 It's great to hear such an excited hubbub at the start of a conference. I think it's a very good sign for the dialogue and energetic debate we're going to have over the next few days. Good morning to everyone. My name is Sarah Turner. I'm the Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to this event on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre, but also on behalf of my co-organisers for this series of events across the next few days. I'm just going to introduce them to you now. I'm sure you'll know many of them, but I'd like them to just give you a little wave so you can see who they are. So Devika Singh sat at the front here, Senal Kula, Hamad Nassar and Nader Raza. I can't see where Nader is. There we go. I've worn a good colour here, so you all can see me. If you have any questions, do pick me out in my red coat and come and find me and I'll help you in any way that I can. The organisers are based across three different continents and many of you will sympathise with the challenges of coordinating work and life across time zones. But despite our physical distance, our collaboration has been a close and convivial one throughout and I want to give them my heartfelt thanks right at the start of this event for all their time, energy and advice. Talking of time and energy, all of you will have been in contact with our indefatigable events manager, Ella. Ella, are you here? There she is. This event would not have been possible without her and the organisers are extremely grateful for her efficiency, patience and kindness. Thank you, Ella, and to all the other staff at the Paul Mellon Centre, we have Harriet and Nerman here with us and Maysoon for helping with all the organisation across this event. Many of you have travelled a very long way to be with us. Thank you to you all for coming and giving so much of your time to be here with us. We are truly very grateful to all our speakers, respondents, chairs, panellists and delegates. It's wonderful to have so many people express an interest in this event and it is an indication, I think, of the timeliness and importance of these conversations, especially as we reflect on the recent geopolitics of the UK. It's a word about housekeeping and locations before we get into discussing the main focus of the proceedings. We had originally planned for this to be quite a small-scale symposium to take place in the Paul Mellon Centre in Bedford Square. We've recently completed a renovation project and have a lecture room for 60 people in the building. However, it became apparent that demand for tickets far exceeded the supply we could provide. So we scrambled to find some alternative venues so we could fit as many people in to participate in these discussions. It's not an easy task to find extra rooms in London in the early summer season with so much going on. But I want to thank the Trade Union Congress Centre for providing this room for this morning's conversation. This afternoon and for all of Friday will be based at one Alfred Place, which is just behind Bedford Square on the north side. In your conference packs, there are maps showing you how to get to the various locations. The walks are about roughly five minutes away from each place. This afternoon at one Alfred Place, I'm just giving you a warning so you know what to expect. We've squeezed in as many people as possible. So it's going to be intimate, but hopefully again this will encourage dialogue and discussion amongst us all. I hope you're going to enjoy actually this experience of roaming around Bloonsbury and Bedford Square. It will make the experience a memorable one and energise you in between all the panels. Again, please do ask any of us if you feel lost or don't know where to go next will help you at any point. I look forward to welcoming you into the Paul Mellon Centre at lunchtime and for the drinks reception tonight. Perhaps quite a few people in the room hadn't heard of the centre before the event. Don't worry, I won't ask for a show of hands and I just want to tell you a little bit more about the centre and our work. The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art is an educational charity committed to promoting original world-class research into the history of British art and architecture of all periods. We collaborate closely with the Yale Centre for British Art and a part of Yale University and I'm delighted to welcome colleagues from the Yale Centre for British Art to this event as well. At the PMC in London we have a rich library and archive collection. We have a twice yearly grants and fellowships competition and we publish a book series with Yale University Press and co-publish with the Yale Centre for British Art an open access digital journal. The open access nature of this publication reflects the wider ethos of the centre in London and our sister institution in Yale to interact with researchers around the world to rethink and to interrogate British art and art in Britain, not as something set apart but as part of entwined and complex cultural histories. This means, I think, confronting Britain's imperial and post-colonial histories through culture, a task which again I think is even more urgent in this present climate. As an institution our research programme pivots around collaboration and dialogue and we're very pleased to be working with a number of partners on this event, particularly Nader Radha and her colleagues at Tate Modern. An expression of this partnership will take place on Saturday the 2nd of July at 2pm at a public panel discussion connected to the Bupenkarka exhibition which will take place in the Star Auditorium at Tate Modern. If you haven't already had a ticket or bought a ticket for that event please have a look on the Tate Modern website or talk to Nader and we'd love to see you there. That will be the culminating event of the week. Many of the speakers will take part in that, Gita Kapoor, Deepak Ananth, Sinal Kula and Karan Zitavits. This event is also part of a longer term collaboration with the Asia Art Archive and Hamad Nassar. I'm going to hand over to Hamad now to say more about the London Asia project. Thank you, Sarah. Before I start with my little intro, I just wanted to mark the passing away yesterday of KG Subramaniam and we have amongst us one of his students. We thought we'd ask Vivaan Sundrim to come and say a few words. It's a sad moment to express the deep grief that not only I but hundreds and hundreds of students that KG Subramaniam known as Manita Manisar, Manisab. 55 years ago I joined Baroda and he was head of the painting department. I think from that day ever since through many decades he has supported not only individuals but he's been an institution himself and always supported various institutional things that I wanted to do, like the Amritha Sheyrgyl retrospective, the Kasoli Art Centre and of course one went to Manisar to get his support and he would agree to be a chairman. What's remarkable, we were very fortunate, Gita and I, to meet him in December and he'd already had earlier on operation but he was, that was some time ago, but he was still so energetic and literally there were six of his paintings which he was working on. So his endless energy to work in the large mural but also his mind, I mean it's remarkable, we all know the amount of work he's written and I think that after his death this will grow and if I can end by saying that his teacher, the great Nandalal Bose, who he admired and spoke so much about and tried to dispel our notions that he was not just a revivalist Bengal school artist but a much greater artist and it took some convincing of Subramaniam to explain the complexity of his art and I think that after Nandalal Bose certainly Subramaniam will be remembered as one of the greatest artist, teacher and creating many generations of artists who will deeply remember and not only mourn him but will continue to analyze and understand his work. Thank you Vivian. I'm Hamad Nasser, I'm the Head of Research and Programs at Asiat Archive and prior to this with Anita Vaud I co-founded and co-directed the London based arts organization Green Cardamom. So in these two avatars it's great to see so many friends that I've sort of had encountered in one or both of both capacities and it's wonderful to also see new friends that hopefully will be making over the next two days. Welcome. I'm going to sort of repeat and not make the heroic assumption that people have heard or know of Asiat Archive so I'll give you a very brief intro. Asiat Archive is an independent non-profit that was set up in Hong Kong in the year 2000 and it was established really to try and catalyze new ideas that could enrich our understanding of the world through the collection, creation and sharing of knowledge around recent art in Asia. Now we've done this over the last 15, 16 years through one of the arguably most valuable collections of material both primary and secondary which is freely available from the library in Hong Kong and increasingly online from the website. Now what kind of content is that? It includes personal digitized archives of folks like Geetha Kapoor and Vivan Sundaram and indeed Keiji Subramaniam. So people who open up windows into vast vistas of a field and of a scene and through which we hope to fuel many different practices, research, pedagogic, curatorial, artistic. So at AA we like to think of ourselves as fuel for practice. Now this symposium continues ongoing investigations both for the Paul Mellon Centre and for Asiat Archive into how we deal with exhibitions as subject of historical study. And indeed our sort of collaboration was seeded at another event that Paul Mellon Centre hosted as part of the Association of Art Historians at meeting last year at East Anglia. And that was called British Art through its exhibition histories 1760 to now. And they kindly invited me to present a paper which featured the other story. It was titled After Lives of the Other Story. And in that is making sort of basically two propositions. One that Rashida Raine's polemic exhibition is haunting British art history. And it asked whether institutional collecting can bust this ghost. And secondly it argued that these British art histories are enmeshed with new art histories being constructed around figures such as Rashida himself or Leon Chia or David Medaillia in places like Sharjah, Karachi, Taipei, Singapore and Manila. And once those histories start circulating what space do they leave for this expanded British art history that the Paul Mellon Centre wants to sort of invest in, what space is there for those to be written or overwritten about what circulate. So echoed an earlier project where in response to the archives of the Royal Geographical Society I proposed that one of the problems with the discourse around British identity and it seems very opportun right now is that it does not recognize its Indianness. Yes you can be Welsh or Scottish or English but you can't really be British if you don't recognize your Indian self because there is a claim on Britain from its former colonies most significantly India. So these were the conversations that Sarah and the team at Paul Mellon Centre were also interested and invested in exploring and we very quickly moved through some very collegial and convivial lunches and dinners into a collaborative project that we've called London, Asia. Now we were not aware that London, Europe would not exist anymore where London Asia was born and this symposium is the first public event of a three year collaborative project and it posits London as this site where this enmeshed art history can be constructed and we will sort of focus over these three years on four lines of inquiry around exhibitions, around institutions of patronage, writing and art education. And this will be a platform we hope where both new initiatives can be born but also we can shine sort of collective light on existing efforts, on histories that have fallen out of circulation and we're going to only do this by evolving the project together in conversation with folks like you. So we look forward to doing that and before I turn over to Sarah again to walk us through what these next two days will bring, I just want to sort of recognize that in anything and I'm sure there are enough people here, in any organization where there are four co-conveners there's always a first among equals, it's not me. And I'm sure it's, you know, my sort of fellow co-conveners will agree and recognize the effort of Sarah Turner. Sarah, thank you. Thanks very much. Well as you've heard already I think the event really has come about through a real dynamic series of conversations and I do want to say thank you to Devika as well for really pushing me to do this event as well and thinking about a growing body of scholarship on exhibition histories and a group of scholars really kind of coming together and we extended those conversations to our other co-collaborators as Hamad has indicated. And so you've got the program for the next few days, you'll see that it's not, we've constructed something that isn't a marathon of paper after paper after paper. We have papers, response, discussion panel, so lots of different texture and rhythm to this event. Using exhibitions not so much as a series of case studies, but as challenging and provocative sites physically but also methodologically and I think that's something we really want to get out of this conference thinking about the exhibition as method, exhibition histories as methodology as well. We're also thinking across the 20th century and into the 21st century with the date range as well and that's something we want to put out there as a kind of productive challenge to think about how we stretch across those date ranges as well. So we wanted to create this extended conversation through showing, telling, seeing, exhibiting South Asian in Britain 1900 to now and we don't have a predetermined set of answers or conclusions we want to reach. The organisers will lead a wrap up session on Friday where we'll all contribute our thoughts on this topic but I'm sure we're all eager to get the dialogue started so I'm going to hand back over to Hamad to begin the first panel.