 Dear guests and participants, can you please take your seats so we can start the second keynote speech, please? Okay, thank you. So, it's time for the second keynote speech, and on behalf of Oriental Heritage Without Borders, my name is Daman Bahave Moganam, and we are privileged and honoured to have our esteemed colleague and dear friend here with us today, Mr. Shaheen Merali, whom I have the privilege of knowing for a couple of years through his impeccable work in the field of arts, as well as literally sense. Mr. Merali is a renowned curator and writer, currently based in London, UK. Previously, he was the head of the exhibitions, film and news, new media at the House, the Culture and the Belt in Berlin from 2003 to 2008. So, he's practically a Berliner himself, where he curated several exhibitions accompanied by key publications, including the Black Atlantic, Dreams and Trauma, Moving Images and the Promised Lands, and Reimagining Asia, 1,000 Years of Separation. Mr. Merali was the co-curator of the six Guanji Bienniale in Korea in 2006, and upon leaving Germany, he curated many exhibitions in India and Iran, and then embarked upon a period of extensive research and consultation on the conservation and production of a major exhibition of the International Collection of Berla Academy of Arts and Culture in Kolkata between 2010 and 2012. His recent exhibitions include Refractions, Moving Images on Palestine, P-21 Gallery in London, when violence becomes decadent from the ACC Gallery in Weimar and speaking from the heart, Castrum Perugini in Amsterdam, and after Love at Last Sight, Neskit, Nezekit, Ekichi, Retrospective, Pie Artworks in London. Mr. Merali has written catalogues, essays on Agati de Bellingkort, Neskit, Ekichi, Citesh Kalat, Sara Rahpar, TV Santosh, Chai Yuan and JJ XI, if I have all the names correct, and others in the field. Please give a world welcome to Mr. Merali, and I'll give the floor to him to hear his fascinating talk tonight. Thank you. That's so kind of him, isn't it? Yes, that list carries on, and it grows as you get older, and the hairs start going into another direction, and things start looking whiter and paler, and it's been a fascinating journey, and I'm very grateful for what has happened in my life to have access to the artists that we were talking about earlier on, who provide us with such an interesting language for our times. I was actually trained as an artist, and then I started teaching at Centre St Martin's College of Art and Design for the undergraduate and postgraduate programs there, and then came here in Berlin, which proved to be a very fortuitous time for myself, my travel, and the research that an institution such as the Haus der Kutschen der Welt affords a curator or somebody who's interested in producing exhibitions and thinking through the lives of artists from their studios to a space in a public sphere such as a gallery or a museum. But these are maybe what was suggested could be products and what are the conversations, and it's a very interesting, wonderful idea about the notions of conversations which was brought in to bear through this conference. The ways and means in the arts at the moment remain to be seen to see how innovative they are, especially in a city like Berlin, which in many ways remains very fruitful as well as dry-mouthed about what the arts can be. We are in a strange way also seeing the increasing development of hubs and centres which are looking at models through the sphere or the prism of a city like Berlin, and also maybe other European models which are at place like Art Basel, which create their own potentialities and cul-de-sacs. So I don't necessarily want to talk about the arts without actually talking about some of the sort of ideological structures that the arts is involved in, evolves around, and in a sense recreates through the way it organises itself. The arts itself is a very, very in a sense complex system of address, and the Arts Archive or the notion of the art in an archive also has its own strange history which we need to mediate, think through. But at this point I really, really was interested in writing a paper, which this is the second time by the way I'm delivering this paper, was about the idea of how do we, in a sense, record the arts, what is the archive. It's a long paper, so you could have to bear with me. It's not something I can recall from my head. I have the paper in front of me, so I will be reading it. And it's not necessarily a straight journey to write about the notion of the archive. It's not conclusive. The paper is not conclusive. And it's not in any one particular language. It's neither academic nor our criticism. I hope to bring and enfold as many different aspects of our different realities, especially when I'm writing rather than creating exhibitions. Writing in itself is a very creative, evolving thinking space, which allows the possibility to be creative rather than be restricted. And I tend to work with that as part of the way I write. So when I do write, some people of course I ask for comments, and often a lot of my friends who I ask to read on my behalf to see if I'm going in a certain manner, in a certain way, they always comment about the titles I use for my essays. And because the titles are very specific, they're very distinct, as this one is. And for me, the title of an essay is very much like a book cover. It reminds me of the notion of a book cover. It's a sort of a portal through which we're able to suggest what we're going to reveal in the text, what the destination might be that is going to unfold in the further reading of the text. And to a certain extent, titles are also by emphasizing a certain, maybe hesitation, a certainty, the duration of what we are about to talk about. They are, in a sense, creatively significant to the whole text. People often write the text only through its title, so it has a great handle on the whole, which is to be, in a sense, thought through. A title also sort of foreshortens the vast territory that you might be thinking of, let's say, in a work of fiction or non-fiction. So it is, in a sense, a very poetic sketch. And I was very grateful for the talk, which was prior to mine, which talked about the notion of poesis and poetics. So in a sense, the title of a talk is that liminal space through which we enter the rest of the text. It is the space which we hover above to work out whether we're going to buy that book or not. Is it speaking what it needs to speak to us or us to be able to address it, address us further? It also needs to explain certain concepts, ideas, notions which are implicit in the text. So that title is really sort of important. Otherwise, people sort of stay away. So in terms of a title such as this, The Spectre of Knowledge in Brackets, it needed to both aspire to the idea of what is artistic practice at the moment, but also have the kind of informative, objective quality about it. And also, in earnest, the notion of the archive gives a greater amount of importance to what we're deliberately looking at at the moment in the world of arts, because the archive itself, not only the arts, but in common media has become incredibly, incredibly important space that we need to rethink again, especially in terms of how we receive and how we revisit the archive. But I'll talk about that later on. But it is that part of the title, The Spectre, which wanted itself to be known, in a sense, as a space through which to evaluate the archive. And it was that that made me think about the archive not necessarily as an event, because the old ideas of the archive as an event of returning to something, but maybe a post-event of re-returning to somewhere. And in many ways, the archive as a space which is maybe a masquerade or pretence, a space which doesn't really exist anymore in the way that we think it exists. And I want to talk about that as well in the paper. So, in one way, what I meant by The Spectre was that it allowed the idea that we roam, the idea of the roaming spirit, of something which is disembodied, an entity, which is visible as well as invisible. I wanted all of those things in the title. The Spectre was important as a motif, but it was also kind of allowing that there isn't a final resting place in how we look at the world at the moment. How the world seems to be in a flux which disallows a resting place. And there used to be the idea that you could return somewhere to find that resting place, the graveyard, the line on the floor, a place where we think we will find restitution. But The Spectre allowed me, in a sense, to think through that the poetic idea of not being able to rest, of not being able to embrace a space which allows a calming down, a calming to, is very ghostly, in a sense, that we are restlessness. The idea of restlessness is very ghostly. We don't feel at all certain about where we are, who we are, what we become. And I try to think about those sort of overarching, overwhelming conditions which are now at the moment creating the world or recreating a world what we are sort of thinking about as a world, as a globalized space, which it isn't. But this is sort of a supernatural relationship to the past. We think we understand, we think we can get hold of it, we think we can have as much information, knowledge, ideas about the past. It evolves literally in our palms through technologies. And yet, the past eludes us consistently and we seem to be in a sort of shifting space rather than a space which we have reached. For me, the idea of the specter, as an sort of arching figure, a space, a place, an idea, was about how we are in a place of tricks where memory is part of the tricks which we play upon ourselves, when we revisit that, which was once real and which now remains both internally but very intransiently. Intransiently. The archive for me, in that sense, with the specter as a figure hovering around it, provided more and greater possibilities, maybe many more permeable points of an entry to this which had been sort of resolved as an institutional space, more or less, and to take it away from its sort of quasi-scientific heritage, it's not a word I want to overuse in this conference, but how the archive itself has become and remains much more of a subjective rather than an institutional space, especially the current state of archives that we are having access to online. And how do we now come to terms from that institutional space of the archive to the new space of the archive which has shifted, and in the shift it has also shifted the contents and how we evaluate it and how we even find influence in it. These are sort of very large questions which to a certain extent are coming through also partially or a lot of time in the way we are able to use technology to understand our past. So in many ways the archive was always thought of as sort of a place of rescue from an abandonment of material. This rescue which somehow resonates with us and allows us to have some further interpretation of spaces which we don't have access to normally, maybe the past, maybe memory, and in that sense for me it's also a kind of an occupation that we occupy ourselves with the archive and in a sense it's a bit like a good horror film. It sort of manages to make us feel disturbed, unsettled, to visit them, but at the same time think that there might be possibilities to be able to work with it. One of these sort of spaces which I was fortunate as in a sense to come across was the Ring and Bloom Archives in Warsaw which some of you might be familiar with and it's listed again in the UNESCO, sorry? Yeah that was nice, fine, it's fine. It's listed in UNESCO's memory of the world, register as a monument of World Heritage. Although it is partially housed and some of, are you aware of this archive at all? Anybody? No? All right. Although it is housed in the Jewish Holocaust Institute as a unique collection of documents, possibly some of the most significant testimonies about the extermination of Polish Jewry, as the story goes the archive and its creators, including its initiator Emmanuel Ring and Bloom did not live to see the end of the Second World War, but those who survived made the effort to find the three separate archives which were buried in and around the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto and the first part of the archive was unearthed in September 1946 while the second part was discovered by chance in December 1950. Yet the third and the final part of the story as recorded and lodged in this archive has never been discovered and it is supposed to be hidden on the 19th of April 1943 just on the cusp before the outbreak of the uprising in the ghetto so it holds that moment that supposedly holds some of that really important moment on that cusp of what was going on and it was supposedly hidden in the form of brush-making workshop which happens to be now the grounds of the Chinese Embassy the new Chinese Embassy which is there and the archive is supposed to be held here but you cannot get access to that grounds because it is not available for excavation and it remains somewhere there either as a myth or a reality or a possibility in its absence this part of the archive lingers like a ghost like another specter of what happened during the time of the uprising in Warsaw and it's these sort of ideas that in a sense allow me to think through about how the sense of incompletion the sense of loss, the sense of inability to finalize a picture or the picturing of the past is in a sense not something which is held together it's not bound to us it can never be given over to us and we live with that sense of incompletion and to a large extent when we arrive to the archive nowadays what we arrive to is not what constitutes knowledge but what is foregrounded as knowledge within it which has been found so it's a partial story, a partial history and in our times this history this partial complex, this partial notion is actually been culturally hardened and I think the last speaker spoke very well about that and it has in a sense also become information-based the notion that this is information, you should know this what was really interesting about this archive in Warsaw was that people were recording on pieces of paper through drawings even if they were not artists children were recording how they felt what they were doing they were recording how they were surviving, how they were living so we had this incredible notion of what this archive could be as a living reality, that final cusp but of course as it happens what happens is we see two-thirds of a submerged vision of what happened and in that sense it allowed me to think about the sandwich of information that we deal with nowadays in the terms of what an archive is that in a sense is what is graspable is available in the archive and it ends up being highly selective and yet it supposedly is also open in this, the notion of the archive and to some extent it is also accessible but what is in a sense emphasized and what keeps on being emphasized and if you can go to any library here I remember going teaching at Centre St. Martin's for instance had a vast library downstairs would you find one book on contemporary arts from China one book on contemporary film posters from Cuba you'd be lucky so even libraries as part of the sort of notion of archive who's collecting, who thinks what is important why should it be that the teachers should have access to this and not that, why should the students have access to this and that becomes part of the sort of leisurely way that you have institutional absentism so in many ways when I'm curating I'm thinking through artist practice when I'm visiting studios I'm interested in their personal archives I'm thinking about what is it that makes them trigger what are the answering in the works that they are committing themselves to make within the public realm and how do they ruminate and try to find another way to talk about the world in a sense the artist's role is on a kind of traditional but also a permanent quest to go through resources which are available and in a way to also talk about what is not available or what has to be re-read what has to be re-returned to in a sense to the table I'm always interested in how artists are interested in talking about the dialogue of the formation of an archive I was just two days ago with an Algerian French-Algerian artist based in Berlin who is absolutely immersed in thinking through just both the philosophical position of artists or the philosophy of art and the philosophical quest that artists are involved in trying to search for the medium and the material that they can talk with but also in a sense how expansive he can make through his undertaking what is missing or what seems to be in a sense there but absent at the same time of course a lot of artists' works at the moment have the potential for political ramifications we know that a number of artists recently have gone through and are going through understanding the fact that what they produce is not necessarily going to be up to be shown in a public space four days ago there were two artists from China who walked into Martin Gropius' bow stood on the chairs, the stools of Ai Weiwei and screamed for one minute took the shirts off and never taken away taking off the shirt is part of performance art so it is indebted to that but I want to go back to that scream and to the Ai Weiwei at Martin Gropius' bow why do we look at this sort of triangular situation Ai Weiwei is a collector there was something, I don't know how many thousands stools is placed there thousands years of separations what does he allude to what is he talking about the fact that the artist is not allowed to come out and still make work and present it in a space like Martin Gropius' bow the fact that Martin Gropius' bow is a state functioning role and once Anish Kapoor and then Ai Weiwei these are kind of strange combinations of artists that they bring through all of these things are really important but the fact is the matter that is who actually know Ai Weiwei who have done this intervention in the Tate with a tomato ketchup and soya sauce fight and they've screamed in the Turban Hall at the Tate as soon as they walk anywhere near the Tate by the way they're known as Matt Ferreo it's one of the people I've written the essay on as soon as they approach any of the Tates, even sentives I'm sure they're sort of literally stopped because people know what they're going to do at the time of the Turner Prize a number of years ago when Tracy Amin had her bed her unmade bed they jumped on it and in jumping on her bed it made it even more unmade so in a strange way these artists are looking at the heroism of art the heroic place of the art the reasons why certain artists end up in certain places the traditional function of the exhibition of the seminal monographic show and how in a sense it makes expansive both the space, the place and the history of art but the repercussions are also in the little stories that go around these large scale works and pieces and events but those remain always outside there will never be a recording available of JJZ and Child One jumping and screaming at Martin Gropius Bell that is an artwork in its own right it will remain outside the archive it was actually could have been made in collaboration with Ai Wei Wei because they do collaborate with Ai Wei Wei so there is a sort of a circuit circulation which doesn't complete possibly that which was made as a political statement is disallowed that which is also another sort of intervention around Chinese culture and the possibility of a fuller history is not allowed that is not to be dug up and it's not a kind of bashing about any country or whatever it's just about how power institutions and the lack of power and institutions coexist and co-work to produce a type of history many people don't realize for instance that the history of performance art in China was constructed in villages and not in institutions all the performances that came out of Chinese contemporary art were done in small areas on the outskirts of the city in what are known as artist villages there the reason they performed was that they couldn't be allowed to show any evidence of their practice so the only evidence of the practice was a series of photographs that emerged at the end of the day possibly of that performance and the ideas of Chinese contemporary artists if you go to Beijing sometimes you will see that the village still exists as 798 for instance as a district where all the artists are producing work again a different inflection on what is the archive, what is the history why did it come out the way it came out is not resolved or not written or not in a sense ordered the consequences differ from the official history so in a sense what I'm trying to suggest is that the traditional notion of the archive cannot be trusted, should not be trusted it has born out of fame and fortune from acknowledging the grand yes who redeemed to the greater public by providing material and access to their life's accumulation and now a lot of these archives remained within institutional frameworks where we are allowed to the notion of studying and research if we go back to the Guggenheim and its relationship to what's going on with Abu Dhabi we cannot equate the notion that art is about freedom if we are talking about using labour in this manner and how are we at the moment allowing this New York University, the Louvre the major institutions are basically employing slave labour to create massive structures in the desert and they're working out technologies to try to show art in plus 39 degrees temperatures we have to be very careful in the sense where we have gone into the McDonaldization the McDonaldization of art this birthing all over the place the structures, they carry weight they carry great weight we have the history of Peggy we have the history of Solomon they're like tombers, they're just like great and in many ways it's that increase in desire that increase in stupidity which is allowing us to think that culture at the moment is apolitical, market-based and ineffective so in many ways what I was thinking and wanting to talk about was how do we look at all of these different aspects how do we come to terms with the historical models of constant management of knowledge through the archive how do we think how do we somehow subvert the arguments towards the focus on conservation rather than as was pointed out so beautifully in the last text that there is a sense of appeasement there's a sense of necessity to think through what is going on in how information and misinformation is combined and reproduced as contemporary culture and contemporary experiences of culture so we are, as you saw recently the great, how many of you are from Berlin it'd be quite interesting to know alright, so it was for me the very strange and important thing let's say at the gallery weekend recently was the dinner at Tempelhof there was a big art fair where all the collectors from the world are flown in by the commercial sector in Berlin and five hundred of them were invited to have a grand buffet at Tempelhof airport that for me is an occasion where we have to study the reason why something like that is important for culture how networking is done how money manipulates the system and how it creates an order and that sense of order and that's what we consider in a sense heritage in the long term, contemporary heritage this place is so many of the ideas which are now present within the contemporary art so many artists at the moment are thinking again about what is it that the gallery system and the museum system is there for and a sense of independence has been born out of that disinfection this idea of moving away there is in a sense no agreeable perspective in the contemporary arts about contemporary culture's position or the archives position or the museum's position in the way that artists are mediating their position in it the recent show at Dallam for instance for the Berlin Biennale for the artistic community have found it really really difficult because these sort of shows have happened as you know in a number of different spaces and places in the world in the past including La Magician d'Aterre and the great exhibition by a number of artists including places such as Maryland Museum have created a sort of a dangerous type of knowledge of what is unconstructed or unverifiable or the relationship between the past and the contemporary this juxtaposition this lack of absolute deeper knowledge about how those two things can coexist or how they cannot exist has become really a cool desire for artists there was a fantastic work by an African American artist at Maryland Museum where he looked at the notion of the museum in a city which was predominantly black and it didn't have representation of the black population on show the artist's name is Fred Wilson and he called the exhibition Mining the Museum and he took artifacts from downstairs which were held downstairs in his holdings which then he represented again in the vitrine there would be an artifact which would be called ironworks and within the ironworks there would be chains which were used for slavery and a mug which was used to drink water from a pewter mug both produced at the same time these two different histories of the slave and the master as such had never been part of the idea of that museum Fred Wilson was the first artist to make that intervention and allow those two coexisting time folds to be in the same place in the same vitrine now when you can and use your art to expose the way that art is used or the museum is used or the way the archive is inaccessible or full of many fault and fault lines then you are able to in a sense reconstruct history reevaluate what has happened and re-represented in a manner which allows a real retelling for the first time so in many ways I don't want to carry on for too long because I know we've got 15 minutes I've gone completely off my paper as you might have realised but in visiting artist studios visiting museums trying to be on top of all of these events which are happening all over the world from things really exciting things happening in Asia an incredible amount of stuff going and working in places like Tehran another little story about Tehran for instance artists had the chance the gallery system in Tehran could only show works by artists for two weeks because within that two week period if they had done something incidentally wrong in an irrational system by the time it got out that they were doing something wrong the exhibition had changed through new technology and the amount of way the information passes around that has turned to two days so exhibitions are now up for sometimes only for a period of two days because by the time it goes out it comes back there's somebody visiting to find out but it has to go before they come so the system of art in a sense is never to be taken for granted nor is the way that we are given information over the historical models of management or constant archiving the sort of appeasement that archives play in the role of how we research can be very frustrating for many people involved in the arts it's something which we have to be in a sense careful of and maybe what is interesting is to maybe visit somewhere like Walter Benjamin's idea of the collage the montage where it says the great possibility of actually thinking through the different weaves and wefts of how we can represent and think through culture is much better than having something which is unevolved and just very evolutionary which I think is the easy way but those complexities which are out there the knowledge which is out there of looking at these different positions and experiences of the artists and the art world which is sometimes random it depends on who you know how far you want to go with it it's an experience that might bring that distance and proximity into some form of conversation and possibly balance and inertia might be also conversations we can have because artists of course like everybody else in society want a sense of balance but they don't necessarily want to be in a place where they're complicit with systems which exploit them just to end on a sort of note because maybe we might have 10 minutes of discussion if you have any questions that montage of experiences I myself have done something wrong here I talk about artists as if they are some sort of cohesive great group out there they're not at all artists are absolute individuals and they have absolute different times the way that they behave is absolutely like depending on what is out there sometimes it's extremely selfish and sometimes it's extremely faithful feeling and everything in between so if our biggest asset to a large extent are the artists and they should be because in a sense this is very much where the heritage the notion of heritage the object the thinking about the object comes through a lot of the time an experience of being with art what I think is really really important at this particular point is that we might be thinking about how do we remain slightly aloof of the system as it is involving of the burst and the boom and how do we come to a point where our practices of thinking and looking and producing is not downed when the next recession comes how do we sort of come away from that mentality that things just break away every few years which seems to be the case of the way the economy is controlling the arts how do we fortify away from that such relativness where our possibility to be congress and long term is not based just on economic centers but in a sense cultural hopes of cultural foundations that we might be able to build I was very glad to see this space by the way you know I used to work it out more but there was nothing like this before here this is a great move for me and so I'm very glad to be here and thank you very much please Thank you for the nice presentation Shinbasi in Berlin for the nice presentation personally I have benefited from your speech especially as a new player in business of controlling art so far I know that the totalitarian regime tried to control art but now the economy is also controlling art so I would like to ask your opinion about this control over art totalitarian regimes tried to control the archives and they tried to control art so according to your opinion what is the relation between freedom and art can really totalitarian regimes control art about five days ago I met the education officer from Manifesta which is now taking place at the Hermitage all of us really felt slightly afraid of Manifesta moving to the papal city of culture which is the Hermitage as such and then yesterday Loebihode, Kasper König the curator for Manifesta released a statement to say that he was really thinking maybe Manifesta will not manifest itself in a month's time I think it's sort of important to understand that artists are always placed at the forefront of some problematic space have always been Berlin is the sort of like epitome at the moment the great sort of the hub at one point Berlin has got many art centers by the way and if you realize that they moved from Mitter to Moicolon to Wedding now Postama Strasza and when you can do it might come up so artists are moved around as some sort of avant-garde of sorting out places and spaces and the topos which was mentioned the localities artists sort of take up the studio spaces bringing a sexiness to the city and this also happened to London where London's east end was the last place anybody wanted to live at one point there were no schools whatever and now everybody came and wanted to be there and the prices have overpriced the artistic community themselves but the question goes back to in many ways it was a very senseless answer that Kasper Koenig made to be honest he said Putin is not interested in Manifesta I think we know where Putin is interested in and it's not the best stuff for sure but you know you can't you can't say I've seen the most interesting things in the world in Cuba the Havana Biennale I've been there three times it's the most wonderful occasion and artists produce some of the best work without materials and the spaces are incredibly evocative of its own history and its own presence within the arts so you can't really dictate what can happen it just depends on for me the sort of energy that artists bring together to a space and then say they're going to try and do something about it and if they are headstrong it will happen does that answer does that answer does that answer does that answer does that answer does that answer