, in the spirit of self emotion, I would urge you to buy that book because it's a fantastic compilation of everything that she's done. And she is in fact having a show at Tate Britain, I believe next year. So yes, it's published. And, and can you maybe say more about the role that you see the sort of relationship between catalogs and exhibitions or collections, is it a sort of collection of their own formation really on the on the page and what happens when you put those objects, and they become images in a catalogue. Absolutely, and I think it has yet another layer of interpretation and creativity. We've got a display at the moment, please do look at our website selected from an Norwegian collection by great painter called Eda Eckblad. And it's called This is the Nightmail after a poem by. Oh my God, sorry, I'm just having a blank moment again. I've been talking about it all week. God, who is it? It's a poem that was commissioned by the Post Office in 1936 for a very famous film, Auden, W. H. Auden, with a soundtrack by Benjamin Britten. We've published the whole poem in the book of the collection display, and Eda herself has done written her own poem in relation to Auden and the objects in the show. So it just take it opens the doors as a portal onto another kind of journey and it's also of course the record something you can take away and return to after the show is finished. Because that's one of the issues of the White Shuffle Gallery. We don't keep any of those displays. They're there and then they're gone. And so the publications are crucial records. I think it's after lives of projects and exhibitions are really fascinating. We've got loads of questions, so I will pick another one. We have one here saying, given the brilliance of the artist displays you've discussed and the interest of your youth forum display, can you talk further about the future of curatorship? Is the specialist scholarly museum or gallery curator a figure of the past that I think that speaks to a particular moments as well, isn't it? And we know there's, you know, lots of pressures on jobs and funding cuts. So your views on the big question, the future of curatorship. Yeah, not at all. I mean, I'm very proud of our profession and I think the kind of level of research and scholarship and love that we can bring to art is just unquestionable and it's unquestionably important. I think it's more that we can embrace other viewpoints and certainly now we're going to continue alongside inviting curators and artists to make collection displays. We are now opening that program out to inviting local communities, school children, all sorts of different groups to try their hand at collecting. And this, for me, actually, it was inspired by a project run by a television station years ago called Channel 4 called the Biker Project where they offered the residents of a public housing estate the opportunity to select works. I think it was from the local museum and put them in their houses and then talk about them. And it was very moving and very, very powerful experience. Of course it's a very authentic way of bringing personal expression into the ambit of art. It will never replace the kind of scholarship and not historical depth that curators bring. I think they enrich one another in these kinds of engagements. I hope also that it's a kind of advocacy really for why collections are so important, why governments should invest in them, why civil institutions are such an important part of society. So I think that there are huge advances to getting people's participation in what we do, but that doesn't take the place of what we do. Fantastic. There are several questions here that are responding to the section of your talk where you sort of enlightened us and let us into some of those secrets of how Tate Modern came into being and brilliant images. Have you up in the dormitory cooking up these ideas and one of our attendees asked looking back on those categories, would you do them entirely or very differently now and they ask you what would they be? I mean you haven't got two years to experiment with that so it might be a bit hard to answer on the spot but I'll let you answer that. It would be really interesting. I mean I think they all had their merits you know and we did in fact return to one of them the geographies model where we made our inaugural exhibition actually was called Century City and it gave us the opportunity to look at non-Western cities and their role in modernism. We chose nine cities but they included Rio de Janeiro, they included Mumbai or Bombay, Mumbai as it's now known and where else. So we looked at how to tell that story of modernism in a different way. So I think the research that we did, the kind of ideas that we rehearsed haven't been lost and I think all of us in our now separate careers find ourselves returning to them. As this is being recorded I should just correct one of my fellow plotters, it's not so Sophie McKinley who's now at the V&A in Dundee just to get that right. But I think ways of making the relationship between art and prevailing ways of thought have also informed some of individual displays that have been at Tate and certainly is something that I've been thinking about how philosophy and the idea of say you know we can see how existentialism and feminism I would argue how it could impact on the idea of abstract expressionism. So I think there's lots of potential still, yes. There's a question here from Drake Zyrinski and I think this kind of is really interesting thinking that this lecture series is co-organised between London and New Haven and across a British and an American institution under the auspices of the poor man lectures but they ask do you have any comments about how private collections may or may not be reshaping public collections and they say this may be a more American centred question as most American museums are growing their collections through gifts from private collectors I think it's really again maybe one of those more back room kind of how the structural kind of sense of how collections are formed and how objects enter collections and actually private collectors being quite crucial in that especially in perhaps financially straight in times when museums don't have the big budgets to go out and bid for things on open markets anymore. I mean clearly there's a problem with the art market being overheated and I think the entry of various you know individuals with very very deep pockets has made it impossible for contemporary collections. We've got tiny tiny budgets and I think that's true across the whole sector and particularly in with my colleagues in non-western institutions so it becomes almost impossible to compete with private collectors. I think the best of those the most enlightened are very aware of that acutely aware of it and they will for example buy four museums they will donate works to museums. They're also as we have at the Tate not we but at the Tate these expert panels that put a certain amount of money in a year to enable Tate to buy work from the Middle East for example Africa or South Asia. So I think private collectors do give a lot back their very active involvement in patronage. What we must always insist on though is the independence of museums and curators that just because you know a museum is offered a gift it does not have to take it and I think that's where everybody has now established very clear guidelines. Generous as those gifts may be they may not necessarily resonate with collections policy or with the kinds of maybe the gaps that collectors that curators are seeking to fill. And I think the key thing there is to have that conversation. I think that has to be led by curators. This is what we need. Can you help us to acquire it? Not what can you give us as a donation and I think that those discussions have become more and more refined over certainly over the last decade. It's interesting when things get put into practice more and more and I guess as a sort of coalition of practice as well. Those things can be teased out and they say unprofessionalised I guess as more and more as that happens more and more. One thing of one of that really struck me as well in your talk is you said something about a phrase artists do what curators dare not do and I love this idea of daring to do things. And actually throughout your talk I think there was the theme of risk and taking risks and sometimes being brave to go places or ask questions and you don't know always what the answers are but you'll try and find out as doing things. But I wondered whether again you gave us a sort of historical trajectory of your own career, whether you feel that risk taking and daring to do things, whether the abilities and the freedoms to do that has changed. You know what's what's the situation for that kind of creativity and sometimes just putting something out there because you think it's a good idea. Well, you know, the thing is that when I was a baby curator. There were virtually no women artists in any collection anyway well they were there but we rarely got to see them. We certainly went to priority. And so it was kind of important for me to try and push that and question that and certainly, you know, I was very, very lucky to be influenced by feminism and by second wave feminist of my generation, people like Barbara Kruger or Jenny in this country Sonia Boyce, people like Shitababizwa so I think you'll be talking about that seeing the work of those female artists really raised questions for me about why they were so invisible. And that definitely required change. I think the other great influence for me was the work of organizations like Innova that in the 1990s really challenged this idea about what was international. And they were hosted actually at a, at a conference at Tate, where they brought many, many different artists, people like Jimmy Durham, for example. I can't remember who else was there but it was a very, very powerful experience to hear artists from non Western locations speak about the frustration, the invisibility and how they've been so profoundly marginalized. All of this has, I think, been led by artists, they've really pushed that envelope, you know, and they continue to do so. The Fred Wilson display was, I can't tell you how influential that was discovering his project in 1992 was for me a kind of paradigm shift. And that's what I think we can look to artists to continue to do, whether it's the stolen goods tours or whether it's Walid Rad taking those beautiful photographs and putting them up on display in a museum, you know, they're constantly and in a very also I would say knowledgeable and respectful way playing with art histories to make us see what they do, the lacunae, the, the kind of marginalization and all of that, I think has really driven that there's been a huge momentum, just even over the last few years. And I really embraced that and think it's exciting. It makes museum creating a kind of avant-garde. It's this question, I'm just, we've got maybe time for a couple more. There's just so it's fantastic. There's just so many brilliant responses to your talk. It's really exciting to, yeah, feel the energy of conversation and debate is coming through these questions, but I think perhaps just connects to what you've just said. Someone asks us, or ask you, and says thank you, you shared such creative approaches to the essential challenges that museums face, and that's really inspiring. Are there any topics that you feel are intractable that you haven't found, or a satisfying approach to, or that's still challenging? I suppose going back to that discussion about chronology, I remember when I was taking around a group of very, very distinguished visitors from Nepal who were utterly baffled because there was no, there was no trajectory that they could, how could they get from a monne to a Richard Long? We put them in one room, there was a stone circle on the floor and then this monne impressionist, you know, it was a water lilies, and it, you know, how do you explain what's happened there, you know, over a century. I think there is still, for the uninitiated, how do you make that, how do you make the case that this is a kind of slow story that there is actually a legacy, and the artists do take up the button from one another that they're constantly looking back. Whatever Malovic claimed about the Black Square, it was still in relation, although it was a ground zero, it was still in relation to his rejection of history painting, so there's always a history behind it. I think for curators today to bridge that, that kind of gap in people's knowledge or understanding where they've been often denied any access to our history through the curriculum, and they're asked to sort of jump in feet first into quite a, quite a perhaps rarefied discourse, quite a challenging, you know, series of juxtapositions or experiences, whereas one of the other questioners pointed out that you've taken something away from its original context. So that weirdly is something that perhaps we must find a way of returning to without replicating the kind of canonical grand narratives is what do artists show one another and so we did a show actually in 2015, for example, called The Adventures of the Black Square. And it was about taking Malovic's Black Square and seeing what what happened, what was the trajectory from that ground zero, and seeing how it manifested itself through, you know, different times and through different geographies. So that that was an attempt to try and, you know, deal with that problem. And I think it will, it becomes ever more pertinent, doesn't it? I think it, I know from my kind of teaching perspective as well, how to make historic material meaningful in the contemporary classroom and especially when lots of students are selecting kind of more contemporary art modules. So what do you, what do collections do with, you know, probably, you know, lots of especially national collections, 90% of their permanent collections and I think, you know, how do you revivify and how do you re-display material that's in that collection and make it relevant and I think that's, you know, you're absolutely speaking to those concerns. I'm just kind of scrolling through because perhaps we have time for one more question to you. And again, like I say, it's just been, it's testament to your ideas because there's just so much coming in. I ask you about how you select the artist that you display and particularly the guest, for the guest collection series. How do you go about, you know, when you've got all these options open to you, how do you sift through all that richness and select, you know, one person to work with? Basically, we, if we, because we have four displays, we can, we did something based actually on the idea of making. So with the VSE collection, we had a sculptor, a painter, a conceptual artist who uses photography and a moving image artist. So that was the starting point. Very practical. They're all in London. And we were able to work with them so that they could come into the space every day if they wanted to and figure out how to put things together and what the, what the kind of vibe was there. But this current iteration, working with the Christian space collection, please come and see it or visit our website. The collection is in the way. So we have an international group. Eda Eckblad, for example, is someone who's a painter, but she really uses environment and space. We've invited her Van Anderson, a great Afro-Caribbean painter based in London. Again, because he has a kind of sensibility where there's many, many paintings in this collection. He looks at art history. We have Paulina Rolofska, a Polish artist, who is a great compiler of images. And we have Donna Juanco, who's based in Mexico, who creates hugely painterly environments. So we look at the content of the collection and really think about which contemporary practitioner could resonate with that content. So we want to be true to the spirit and ethos of the collection whilst at the same time asking artists who are comfortable with creating an installation in space. Not all artists do want to do that. There are many who are very really happiest working on their easels in a very hermetic space. This demands that they create a kind of mise en scene. It's a kind of dramatisation. It's a bit of a theatre set, actually, in a way. So it's really asking them to take a different kind of approach to the practice. I think we're going to have to draw it to a close because we're running out of time, but thank you so much for giving us so much to think with. I mean, I think some of these phrases like the museum is a theatre of representation will will stay with us all as we go home tonight or go about our business in the rest of the day. If you're on an earlier time zone, it was just really rich and really provocative. And I think those ideas about collections and artists connectors as making connections and conversations happen was something that just really came through your lecture this evening. Thank you so much for giving us so much in an hour and a half. It was absolutely incredible and a really enjoyable evening as hopefully you can see if you click on the chat, you will feel that warmth and appreciation coming through. There's someone says a huge virtual round of applause for you for such an outstanding lecture. And again, like I said, on Zoom for the speaker, you just don't get that same energy back. So make sure you can feel some of that coming through the, the screen to you. And thank you again to the events team at the Paul Mellon Centre for Organising Tonight's lecture and to our colleagues at the Yale Centre for Brishart in New Haven for collaborating with us on this whole series. I hope that you'll join us again next week when we have Maria Balshaw, director of Tate, who will be speaking to us and giving the fourth lecture in this series. So thank you again and thank you particularly to Yvona for such a special evening and a really fantastic lecture. So thanks for joining us.