 I think we'll make a start now. I'm sure people will continue to join. Well, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Hamad Nasser. I'm a curator, strategic advisor, and senior research fellow here at the Paul Mellon Center. Let me extend a very warm welcome to everyone logging on to the pedagogy and learning panel of London Asia Art Worlds. Thank you to our panel and our audience for joining us today. Now, the London Asia Art Worlds program has been co-organized as a collaboration between myself, Sarah Victoria Turner, who's the deputy director for research here at the Paul Mellon Center, and Professor Ming Tiampo, who is professor in the Department of Art History and Institute of Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture at Calton University in Ottawa, Canada. Ming is also the second holder of the London Asia Research Award. Some of you may be regular attendees at Paul Mellon Center events, and for some, this might be your first interaction with the center. The PMC is a research institute and an educational charity, which is part of Yale University. Physically, we're based in Bedford Square in central London, where you can visit our library and archive, but we have an ever-growing digital presence and you can find out more about our program on our website, along with details about our research collections, publications, both print and digital, our grants and fellowship schemes, learning activities, and future events. And you will sort of see in the chat some links that you can access for that. London Asia Art Worlds is a five-week multipart program that's been taking place through May and June, and it reflects on the ways in which the growing field of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with and challenges histories of British art. This event marks five years of the Paul Mellon Center's London Asia Project, which was established in collaboration with Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, and is led by Sarah and myself. The Vider Project is concerned with excavating the historical, as well as reflecting on the contemporary entanglements that link London and more widely Britain with Asia. It does this by focusing on three research strands, exhibitions, institutions, and art schools. The London Asia Project questions the boundaries of national and regional histories and explores new models of researching and writing about the transnational infrastructures and networks that have shaped the histories of art. Before I hand over to Sarah, let me walk you through the PMC's online housekeeping guidelines and tell you a little more about how the Zoom webinar will run. Very shortly, there will be a keynote speaker followed by a Q&A, and then followed by a short break and after which we have two 20-minute papers and another Q&A session. But you don't have to wait, we will in fact encourage you to type in your questions using the Q&A function as we go along. And please use the chat box if there are any general comments or if you're experiencing any technical difficulties. This online event is being run by the PMC's Events Manager, Shauna Blanchfield and Events Assistant, Danny Convey, who thanks to both of them for really what's been an incredibly smooth running of the event so far. And they're on hand to answer any questions you may have throughout this afternoon. With that, I'll pass the baton on to Sarah. Thanks so much, Hamad. So our title, London Asia Art Worlds, is we hope, suggestive of our approach, the juxtaposition of London comma Asia invites a kind of dissonance, bringing a city into proximity with a content. It's also a claim on London, a city that resists easy nationalist framings and Asia a region so vast and diverse that it complicates any homogenizing categorization. We want to embrace this ambiguity, this uneasiness of scale and resistance to sharp definitions. The project does not propose a comparative framework, but instead we want to encourage new perspectives on the entanglements, historic and contemporary, real and imaginative of the art worlds of London, Asia. The papers, provocations and discussions which are part of London Asia Art Worlds are an urgent reminder that the contours of nationhood and region are complex and of the importance of making worlds rather than of closing them. And of course, it's not lost on us that this event or the series of events is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. And the pressures and the challenges and the questions that such research raised in the papers and the discussions that are part of these panels really puts that pressure on the framing and practice of thinking about art history through nation. So through London Asia Art Worlds, we want to propose new ways of imagining art history through and beyond national and regional boundaries. This event was originally conceived as an in-person gathering which would have taken place as a conference in London at the Paul Mellon Centre. But due to travel restrictions and the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we re-plan the programme as a digital event, a gathering which is unfolding and shape-shifting across five weeks. And thank you so much to all of you for joining us today and across these events. There are, of course, both incredible opportunities as well as some losses of holding an event virtually via the Zoom webinar platform which has dominated many of our professional and personal and social interactions over the last year and a bit. Again, we want to use this digital space, not simply as a platform for broadcast, but as a place of provocation, of collaboration and of suggestion. And here I'm going to hand over to Ming Tianpo to say more about some of the ways in which we are doing this. Ming, go over to you. Thank you, Sarah. I'm just going to share my screen here. London Asia Art Worlds does not just strive to study the entanglements of London and Asia, but it also seeks to develop infrastructures that enable decolonizing exchanges, pathways, dialogues, and futures. You can see all of the various layers of London Asia Art Worlds on this incredible website, which is a testament to the work of the PMC digital team, Tom Scott, Lucy Andia, Tom Powell, and Harriet Sweet as well as Shauna Blanchfield and Danny Convy who you've already been interacting with during this conference. So deep congratulations and thanks to all of them. Last week, we celebrated the world premiere of Sophia Balagamwala's short film, Whereabouts Unknown. And yesterday I presented the Print Pals project, a collaboration between the print departments of the National College of Arts Lahore and the Slade School of Fine Art. Today, it is our great pleasure to launch two more autistic projects, Mapping Memory and Queer Asia. Our final project by Mitu Sen will be revealed on the last day of the conference. Mapping Memory 2 is an ongoing online collaboration between Shaheen Ahmed, Sabha Khan, and Taran Singh. It traces the nomadic lives of earlier generations of artists within the spaces of Bangladesh, Britain, and Pakistan, shaped by movements of ideas, friendships, and conversations. Mapping Memory 2 was created in response to the London Asia Art World's program, transforming cut paper folds into a layered digital map that virtually moves and expands with a pulsating center of activity. Viewers can zoom in and see connections and links between spaces, time frames, and people. Queer Asia's virtualizing photography is a playlist of audio, moving image, and virtual reality works, and a live online performance commissioned for the London Asia Art World's conference. Queer Asia's explores the possibilities of other types of stories, those that, through queer digital narratives of memory, fantasy, and desire, defy the logics of space, time, and social conventions. Queer Asia's was curated by Annie J. Kwan, and it features Sinway Kins, or Victoria Sin's carrier bag music, which is a nonlinear, seductive, and seemingly limitless soundscape of literary and musical motifs. Yarlie Ann Ellison and Yen Loth, in virtual return, we can't de-haunt, a virtual reality collage landscape of photography and neon pellet drawings, accompanied by queer childhood memories of home in British Hong Kong. Allison and Loth, a very educational bubble tea, audio porn, and erotic audio drama that features bubble tea and queer kink. Abdullah Qureshi's cruising, Other Ways of Love, an audio visual journey traced through glimpses of memory, fantasy, and fictional characters from the paintings of Pakistani artist, Hanwar Saeed. Joel Tan, Strange Day's Journey and Joyful Noise, two experimental radio pieces that explore the grief of lonely spaces and the moist entanglements of tropical mangroves and thumping nightclubs. And finally, Sam Reynolds's Live Digital Performance, which will take place on the 24th of June at 5 p.m. London time, which is a cabaret lip-thinking hit, Spell. The cabaret will be the wrap-up party of London Asia Art Worlds and will feature hosted air meat tables and the opportunity to chat informally with queer Asia artists and other participants. Please register for the final session at the link that will be in the chat. Our panel chair today is Karen Zitzowitz, who is the chair of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University. She is a specialist in the modern and contemporary art of India and Pakistan. An art historian, anthropologist and curator, she has curated and published extensively. She has, for example, curated exhibitions of the Pakistani artist, Niza Khan and Indian artist, Mithu Sen at the Eli and Eddie Broad Museum at Michigan State University. Her writings have been published in British art studies, third text, art margins, art history, and she now sits on the editorial board as chair of Art Journal. Her previous books are The Art of Secularism, Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India, The Perfect Frame, Presenting Indian Art Stories and Photographs from the Kiko Gallery Collection. Her most recent book, Infrastructure and Form, Globalization, Contemporary Art, India, is forthcoming from the University of California Press. Please join me in welcoming Karen Zitzowitz. Good morning, everyone, because that's what it is where I am. And thank you so much for that gracious introduction and for this extraordinary series of events and projects. I'm so excited to dig in to the art projects that were just announced. As most past speakers have acknowledged, we are participating from locations around the world. I'm currently in East Lansing, Michigan. With that in mind, I'd like to begin by joining my colleagues, my local colleagues, MSU colleagues, in collectively acknowledging that Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg, Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Adawa, and contemporary lands, sorry, and Potawatomi peoples. In particular, the university resides on land seated in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw. We recognize support and advocate for the sovereignty of Michigan's 12 federally recognized Indian nations, for historic indigenous communities in Michigan, for indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their homelands. By offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold Michigan State University more accountable to the needs of American Indian and indigenous peoples. The title of this session, Bureaucracy and Agency, alludes to the classic categories of structure and agency. And through that, the basic analytical question of how institutions, things like language, law, culture, capitalism, universities, agricultural systems, forms of architecture, artistic, or academic disciplines, and obviously I could go on and on, which are, after all, made by human beings, start to limit, start to limit or shape those same people's actions. I feel like something crazy is going on here, but I'll just go on and talk about whether or not I have control over what it is that I'm doing. All right, so what was I saying? Institutions are made by human beings, but they start to limit or shape those same people's actions. It's a marxie intellectual space in which, as he wrote in the 18th Brumair, quote, men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past, a quote. Marx goes on in the next, I'm not sure how to continue, except perhaps to suggest that we should think about the agency of different peoples and the way that that interacts with our institutions. Let me return to Marx. This is a marxie intellectual space in which, as he wrote in the 18th Brumair, quote, men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past, a quote. Marx goes on in the next sentence to add rather grimly, that quote, the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living, a quote. I'll say once more, it's 8 a.m. where I am, and that's not always the way I want to start my day. One of the virtues of art history is its insistence upon the recording and evaluation of not just the way that people are disciplined in forms of expertise, but also the manner in which particular individuals are able to make changes, consequential changes, in and beyond those disciplines. Although it typically doesn't put it this way, art history is profoundly preoccupied with questions of agency, and art history stands beside popular understandings and engagements with culture in its real respect for, and often minute fascination with the decisions made by individuals. Bureaucracy, by contrast, has not always featured so prominently in the discipline. Bureaucracy is not exactly the same as structure, of course, but is rather a more specific and historically bounded form by which human behavior is channeled. For its definition, we would typically turn from Marx to Weber, who paid attention in his theory of bureaucracy to its productivities, its formal structures, and the particular value placed by bureaucratic systems on efficiency and rationality. Like all forms of infrastructure, it is primarily visible at moments of its failure. For that reason, the more common use of the term, particularly by frustrated consumers and neoliberal states is as an epithet. The term bureaucracy is used to describe systems that are hidebound, irrational, and inefficient, associated with the state or large institutions and not yet improved by privatization. It's important, I think, to keep both definitions in mind simultaneously and therefore to gloss bureaucracy as a system that is meant to be rational and fair, but is also something that people get caught in, raising specters of everything from annoying red tape to Kafka-esque inescapable mazes. Bureaucracy can facilitate and it can impede. By its critics, it is often dismissed as a modern form of Marx's nightmarish burden of tradition. With all of that in mind, we turn to today's session and the question of what constitutes bureaucracy when applied to the field of art. What are its productivities, rationalities, and formal structures? What forms of agency does it make possible? And what does it frustrate or impede? Those are the questions addressed by our panelists today who will all identify key moments in the production or implementation of systems through which art is circulated and presented. In so doing, they will explore and concrease the practical effects and functional limits of the geographical historical network that we have been exploring over the past weeks of this program, London, Asia. With a keynote lecture by Zaynab Virji, who has over four decades built a formidable reputation as an artist, writer, critic, cultural administrator in art as a public good. She has contributed to international instruments of culture, such as status of the artist and cultural diversity. As an active member of civil society, she was the Vancouver moderator of the Spicer Commission, the Citizens Forum on Canada's Future. Deeply engaged with the UK's British Black Guards, Third Cinema and Post-Bandone Decolonization Tactical Video Movement, Zaynab has been embedded in the early years of Vancouver's photoconceptualism movement, as well as history of women's labor in British Columbia. An internationalist, in 1989, she co-founded the critically acclaimed Invisible Colors, a foundational film festival of third world women and women of color filmmakers in Canada. In 1992, she was awarded National Film Board Fellowship as part of new initiatives in film for women of color and Aboriginal women. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art New York and the Venice Biennale. She is engaged on issues of artist labor and income and co-authored an open letter to the Prime Minister of Canada on behalf of 75,000 artists initiating a national campaign. Her work as a cultural bureaucrat, cultural diplomat, artist, activist, and writer has been consistent and contiguous with what might be termed a critical transversal aesthetic. Recipient of many honours and awards, Zaynab, sorry, just one more. Zaynab Virgy is the Laureate of the 2020 Governor of Generals Visual and Media Arts for Outstanding Contribution, and she was just awarded an honorary doctorate from OCAD University, one of the most innovative and exciting art and design schools in Canada. And with that, I'll turn it over to Zaynab Virgy and trust me, there is applause in the background. Great, hi everyone. I'm gonna just get my screen here. Hopefully everyone can see that. All right, today, everything working okay, perfect. Great, so really happy to be here today. And I'm joining you today from the ancestral and traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabeg and the Huron Wandaat. And this territory is part of the dish with one spoon wapam belt covenant and is also covered by the Upper Canada Treaties. Thank you, Karen, for your kind words of introduction. I think I have a lot to live up to. Thank you, Hamad Nasser, Ming Tiampo and Sarah Victoria Turner for extending an invitation to give a keynote on this panel on bureaucracy and agency. These are not words for me anymore, but an embodied experience. I'm really pleased to speak here along with Aparna Kumar and Sunjukta Sundarasan who will focus on two very important thematic inquiries of the Lahore Museum and the Commonwealth Art Festival, respectively. Today, I'm going to share some of my thoughts on my talk titled, Past the Quiet of World Making, a normative inquiry into the Festival of India in London, 1982. And broadly, I will trace the genealogy of the Festival of India to the British Arts Festival of 1951 and will make a case for decolonization of cultural diplomacy and cultural policy while addressing the inherent negotiations required for the production and visualization of national cultures in a world of deep-seated global inequalities. I hope I'm able to meet up with my own ambitions on this talk. Last night, I did rethink it a little bit, so I have changed it slightly, but I think you will see as I go through it how I'm trying to bring different strands together in looking at this idea of bureaucracy and agency through this one festival. So as I just mentioned, I will be focused on the Festival of India in London, 1982. 1982 saw the launch of the first iteration of Festival of India in London, United Kingdom. The US edition was inaugurated in Washington in June, 1985. New York hosted it during September to October, 1985 when it moved to the West Coast and then it moved to the West Coast in 1986. The L'Aix-de-Londe in France was the French edition, 85 to 86. Now both the US and French iterations represent a very different framework, impetus and rationale, which can be problematized and argued. The USA iteration was couched in the Cold War framework while the French one were correcting their Orientalist impulse and positioned it more as a trade show for increasing its share as a trading partner with India. It is my contention that though there have been these two iterations of the Festival of India, my focus is on the London edition as it offers more possibilities of engaging with the problematic at hand to make a case for decolonization of cultural diplomacy and cultural policy while addressing those inherent negotiations required for the production and visualization of national cultures in a world of deep-seated, global, in qualities. In doing so, one of the endeavors will be to trace this genealogy as I spoke about. Now I was born in the Mao Mao movement living in the Kalabar or in segregation in Kenya and fighting on the front lines of inequities of the 1970s and 80s in Vancouver. I've been focused on excavating the contested nature of ideas and much of the original thinking that this era produced. Neoliberalism has stripped us from this ability to produce new thinking. Instead, the terms and vocabulary is repackaged into a neoliberal sanitized version tablet to be consumed by an unsuspecting generation. I have been questioning why and how this generation of the 70s and 80s produced these powerful contestations through a new vocabulary of power. In the globalizing 20th century world, the paucity of critical work on this period opens up for a wide range of possibilities when it comes to creating a normative framework. Often the dominant narrative is based on the classical studies of exhibitions and visual spectacles as the controlling text. It has been central in defining the global project of modernity. The current undertaking, this presentation is a work in progress. And I have chosen to inscribe this research endeavor in the field of global intellectual history for a number of reasons that I will discuss. First of all, it is important to have in mind that global intellectual history is a field under construction that has emerged during the last decade to address a certain number of issues in the field of intellectual history. For example, intellectual history tends to foreground the primacy of Western ideas and concepts while relegating the non-Western into the confines of area studies. This argument is particularly well articulated by Frederick Cooper in his quote, how global do we want our intellectual history to be? In Global Intellectual History edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Satori. Describing the Festival of India within global intellectual history will allow me to position the event rightfully as a global event rather than as an essentialized Indian or South Asian event. It is imperative to have a critical appreciation of the locus of the ideas and historic reach of the festival via politics of decolonization and solidarity movements. Concomitant to this, the field of intellectual history engages primarily with Western political thought of the early modern period and it would be restrictive to position this research into a singular Western paradigm emphasizing a singular modernity. Instead, I find the contemporaneity of ideas that allowed for the collusion with states, societies and self as more tempting and pregnant with immense possibilities for new insights. Having said so, we need to look at the 20th century as a century of third world decolonization and third world revolutions and not through the lens of Cold War as is argued by John Foran. In the politics of imperialistic historiography, the history of third world revolutions and decolonization has been erased by the dictate of the Cold War frame. However, as argued by John Foran from the Bolshevik Revolution to the present, the history of 20th century is a century of third world revolutions. Now, having said so, let's go to the bonding moment. I want to begin with the story of the bonding moment. I'm sure some of you must be aware of this historic moment in the post-war decolonization which led to the first Afro-Asian solidarity and then expanded within a decade to try continental solidarity between Afro-Asian and Latin American nations. There were multiple historical forces at play as the post-war decolonization unraveled leading to new forms and sites of contestations. Anchored in the famous Bandung Conference of 1955 was the idea of new solidarity between the peoples of the new emerging nations across Asia and Africa. And a decade later, the formation of the organization of solidarity with the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America, in other words, Ospal, it's an acronym. One primary mode of thinking that emerged out of these contestations and formation of new solidarity was the idea of the third world and its concomitant concept of third cinema. Quote, the central concept was for the new nations was the third world. For them, the third world was not a place, it was a project. Thus the third world defined the political imagination of people and bound them together in the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles. Post-war decolonization was essentially a project reordering the world that sought to create domination free and egalitarian and an egalitarian international order as rightfully Adam Ghetto argues, quote, against the conventional view of decolonization as a movement of nation-building in which the anti-colonial demand for self-determination culminated in the rejection of alien rule and formation of nation-states, he recasts anti-colonial nationalism as world-making, end quote. The 1980s demonstrates that instead of marking the collapse of internationalism and the closure of alternative conceptions of a world after empire, anti-colonial nationalism in the age of decolonization continued to confront the legacies of imperial hierarchy with a demand for the radical reconstitution of the international order. It is in this context, we see that various broader political formations, such as the Afro-Asian solidarity, third world and movements inherent in it, et cetera played a central role in this envisioning of the new order. In my endeavors to study events such as invisible colors, the Festival of India, other story, and excavate them as projects of anti-colonial world-making and making a contribution to the present by rethinking decolonization. Well, let me give you an example. In Canada, in the mid-1970s and up to the end of the 80s saw a massive mobilization of indigenous peoples which led to multiple sites of exhibitions and resistance. In 1968, the US Congress passed the American Indian Civil Rights Act and the American Indian Movement, AIA, formed, which later held armed occupations at Wounded Knee, Alcatraz, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters. In Canada, in 1969, indigenous peoples rejection and just criticism of the contested white paper from the government to dissolve the Indian Act formed another impetus to unite politically and respond a year later with the red paper which refuted the proposed plans. These acts of critical mass organizations received national and international prominence which then generated focus on environmental concerns, land entitlements, basic human rights, inequalities and injustices that destabilized the imagined North America and aided in breaking down notions of the vanished and stereotyped Indian. A key fact that we can take away from this is about the birth of what is called red power, a militant movement of indigenous people who fought the colonial state, Canada. As we know, the struggle continues. But more interestingly, researchers demonstrated how the Kenora episode in red power developed solidarity with Third World Solidarity movements of the 60s and 80s and these movements had interconnected and intertwined activities, responses, influences and consequences. Artistically, these movements stirred a responding aesthetic and agency. How do we make sense of the festival of India in a contested space and time? In other words, how best can we historicize the festival of India? As we know, to historicize is a double act. That is one, the relationship between us and the event and two, the relationship of the event with the other event that surrounds it. Historicizing is a particular which insists on primacy and the centrality of homogeneity of space and time. What we observe is that such homogeneity emerges with modernity and becomes dominant. In the next few slides, I will try to situate the festival of India in the flows of modernity. Here I want to bring you notice that this festival which is situated at the cross-section of British imperialism and decolonization and the idea of modern. The Commonwealth Arts Festival was staged in Britain in 1965 with the working title of the Commonwealth at home. The festival was designed ostensibly to bring together far-flung lands connected by the legacy of the empire to establish goodwill through culture and the arts. Primarily, who the Commonwealth was for, its locus and its meaning was up for debate. As if it were a counter-flow to the Commonwealth Festival that India decides to have a major multi-venue cross-disciplinary festival where the former colony defines and defines a new post-colonial reality putting aside the Commonwealth rhetoric. The images of two prime ministers, Margaret Patcher and Indira Gandhi at the opening of the festival. The Festival of India's 19 exhibitions and many accompanying performances, lectures and seminars were the major cultural events in London in 1982. The exhibition was an ambitious projection of its civilization. Inaugurated by the prime ministers of the two countries, the festival benefited from political patronage and support at the highest level. The Indian diaspora was fully accessed by the organizers and the Indian community, benefited immensely with the younger generation getting a sense of discovery of their roots. There's some highlights here too that I just want to point out is that at the same time, in the image of Man at the Hayward Gallery, the Indian perception of the universe through 2,000 years of painting and sculpture, there were British museums from village to city in ancient India presented a rich harvest of contemporary Indian archeology. The British Library, art of the book in India which explored Indian concepts, governing book materials and illustrations. At the V&A, there was a sumptuous display of Indian heritage, subtitle, court life and arts under moral rule which explored the final aristocratic flowering of craft traditions that went back to the origins of Hindu culture and combined them with the great decorative traditions of Islam. Then at the Tate presented modern Indian artists, three contemporary painters, Emma Hussein, Bupin Kakkar and Katie Subramaniam. While the Royal Academy of Art presented contemporary art from India representing artistic activities since India's independence. And at the Barbican Centre Aditi, a celebration of live linked visual and performing arts with traditions. Now it all began with Sir John Thompson, the then British High Commissioner in India who suggested that British scholars and museum officials should bring together a vast collection of India's inexhaustible treasures and possibly outshine the major exhibition on Indian art that was held in Burlington House in 1947 to 48. And the exhibit shown at Burlington upon return became the nucleus of the collection for the National Museum in New Delhi. And in 1979, there was an agreement for this by 1980, Mrs. Indira Gandhi returned to power and expressed her desire that the festival must not only display India's glorious past but also its dynamic present and its hopeful future. Following the visit by Thatcher to India in April 1981, both Prime Ministers became the joint patrons of the festival and the corporation and the project was elevated to the highest level. There was a shift in design and display strategy to shift emphasis from a chronological and historical understanding to promote a new understanding of continuity and change. There were other associated events though, was a parallel one organized by the committee of associations and artists residents in the United Kingdom for the Festival of India, an ad hoc body of Asian artists and cultural organizations, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, whose coordinator was Naseem Khan and her images on the slide. And she said in the article that culture binds communities together. There was no one single culture as there is no such thing as an Asian community. There were Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi and many more. It is that voice of survival that we want to make heard during the Festival of India. It is a poignant voice, beautiful and touching and it makes sense of culture in the way that museum cases sometimes cannot. Without that voice during the festival, ordinary British people will lose the opportunity of understanding just a bit more of the different people in their midst. The danger must be with such a large and glittering festival that the shadow it casts will obscure the things nearby. Now, I just want to point out really quickly here that at the same time there was, this was an act of resistance and the similarly in Vancouver when the Fable Territories exhibition came from the United Kingdom, there was a similar contestation here from its South Asian community. I'm wondering why the art gallery of Vancouver had wanted to import the South Asian culture when it had its own very own backyard. Okay, let me quickly go over the exhibitionary sort of representation history. In 1986, there was the Colonial and Indian Exhibition and it occurred during a high point of exhibitionary activity and after the establishment of governmental rule in India, it was held within the district of South Kensington and the exhibition represented colonial India and other British colonies in the metropole. In 1908, the Franco-British exhibition was held prior to the unprecedented destruction of the First World War and marketed colonial spectacle and enabled comparisons of the French and British Empires. Like the 1986 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, the 1908 exhibition took place in the British metropole and represented French and British colonies as anachronistic presences in a modern city. In 1924, the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley offered the first exclusively imperial exhibition held in London after the First World War and as one of the most visible and popular features of the Empire Exhibition, the India Pavilion housed renditions of India's traditional and feudal past as reasons for British rule and similar to pre-war exhibitions, the exhibition featured India again as an anachronistic presence in the metropole. Following the success of the First World Exhibition in 1851 at Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, imperial and international exhibitions became routine events across the West that merged both education and entertainment to forward political and economic goals and a testament to the sustainability and popularity of exhibitions in the era of imperial rule is that of the 300 exhibitions held between 1851 and 2001 and 210 of these occurred between 1880 and 1945. Traces of the historical dynamics of India at exhibitions held in London during and after imperial rule and the evolving and political climate of the Empire shaped portrayals of India and their embedded imperial discourses in historicizing the Exhibitionary Administration and display of India over time. It is imperative for a more complex reading of exhibitions in which displays invoked a melange of meanings that destabilized as well as projected imperial hierarchies. Cartel representations of India frequently conflated various time periods in India ignoring Indian conceptions of their own history and the specificities and complexities of India's past. The British appropriation of Indian history with its teleological framework placed Britain at the apex of modernity and represented India as fixed in an array of pre-modern traditional feudal and princely pasts. The ideological and strategic methods of the Raj, however, did not transfer flawlessly into the exhibitions nor did they eradicate contrasting narratives on India. Rather, administrators and visitors publicized oppositional discourses at the exhibitions that argued for positive connotations of Indian tradition that validated India's difference. The deliberate efforts of exhibition authorities could not wholly control the responses to exhibits, the alternative meanings they signified or the ways that Indians shaped exhibits on their own terms. All the depictions of Indian tradition were intended to naturalize hierarchical constructions of India's difference from the West's industrial modernity. The exhibitions also invited visitors to imagine the potential for an Indian similarity. The idea of India's difference viewed in racial terms by the late Victorian era era persisted in the exhibitions and justified Britain's long-standing rule in India. Each exhibition, however, also embodied the ongoing contradiction between imperial notions that regarded Indians as fundamentally different from Britain's and thus incapable of self-rule and those that regarded Indians as similar to the extent that they could progress into modernity. The ideological basis for empire then shifted in tandem with the changes in British Indian relations over time. After Indian self-rule, exhibitions continued to negotiate the changing power dynamics of Britain and India in the world and showed the instabilities of the empire commonwealth, empire-commonwealth in the post-war era. A testament to the importance of historical context to exhibitionary porterals of the empire, the 1951 Festival of Britain emerged after Second World War at a time of undisputable political change within the empire across the globe. Britain nonetheless persisted as a world power and British officials clung to remaining colonial territories, retained spheres of influence alongside America's growing presence abroad and negotiated new avenues of power through alliances with commonwealth members. Following Indian independence in 1947, the Festival of Britain surfaced as an inward-looking demonstration of Britain's continued economic and political modernity after Second World War as a highly contested event. Developed under a label government in an age of austerity, the Festival served as an official attempt to reinvigorate Britain's domestic economy and worldwide importance. Initiated as an international event similar to pre-war exhibitions, the government reinvented the Festival as a nationalistic depiction of Britain. British official administrative circles restricted the festivals to displays of British culture, technological and scientific ingenuity and industrial development. Consequently, they debated the extent of empire commonwealth representation. Though they hoped to include some form of imperial participation, administrators did not permit commonwealth countries to demonstrate their modern nationhoods separate from the metro pole unless these countries directly financed their exhibits. The festival did not include nationalistic portrayals of independent commonwealth members. They opposed the very nature of the festival as a product of Britain's one-sided perspective of modernity and the inequalities inherent in the commonwealth. When the festival opened, it narrated a fictionalized and problematic story of British imperialism in which the colonial regime fostered democracies and economic development in the empire commonwealth. India and Pakistan as recently autonomous states renegotiating relations with Britain and their potential entry into the commonwealth scarcely participate in the festival's depiction of empire. The festival eventually downplayed but did not entirely exclude imperial themes. The festival fashioned auxiliary rather than central exhibits devoted to the empire commonwealth and these exhibits promoted a re-envisioned portrayal of imperialism that stressed British contributions to international civilization. Okay, I'm gonna move on. Okay, the 1980s were really defining times Yeah. Which started to consolidate crucial issues around the cultural politics of race and nation, representation and identity. You know, the Black British art movement took off post-Brickston rights in 1981 and perminder via organized a third eye festival of Third World Cinema in London in 1983 which positioned the issue of Third World Cinema front and center in the United Kingdom. The 40th Edinburgh International Film Festival in conjunction with the British Film Institute held a special conference on Third World Cinema, its practice and its theoretical mores with a broad spectrum of filmmakers, critics and theories attended and Kabeena Mercer called it a surface of emergence. So my direct association with individuals behind these events influenced and shaped my politics and created a nuanced understanding of the challenges of the convergence of Third World Cinema and feminist politics. And there was a distinct energy and growing contestation as the neoliberal order was slowly being introduced by Thatcher in the United Kingdom. And just going to elaborate a bit about these interconnections between art movements and ideologies. Invisible Colors was one of the foundational film events in Canada which really had a direct bearing upon the development of Third Cinema. And what I want to do here is to draw your attention here to what you want to draw your attention to here is the agency of artists. And what I'm referring to is my connection between British black art and invisible colors across the Atlantic and interesting exchange of practices and discourse was happening and defining the politics of the time. Invisible Colors broadened its remit from a Third World Feminism Endeavour to a project that had the potential to embrace all the main discourses of colonization, decolonization and post-colonization and national cultures of the cinema's concern. I mean, people often ask me why did Invisible Colors happen in Vancouver? It was because I was there. I was a woman of color who worked at Women in Focus and very quickly I began to just bring that discourse to the forefront of my work. And it was my agency that offered this connecting link between Vancouver and the British black arts movement. It was the mid-1980s. And my engagement with the British black movement was very much along the lines of the relationship between culture and technology and the place of race and gender within this discourse. It was really also about how we could construct a national identity in Canada. What was that identity in post-war Canada? And there were two direct influences, the emergent discourse of post-colonial theory and my regular travels to England, which kept me synced with the black British arts movement with Rashid Nareen, the black audio film collective, David Bailey, Stuart Hall, Marlene Smith. And so I will move on now. I'm touching on all of these things because I'm just trying to get a sense of the different things that were happening. In Vancouver, the media arts was a very hyperactive media arts scene and a hotbed of experimentation and collaboration, technical play and radical engagement with the proliferation of organizations engaged with media art. And while in Vancouver in the 70s, the world of communication technology was being transformed by the advent of McLuhanism, the critique of mass media from the Frankfurt School and the severe contestations on the McBride Commission of the New World Information Communication Order and the search for third cinema. Culture was called into question as much as its history. And I think what my point here is really that there were so many contestations that were going on and I was really trying to capture this sort of like, what was happening in the 80s, 70s and 80s. Now, I think what I've given you now, it's such a good context to get a glimpse into the bureaucrat behind the Festival of India. Kapila Watsen, the lady in the center was among the last of the Nehru-era cultural administrators and was an active exponent of what was called Indian culture produced by the Indian state. To her left is Rajiv Gandhi and to her right is P.V. Narsimha Harau. It was the idea of a single template for culture in the subcontinent, analogous to the forging of geographic unity. Kapila passed away last year in the month of September and one critic who called out the uncritical take of the work of Kapila, he wrote, journalists, critics, scholars, artists, eminent cultural figures have all rolled the drums, doffed their hats and penned purple prose in praise of someone who in fact played a problematic role for decades in Indian cultural bureaucracy. The Indian state purposefully proceeded to hammer into being the idea of a single template for culture in the subcontinent in the same manner that it went about muscularly forging a geographic unity. While in the political sphere, the tendency to break free has been constant over the past seven decades with many a million mutinies, the road rolling effect has flattened the cultural domain inflicting fatal injuries to myriad autonomous entities. Of course, Kapila Watson cannot be singled out in this project of weaponization of culture to artificially concoct the glue that was expected to hold the nation together. However, her theoretical framework of the cultural matrix being a giant blender popping into one big bubbly soup, the little traditions and the great traditions effectively proposed an easy impertinent homogenizing where none existed. And it effectively served the cunning purpose of propagating the now scary slogan of unity and diversity. In the absence of any coherent cultural policy, this was the cannibalizing mantra whose inherent violence is only too evident now. Despite her scholarship, acumen and experience, Kapila Watson, along with Honkavan and Pupul Jayakar was perhaps amongst the longest post-independent perpetrators of this confusion. Agents of a tendency which could perhaps be traced to the celebrated early 20th century historian Ananda Kumar Swami. These promote proponents of national culture but the entire might of their knowledge, scholarship and experience behind asserting the unitary nature of Indian culture contrary to the lived reality of its radical multiplicity and multi-centeredness and even multinationality. And this was the late motif that manifested in the form of the Festival of India. And here you can see the document which was produced by Kapila, some aspects of cultural policies in India in 1972. And hopefully you can read this, the short paragraph gives you a sense of her building a unifying template. At other instances, she writes, and I quote, when India becomes a colony, the process of mutual influence and acculturation continued while on the other hand, India was being politically conquered, its culture or at least a curiosity for it was also making inroads into the minds of the administrators and organizers representing the rulers. Many civil servants who came to India were brought up in the 18th and 19th century liberal arts tradition of Europe. The spirit of inquiry and desire for intellectual adventure was ingrained. And once the cares of the state became routine, they set out to explore the cultural treasures of a country whose high civilization and attainments had already become known to Europe. The interest began with literature with the discovery of a few manuscripts, but soon spread to the other branches of learning, particularly art and archeology. Had it not been for this, it would have been impossible for them to plead with the home government for more facilities and funds for the establishment of a few societies of Oriental learning, such as the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the centers of Oriental learning, such as Queens College, now the Sanskrit Varanasi, Visvidhyaala and the Archeological Survey of India and the Imperial Library, now called the National Library and the National Archives and to establish schools of art like the Kolkata School of Art. These efforts, however, must however, be understood in the proper perspective. None of the institutions so founded were guided solely by the motivation of intellectual discovery and the adventure of the Indian cultural pattern. This approach to cultural policy-making parallels multiple other effects where specific written documents have been produced and it's co-terminious with ones produced in other former colonies. And to illustrate this point, I just wanna actually talk to you a little bit about what was happening here in Canada. The Massey Report of 1951 establishes the architecture of what Canadian culture should be and lays out the institutional process and the formation of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Archives, the National Art Gallery and many other things with the idea of Canadian content. Whilst I've written and spoken on this extensively, I want to undertake some kind of a combative study of these two national policy documents and analyze really how they function as sort of controlling texts. To understand this axis of modernity, I think there are three points that need to be explored which are decolonization, contested modernisms and the counter flows. The Festival of India was about the contested history of the modernist aesthetic and modernism and it was really about situating Indian culture within this matrix. There was this great churning about not only its meaning but the future of modernism. For instance, the 1970s witnessed a crisis in the United States which was well captured in this sort of issue of art forum and hopefully you're able to have a look at that, read that. In 1981, Vancouver hosted a conference that brought to the forefront the rethinking of history and debates concerning modernism and modernity and it challenged both the orthodoxes of Greenberg and modernism and the reductive view of modernism then taking shape within the emerging doctrine of post-modernism. And it is in this context that I was also equally engaged with other articulations, especially those from a non-western perspective. In an essay entitled Cruciality and the Frog's Perspective, An Agenda of Difficulties for the Black Arts Movement in Britain, which is writer Paul Gilroy attempted to create a theoretical framework for discussing the cultural and political significance of black arts in post-colonial Britain. And Gilroy's short, dense and challenging text raised a range of questions and issues, I think which can be explored across different contexts and fields of cultural production. But Gilroy adopted the term populist modernism in an attempt to force a conception of culture alternative to the one articulated in debates around post-modernism and its legacy in European philosophy and history. Instead, Gilroy proposed considering a populist modernism as an aesthetic and political strategy that many black artists have evolved in and apparently in a spontaneous manner, one that furthermore could be examined to specific forms of expression in the black diaspora. And similarly, we see the foregrounding of the third text pioneered by London-based Pakistani artist and theorist Rashid Arayn. But now let's see what's happening in exhibition making. Post-war decolonization led to a global societal upheaval. Two competing centers, New York and Paris, gave their take on the situation in 1984, the MoMA exhibition, Primitivism in the 20th century, art affinities of tribal and the modern in a response that wanted to correct MoMA, the 1989 Meshissian de la Terre curator Jean-Coubert Martin presented works by more than 100 artists from more than 50 countries at the centre of Pompidou and the Grand Hall at the Parc de la Viet in Paris. But the key is to keep in mind the 1954 exhibition, Family of Man. And this is in keeping with Harry Truman's doctrine and seeding the term development and thus the idea of development gets connected to progress as the primary evidence of modernity. What often gets missed in the art histories, the juxtaposition of these exhibitions are the very ones that I mentioned earlier, which are representative of the Western canon. The Indian Trinale in 1968, or for that matter, the first Arab Biennale in Baghdad or the first Asian Biennale in Dhaka. And the journey from the first Trinale in 1968 to the first Asian art Biennale in 1981 is a fascinating history of what I would call multiple modernisms. The Alexandra Biennale produced a discourse on Mediterranean modernism and similarly the non-aligned countries producing a discourse on modernism. But I won't get into those details but just this is to underline sort of the, just to point to the counter flows that were going on vis-a-vis these things. Global modernism is a recent addition to the vocabulary with the global turn implying the market after the Washington consensus of 1995 and the Washington consensus indicated the agreement between the IOF and the US Treasury and the World Bank and US Treasury on financial assistance to third world countries on the condition of allowing the market to rule with no state interference. And this was, of course, we know organized through the world trade organizations. Now it is in this context we have to understand how the term globalism is understood to be an outcome of the neoliberal globalization of the 90s and thus how modernism via globalization we see there's an onset of a homogenization process and it is in this homogenization processes that the erasures have occurred. And on the other hand, at a normative level global modernism might be understood in the context of the center periphery relationship. In that sense, global modernism can be understood to reveal the agency of the periphery in the creation of modernity. Indeed, in doing so, there is an imperative of thus countering Eurocentric understandings of global history and exposing the exploitation, violence and uneven development that characterizes the modern world. The other point that I'd like to make is the need to distinguish modernism in aesthetic terms from the institutionalization process. What I'm saying is that modernism is not just an aesthetic term, but represents the politics and process of institutionalization. Okay, so I'm going to give you some examples to illustrate what I imply by this. For example, by the last phase of decolonization, 70s to 80s, comparative literature emerged as the dominant coda for explaining the times and through which we see how post-colonial literature was institutionalized under the rubric of modernism. So when we speak of global modernism, we need to understand that global modernism renders the sight lines of the West. It is a global turn in modernism. And the post-95 banalization of the art world is a perfect example. And as a result, contemporary art looks very homogenous. Now, given the context of what we've been discussing so far, this statement of Oqui becomes, I think, quite self-explanatory of how this co-option takes place. Today's avant-garde is so thoroughly disciplined and domesticated within the scheme of empire that a whole different set of regulatory and resistant models has to be found to counterbalance the empire's attempt at totalization. Oops, okay. The two images that you see there are about the Senate report on cultural diplomacy and my forthcoming book. Today, the idea of cultural diplomacy also has been neoliberalized. It has become a tool which is euphemistically called soft power, but there is a conceptual discontent of the term cultural diplomacy. Cultural audiences are using this more in terms of building audiences and that's the level of instrumentalization that's occurred. Though the soft power rhetoric initiated in the 80s, it all consolidated under the 90s under Kofi Annan as the United Nations instrumentalized cultural diplomacy. But more importantly, the term such as cultural diplomacy, cultural relations, public diplomacy and soft power create a certain kind of ambivalence in the semantic constellation at play. The saliency that these terms gather and the import of actions hinged on their meaning can create a rather confusing terrain that highlights a mismatch between overblown rhetoric and the ground realities as much as the institutional location of cultural diplomacy. Then of course, there is the problem with the very modernist framework of the study of international relations which gives primacy to the nation state and its security. Neither religion or culture or even science and technology is not being taken into the envelope of cultural diplomacy. They've not been given any space within the dominant realist and near realist schools which have peddled a particular understanding of diplomacy, foreign policy and international relations. In conclusion, I think the Festival of India offers us an opportunity to address this pending issue of the 20th century. Relations between exhibition spaces and the politics of decolonization in the middle of the 20th century are not yet fully conceptualized. Also we see how the concept of agency gained currency in the late 70s as scholars across many disciplines reacted against structuralism's failure to take into account the action of individuals. And the 1980s demonstrated the valency of agency effective change. And I'm going to conclude there. Thank you. I'll stop the share. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Zainab, for that fascinating talk I've been typing furiously. And I invite the attendees to use the Q&A box to put questions. We have, I think, let's take just about 10 minutes or so for questions. And I can begin with, you said about seven or eight enormously provocative things. And so the question is really which of those provocative things to start with. And I think what I'd like to start with really is is your sense of neoliberalism as a kind of restaging of these earlier debates that were somehow vital and more connected and that are at this moment kind of flattened or homogenized or evacuated of politics or and that you started, this was one of your early statements and then you returned to that at the end. And I think I would love to hear a little bit more about the nitty-gritty of that. And you started to talk about this in your ideas of how cultural diplomacy allows in particular kinds of ideas and excises other sorts of ideas like science or religion, these more cosmopolitan formations. I wonder if that's where you're going with this or if it's more a critique of basically a co-optation and so I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, yes, thank you for that. I think we are being co-opted and we're not unfamiliar with this co-option, are we? It's in the vocabulary, it's happened through generations but I find it very extreme at the moment. I mean, just think of the lean in, I'm thinking of feminism and the lean in version, right? This idea of self-care actually is all about the individual. It's not really about solidarity and coming together as society. You know, it's, and solidarity itself, you know, we don't even hear that term anymore. It's allyship, right? And so I think there's been a huge co-option and there's a complete lack of, when I say complete, excuse me, but I feel that there's such a huge lack of understanding about what preceded today, you know? There's this collective impulse and vokishness and often a lot of group think. And so yes, I think that perhaps, you know, what I think what really needs to happen are a lot of intergenerational conversations. To clean this up, to make that space to talk about it, to understand what has happened, how we got to this place and how iron can we, is it even possible to break it, to dismantle it? Yeah, I think that's a really sort of fascinating turn and really vital, right? Because it's, I hear you reacting to just kind of common everyday discourse and it's where it is productive and where it seems to shut things down, right? And it seems to shut down particular kinds of understandings of identity. And I thought that was that your, the difference there was really striking when you said basically, you know, so well, why was invisible colors in Vancouver? Well, because I was there, right? And of course, in that I was there is both I chose to do this, you know? Like I chose to be part of this, this is who I am. And also, I was there for broad historical reasons like you were there because you were moved on tides, right? Not because, so it's this interesting balancing of a kind of social subjectivity with individual choice. And so I wanted to ask you to sort of explore that a little bit more in the way that you see that operating in these movements in the 70s and 80s and the way that you see that sort of perhaps moving, working today or not working today, either way. Yeah, I think that I'm glad you brought that up. It's interesting, doing something like invisible colors at that time, it was possible because we were all talking and we hadn't been segregated out into our multicultural pockets and boxed into our separate identities and labeled and put up. I mean, I was recently asked, should we do a second invisible colors now? And I'm like, no, we wouldn't be able to. We would be impossible to do that. We've got real Asian and we've got imaginative and we've got the Latino, the Sine Lune Festival and we've got everyone's doing their own thing. No one's talking to each other. They've all become marketplaces and there's some independent work shown but basically they've become marketplaces. What we were doing was bringing people together for that discourse and we didn't all agree but we agreed that we could talk about them. And I think a lot of that has been broken in some ways. And so how does one recreate that? You know, recreate that. And I think it's also that sort of issue of labor, right? That's also what we're talking about. That's an important component of labor. So I hope I was able to address what you were asking. Yeah, sorry. I tend to ask these sort of long and complicated not thought through questions. Sorry about that. We have a question from an attendee, Malcolm Dixon who asks, was there a homogeneity in looking at India pre-independence? Was there a distinction between India, West Pakistan and Bangladesh or East Pakistan from the colonial perspective? And I think that's, you know, it's a question that you've opened the door for that I think also Aparna and Sandukta would be good at answering as well. But I think the question really is about that earlier moment. And then also I would like to add to it whether you saw those tensions in the 70s between sort of Indian, like the festival of India, Kwa India versus a kind of broader South Asian sense of community in Britain. So to Malcolm's question, was there a homogeneity in looking at India pre-independence or was there a distinction? Yes, there was. And it was part of the imperial project, I would say. You know, very much part of creating that and defining the metropole, which is what I think it was really about this and that this, you know and it had to be added in a particular homogenous way. And so I think that I think it was really interesting what Naseem Khan did in England as well, because it was really that contestation in the local space about actually this. It's almost like, you know, it's like being in a fairy tale sometimes going to these things because you live your life as an Indian person or I'm from Kenya, so as an Indian Canyon, that's our South Asian Canyon. And I would go do something that was Indian or Kenyan or African and I would go, but this is not me. This is not us, this is not how our lives are. And yes, of course, you can see where the resonance is, but at the same time, you actually know that there's something majority of people would not see themselves in it, you know? I always love telling this one story, though I'm just gonna throw it out here. You know, a whole bunch of kids in South Africa were shown Tarzan film and all the kids in South Africa understood that that's what America must look like because they knew it was not them, right? And I guess in Naseem Khan's thing, you know Black was a political category to come together. It was a solidarity, right? It wasn't, you know, trying to homogenize in that sense. It was really about creating a solidarity to question what was happening and particularly that the India festival. Well, Zainab, I think we should conclude at this point and we'll set ourselves up for our little break. We'll take a break of 10 minutes and then we'll come back with two papers by Aparna and Sunjukta. And I just wanna point out that your last slide was such a beautiful, you know, claim effectively of the importance of the work that Aparna and Sunjukta are about to do, basically thinking about the relationships between exhibition spaces and politics of decolonization in the mid 20th century. So thank you so much for that shout out to your colleagues and we will see you all at, well, in 10 minutes whatever hour you're at, 42. For me, it will be 942. All right, thanks very much. Okay, everyone. I'd like to welcome you back to bureaucracy and agency. And I'd like again to thank Zainab Verdi for her fantastic talk and note that we will ask her to join the whole panel and the organizers at the end for more Q and A. So if you have more questions to ask her then and or comments to make discussions to start then please know that there will be time for that at the end of the session. At this point, I'd like to turn to our two other papers for today and our other presenters. We will have two talks which I believe will be around 20 minutes in length and the first of those will be given by Aparna Kumar. Aparna is lecturer in art and visual cultures of the global South at University College London. She received her PhD in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Her research in teaching span modern and contemporary South Asian art, 20th century partition history, museum studies and post-colonial theory. Her current book project examines the impact of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 on the development of aesthetic discourses in India and Pakistan in the 20th century. Her paper for today is entitled Leveraging a Royal Coordinate, Partition and Museum Diplomacy Across London and Lahore. Aparna, I'd love to welcome you to the virtual stage. Thank you so much, Karin. I'm gonna bring up my slide. I just wanna start today by reiterating my thanks to Hamad, Ming, Sarah, Shauna and Danny for convening this wonderful series of conversations. I'm really grateful to have the opportunity to share some of my work today alongside Zainab, Sunjitha and Karin and look forward to the discussion that follows. Among the many things, territory, infrastructure, people that were divided between the new nation-states of India and Pakistan in the course of the 1947 partition was the subcontinent's cultural heritage, monuments, museums and collections of art and archeology. In the case of monuments and other large-scale, unexchangeable objects like the Taj Mahal and Agra or the Badshah Masjid in Lahore, national borders were a crucial determinant to ownership. Monuments became the property of the nation-state in whose territory they resided after the release of the new hastily-drawn Indo-Bakistani borders in August 1947, which today span modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Museum collections by contrast, which comprise smaller, more portable goods were often subject to more complex jurisdictions and procedures. While ownership of some museum objects was determined by the same territorial logic that govern the division of monuments, other objects endured a more violent partage. Concerned for a fair and equitable solution to the problem of dividing cultural heritage between India and Pakistan at partition, indeed drove government and archeological officials of both nation-states to fragment or disassemble some of the most valuable cultural objects under dispute. The objective being to better and more equitably share in their contents, value and representational power. A prominent example of these disassembled objects is the famed Mohenjidar necklace, an important relic of the ancient Indus civilization. Made from gold, agate, jasper, stethite and greenstone, the necklace was broken down at partition into its constituent parts of beads, disks and pendants before being divided equitably between India and Pakistan. In the years since the necklace has been restrung as two distinct pieces, with each half being displayed independently in museums in New Delhi and Mohenjidaro in a manner that has powerfully naturalized their separation. It has, in other words, become an astounding visual metaphor for the partition itself and the virulent politics of erasure at the heart of the two nation ideologies that both engendered and now sustain it. The division of the Mohenjidaro necklace is astounding for another reason too, its location. Its fragmentation did not, as one might expect, take place in the storehouses of the Lahore Museum or the offices of the archeological survey of India and New Delhi, the primary urban coordinates of the division of India and Pakistan's museum collections between 1947 and 68. It was both negotiated and executed in London in 1949, where the object had been sent two years earlier for inclusion in the Royal Academy of Arts Now Canonical, 1947, exhibition of art, chiefly from the dominions of India and Pakistan at Burlington House. But an archeological object of such caliber as the Mohenjidaro necklace found itself in the troves of a London-based art institution, on the precipice of Indian and Pakistani independence is itself not entirely suspect. London's museums, galleries and art schools have been filling its holes with archeological material from South Asia, both in original and copy for at least 150 years, if not more. However, that the necklace was partitioned in London, while in the care of the Royal Academy of Arts is noteworthy. A privately funded cultural institution led by contemporary artists and architects in Britain, the Royal Academy operated beyond the scope of the Partition Council. The multi-faceted bureaucratic apparatus assembled in 1947 to discharge the division of India's imperial assets and liabilities. The case of the Mohenjidaro necklace thus expands the geographic coordinates across which the division of Indian Pakistan's cultural heritage occurred. It also brings into question the agency of London's leading cultural institutions in shaping the 1947 partition. And in turn, the cultural boundaries, histories and identities the partition would reify. In what follows, I unfold the Royal Academy's entanglements with the 1947 partition by revisiting their 1947 exhibition through the torturous journey of the objects of art and archeology sent from Bombay to London. I argue that the objects transit display and difficult return amid the fracture of their homeland not only complicated their status as symbols of an authentic Indian heritage, wherein they were recategorized, separated, dismantled and in some cases, harnessed as political leverage. It also thrust the Royal Academy as the objects de facto caretaker in London into an uneasy position of partition, diplomat and arbiter with a deep, if unwitting hand in Indian Pakistan's broader decolonizing disputes over culture, history and representation. Conceived on the heels of the Royal Academy's earlier pre-war shows on Persian and Chinese art in 1931 and 35 respectively, the 1947 exhibition of Indian and Pakistani art marked a continuing effort within the institution to expose the British public to the, quote, typical masterpieces of the art and culture of the great civilizations of the world, quote. It also represented a timely political gesture proposed with the support of the British government and, quote, almost wholly in the interest of the Indian government to mark the eve of Indian independence, the 1947 exhibition aspired to, quote, bring before the West by means of a grand collection of examples of the visual arts, concrete evidence of the beauty of India's artistic greatness, its genius, its culture and the supreme part it has played in building up the civilization of the East, unquote. To this end, and as detailed in the exhibition's 1947 catalog, the show brought together a vast array of exhibits from public and private collections in India, Pakistan, Britain, Europe and the United States, spanning an extraordinary historical chronology that began with the Indus civilization and ended with the colonial and modern periods of Indian and Pakistan history. The exhibition featured archeological material from Mohanjidaro in Harappa, sculpture from the Morian, Kushan and Gupta empires, as well as Buddhist antiquities from Barhut, Amravati and the Gandhara. It showcased South Indian bronzes and ivories and a miscellaneous selection of textiles. Mughal, Rajasthani, Bihari, Dakinni and modern Indian painting were also a highlight of the exhibition, spanning six of the shows, 16 total galleries. To honor its location in London and British contributions to the exhibition, attention was also given to the artistic achievements of British artists in India in a contentious gallery added to the exhibition's curatorial program in the final stages of preparations. The Royal Academy was not the first historical survey of Indian art attempted in London in the mid 20th century. As art historian Brinda Kumar has shown, it followed on the work of the more modest art of India exhibition, organized by the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1931, sharing in its precursors chronological breath, emphasis on connoisseurship and collecting and compendium of art historical expertise. Archaeologist Kenneth Thurberg-Codrington, keeper of Indian art section of the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1935 to 48, notably played a role in the conceptual development of both exhibitions. Nonetheless, the Royal Academy exhibition certainly heralded the arrival of Indian art in the West on a new scale. Having brought together in London an unprecedented number of monumental sculptural works from collections based in India and Pakistan, the 1947 exhibition emphasized an experiential encounter with the original in a manner that would calcify its definitions of masterpiece and fine arts for Indian art as canon. The timing of the Royal Academy show in November 1947 also proved crucial. With the exhibition set to open just three months after India and Pakistan went independence, the timing and duration of the show gave the exhibitions gesture of cultural empathy and appreciation added potency. That is to say, the transfer of power in British India wound large over the exhibition. In this sense, the Royal Academy exhibition came together under quite extraordinary circumstances. What began in 1945 as a proposal for a quote national Indian exhibition of art in London meant to signal a new beginning for the Indian subcontinent and ensure quote, an atmosphere of mutual understanding and appreciation between England and India had to be reformulated in its final hour to accommodate the decision to partition British India into two separate dominions. For the most part, this reformulation occurred only in name, when in September 1947, the Royal Academy resolved to change the exhibition's title from exhibition of Indian art to exhibition of art chiefly from the dominions of India and Pakistan. This seemingly modest concession brokered by the former vice-roy of India Lord Louis Mountbatten came after Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's first governor general, initially refused the Royal Academy's invitation to be an honorary president, citing the institution's failure to acknowledge Pakistan's contributions to the show. Few changes were made to the exhibition itself, its arrangement or curatorial story in light of the partition as Tapati Guhatakurtha has shown. Upon its opening, the Royal Academy exhibition maintained unfragmented sense of what would henceforth be territorially divided as the art of India and Pakistan and moreover did little to displace the centrality of India as the main repository and custodian of the exhibits on display. This point is also made clear by the exhibition's illustrated catalog in which British art historian Lee Ashton, the exhibition's director, proclaims, quote, the purpose of the exhibition is to illustrate the fine arts of India and world. That partition was not addressed more fully or more directly throughout the 1947 exhibition as perhaps not all that surprising. For one, the partition seemed to have had little effect over the selection of exhibits to be featured in the Royal Academy show. The selection process took place in February and March 1947 when Richard Weinstein, Kenneth Deberg, Codrington and Basil Gray, key members of the exhibition's British executive committee, were sent to New Delhi on behalf of the Royal Academy to collaborate with an Indian executive committee on various matters relating to the forthcoming show. With the help of Indian activists and poet Sirajini Nedu, chairman of the Indian committee, they completed the enormous task in the short space of eight weeks and admittedly two months before the partition was first publicly revealed. Reflecting on the selection process in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts in December 1947, Gray makes no mention of the partition emphasizing instead the committee's highest aesthetic standards and preference for art over document. He wrote, it should be known that the selection is ours, not therefore what Indian Pakistan wished to represent them to the West, but with the delegation judged to be the most representative of their art. The standard that we held before us was to admit only objects of art and not documents of archeology, history or ethnology. And to remember always the August line of exhibitions in whose succession this one follows. Neither did the partition appear to have much impact over the transportation of exhibits, primarily from Bombay to London, which took place between July and August 1947. Correspondence between members of the British and Indian executive committees indicates there were some delays that occurred in the packing of exhibits from the Indian Museum in Calcutta due to political disturbances. But apart from this, the packing and transport of exhibits from Bombay largely went as planned. This is truly remarkable in light of the political, economic and social changes that engulfed the region by this point. More remarkable still, however, was that no one on either the exhibitions British or Indian executive committees comprised of eminent scholars, archeologists, artists, architects and cultural administrators appeared to have questioned the removal of exhibits from Bombay to London. And specifically whether the exhibits should be removed to London for an exhibition of any kind in light of the decision to partition the subcontinent. The transport of exhibits from Bombay to London in 1947 involved a mass exodus of cultural property from India, approximately 1500 objects at enormous cost and at an extremely sensitive political, economic and social moment. It also countered the logic of the colonial archeological project that had for so long prioritized the retention of archeological relics within India and valorized the site museum. While there had been a sense within the Royal Academy that an exhibition of such grandeur and magnitude would not be possible without the involvement of the British government to guarantee the safe transport and return of exhibits that the partition itself might have grave consequences for the exhibits in question did not seem to register as a concern. Nonetheless, the partition's effects were deeply felt by the Royal Academy upon the conclusion of the exhibition. The Royal Academy having sought quote so comprehensive a collection of Indian art as had never before been brought together under a single roof and quote had sourced exhibits from a variety of government and provincial museums across the Indian subcontinent as well as a number of private and princely collections a sense of which is encapsulated in this map here. Importantly, these included the Lahore Museum the Peshawar Museum and the Victoria Museum at Karachi institutions that were made over to Pakistan in 1947 here shown in red. The difficulty for the Royal Academy thus arose quite organically upon the conclusion of the exhibition in February 1948 when confronted with the task of returning exhibits to their home or originating collections. Prior to partition, this would have been tilled returning the exhibits to Bombay to the hands of the Indian executive committee. However, due to the partition this was no longer feasible. For returning exhibits had become a matter of international and cultural jurisdiction for which there was little clarity and certainly no historical precedent. The division of exhibits in the possession of the Royal Academy of Arts proved a prolonged process. This was in large part due to the great sense of confusion over the best course of action for the Royal Academy. Representatives of India and Pakistan in London along with the organizers of the Royal Academy exhibition were unsure if or how the partitioned council decisions on museum collections in South Asia applied to exhibits in the hands of the Royal Academy. As a result, there was a discussion of simply turning the whole issue over to the English courts to in a sense remove the Royal Academy of Arts from the legal complexities of the situation. However, this course of action wholly depended on the governments of India and Pakistan consenting to the jurisdiction of international courts in their moment of arrival, which officials of the Royal Academy agreed seemed unlikely to happen. So responsibility for the exhibits remained with the Royal Academy who were above all anxious to resolve the issue in a timely manner. Sorry, I've lost my page here. The Royal Academy's initial plan to return exhibits to India and Pakistan took shape in May 1948 after a meeting in London with key officials from the British and Indian Executive Committees. For the most part, it followed the territorial logic guiding the partitioned councils October 1947 provision regarding the division of museum and museum collections displayed for you here. According to this initial proposal, exhibits in the possession of the Royal Academy were classified according to three categories. Category one referred to exhibits from public institutions situated within the territorial jurisdiction of the Dominion of Pakistan. Category two extended to exhibits from museums and other collections situated within the territorial jurisdiction of the Dominion of India. And Category three was comprised of disputed exhibits. These mainly referred to objects claimed by the government of Pakistan to be the property of museums within its jurisdiction but to have been on loan to the Central Asian Antiquities Museum in Delhi when they were shipped to London from Bombay for exhibition in 1947. On the basis of these categories, the Royal Academy recommended that exhibits in Category one be sent directly to the government of Pakistan at Karachi and exhibits in Category two be returned directly to the Indian Executive Committee in Bombay. As to the exhibits in Category three, the Royal Academy actually offered to retain these works of art in London until which time a proper settlement could be reached between the governments of India and Pakistan as to their ownership. The Royal Academy's plan to divide exhibits between India and Pakistan was generally well received among Pakistani officials who hoped to ratify it quickly via joint directive with the government of India. Pakistani officials feared that in the absence of a joint directive granting the Royal Academy permission to hold onto the disputed objects in particular, the Royal Academy would capitulate to international pressure and naturally send all exhibits in their possession back to India, a move that would undoubtedly jeopardize any and all claims Pakistan had to the objects. Most Indian officials, by contrast, objected to the Royal Academy's plan in its entirety. Some argued in this regard that, quote, neither the government of Pakistan nor of the Indian Union should receive the exhibits directly and that the Royal Academy should instead return all exhibits to the Indian Executive Committee in Bombay. Others took their objections one step further and opposed any action by the Royal Academy on grounds of incompetence. Dharmavira, Joint Secretary to the Indian Cabinet, argued, for instance, that the Royal Academy was simply, quote, not competent to divide the exhibits between India and Pakistan and that the only appropriate solution was to return all exhibits to India the only place where the matter could be wholly considered and resolved. India's unwillingness to negotiate or compromise with Pakistan or the Royal Academy ultimately stranded the exhibits in a perpetuating limbo. Exhibits in category two, as to which there was no dispute where returned to India as early as August, 1948, where they were retained for a time in New Delhi for public display in a national exhibition of Indian art. Exhibits in category one and category three, by contrast, were retained by the Royal Academy in London pending further guidance which did not materialize until late 1949. During the Inter-Dominion Conference of April, 1949, the partition council resolved a number of pending disputes related to the division of New Sam collections, primarily located in Lahore and New Delhi. At this time, the partition council also absolved the Indian Executive Committee of any responsibility in the matter of the Royal Academy exhibits and instructed the Royal Academy in turn to release the art exhibits in their possession to representatives of the appropriate dominions in London. To aid the Royal Academy in the process, given the continued uncertainty over cultural jurisdictions, eight lists of exhibits were jointly prepared by representatives of the governments of India and Pakistan as a guide for the division process. These lists are themselves fascinating documents to consider. On the one hand, they speak to the hyper-objectivity to which the division of museum collections between India and Pakistan clearly aspired. Four objects, for instance, are listed as being divided, in quote, half, between India and Pakistan, one of which is the Mohanjidar necklace previously discussed. Moving beyond these examples of object fragmentation, however, these lists bear other insights into the character of object negotiations. It appears, for instance, that efforts were made to evenly distribute types of objects between India and Pakistan. The materiality of objects also appears to have been some concern. Such observations raised other questions, such as, what size, shape, or condition a factor? What have projected financial value? In light of Basil Gray's earlier reflections on the selection process, I also wonder about the impact of any of the institutional setting of the Royal Academy on the creation of the lists. Did its aesthetic values or even its physical distance from South Asia shape or enable how the objects were valued and in turn divided? In the end, with the aforementioned lists as guide, it was British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler who supervised the final division of objects still in the hands of the Royal Academy of Arts. Wheeler came into the position already a trusted cross-border official, having served as Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1944 to 48. At the time he was known to the Royal Academy as a member of the Exhibitions Indian Executive Committee, he was also serving a temporary post as Archaeological Advisor to the new government of Pakistan. Wheeler's correspondence on the division process is riveting both for the clinical notes he wrote on the fragmentation of objects and for his broader expressions of anxiety and frustration which belie an acute awareness of his historical position. The inaction of the Indian government in the matter of the Royal Academy appears to have been a source of great anxiety for Wheeler who above all sought to ensure an equitable and timely division process. He frequently lamented the quote, specious excuses made by India's High Commissioner in London that repeatedly delayed the release of the exhibits from the care of the Royal Academy, quote, presumably on instructions from Delhi. But as Wheeler's correspondence also reveals, India's inaction was not entirely without reason. Rather, it had become a matter of unspoken political strategy, a way for Indian officials to ensure the efficient and timely division of museum exhibits then still in the hands of other institutions in Pakistan namely the Lahore Museum. In a letter to Wheeler in October 1947, V.S. Agrawala, the superintendent of the Central Asian Antiquities Museum in New Delhi, explained that the reason for India's delay in taking a decision on the Royal Academy exhibits was likely linked to the West Punjab governments not making over the Lahore Museum objects as required by the Inter-Dominion Agreement of April 1949. That is to say India's release of the Royal Academy exhibits to Pakistan had deliberately become a form of leverage against Pakistan's release of the remaining Lahore exhibits to India. Much more can be, can admittedly be said about the nature of the division process both with respect to the actors involved and to the interconnectivity of the Royal Academy dispute to objects in Lahore and New Delhi. And in my larger project on partition and visual culture I situate the Royal Academy dispute with respect to the broader territorial and cultural epivals of the partition in South Asia. The division of land, people, monuments, imperial assets and liabilities to elucidate how these various and overlapping processes of division intersected and informed one another and how together they point to the unfinished nature of this process of cultural fragmentation today. In isolation, the Royal Academy dispute is nonetheless striking for the confounding picture at pains of the art institution in moments of social, political and territorial upheaval. I say confounding here to emphasize the Royal Academy's agility throughout to the slippages, the inconsistencies in the Royal Academy's position as it moves from national advocate to partition diplomat from cultural arbiter to witness and caretaker. As much as this is a story about place, one that centers London in the division of cultural heritage between India and Pakistan, it is also a story of institutional agility and the agencies they're in. It unfolds the crucial agile if unexpected hand that the Royal Academy had in solidifying post-colonial cultural jurisdictions in South Asia, jurisdictions that not only impact where objects of art and heritage reside but how they belong to nations, cultures and communities. Thank you. Thank you, Aparna, for that fascinating talk. I look forward to the Q&A afterwards. But first, Senjupta Sundarasan will deliver our last paper for the morning. Senjupta is a historian of 20th century aesthetics who works at the interfaces of visual art and political thought. She is interested in particular in the ways in which art reflects and reframes struggles, imaginations and dialogues around 20th century decolonization. Her book, Partisan Aesthetics, Modern Art and India's Long Decolonization was published by Stanford University Press in 2020. It studies the left-wing aesthetics in dialogue with formations of modern art in late colonial and early post-colonial India. She's currently working on two book projects. First, a co-edited volume on the aesthetics of the post-colonial left in South Asia with a lot of hook of the University of Edinburgh. And second, a monograph on ideas or forms of the transnational and the art of decolonial liberation movements. Senjupta lives and works in the Netherlands as assistant professor of history of art at the University of Amsterdam. Her paper today is entitled D-slash-constructing Commonwealth Art Today, 1962. Welcome. Thank you very much, Karen. I'll try to share my screen. Is this working? Can, okay. Thank you, Karen. And thank you, Zainab and Aparna for excellent presentations and so much to think about. I'm sort of going to be somewhere in between Zainab's 1970s, 80s material and Aparna's 40s, early 50s material. Thank you also to Ming, Sarah, Hamad and Shauna for conceptualizing and organizing these conversations, what you have called murmurations. In keeping with the idea of the dynamic formation of thoughts, forms and questions, I will talk about a very initial set of notes and propositions around the Commonwealth Institute. My plan was to do more in-depth archival work in London last year, but for, you know what? So I'll present to you some of the animating ideas that are taking me to the Commonwealth Institute and also what I'm drawing from very initial round of research on the CI. My interest in the CI comes from a wider and definitely slower new research I'm beginning to do on the ideas and formations of the transnational during the critical transitional decades of decolonization in the 20th century, roughly between the 1940s and 1980s. My focus in particular is on the plural and contesting notions and vocabularies of freedom that animate the transnational during these decades, inflected indeed by the politics of the Cold War. Such ideas of freedom include freedom as artistic form, many of these are within quotes, that is freedom as the radical universalism of form that is often attuned to the first world notions. Freedom has lived in utopian horizons of struggle, attuned often to the socialist second world visions and freedom as post-colonial political independence and negotiations at the same time about cultural sovereignty and social liberation attuned to third world visions. It's worth stating though that in my work, I'm not interested in looking at these in separate ways but to look at the overlaps and the interfaces and the gray zones where these kind of form complicated holes and to understand those holes that are really formed through dialogues between these three. Such ideas of freedom circulating across global scales and hardening in particular formations across particular sites or interfaces and indeed carrying unique vocabularies and signposts bring me to the Commonwealth Institute in the 1960s and 1970s. I'm interested in particular in exploring how the unique formation of the Commonwealth Institute as a cultural bureaucratic pedagogical enterprise in decolonizing Britain constructs literally and otherwise as you can see on the screen, visions of freedom and how such visions frame what I and some others have called the aesthetics of decolonization. My paper today then is a set of notes and propositions rather than most stable arguments and I really do welcome suggestions, provocations and questions later. Begin by showing you the very form of the Commonwealth Institute, the structure of thought as it were. You will see here the proposed building. Let me just move this. Yeah, this is better. You will see here the proposed building, its plans. So the exterior, the model exterior to the right hand side you have the floor plan of the Institute as you can see the modern art gallery is at the bottom left. And there are three exhibition floors that are connected in a way by this triangular kind of roof. The Commonwealth Institute was formed from the Imperial Institute through the Commonwealth Institute Act in 1958 and was allocated this new building, the construction of which you have been seeing on the screen. The architecture of the CI can be seen to be its central function, quite central to its function. Designed to look like and I quote, a copper green tent set among the trees, the three exhibition gallery floors were placed under a roof made of five hyperbolic paraboloids. You see the images on the screen, which as its architects noted were, and I quote, peers to form a large central well under the main paraboloid. A bowl-like space will unite the gallery floors and permit long diagonal views of the curving roof plane. So you have the three exhibition gallery floors that are then sort of converge in this middle kind of space which is called here the void in the draft. This panoramic view of the vistas of the Commonwealth was the core of the CI's mission with showing and seeing made intrinsic to a foundational knowledge production around the Commonwealth. Speaking of the new CI, its director, Kenneth Bradley noted in 1963 that, and I quote, the importance of the new Institute of the Commonwealth lies in the fact that it represents a cooperative effort by every Commonwealth government as well as by many other public bodies and firms to create a physical expression in London of all that is most constructive in the Commonwealth association. The Institute he was careful to note was not interested in politics or trade relations, nor with propaganda of any kind, but with human values in which the real strength of the Commonwealth lies. In its framing thus, the Commonwealth Institute professed an almost apolitical humanist vision with the question of culture being made into a key goal in what Bradley called visual education. Explaining why the building quote unquote, looks and behaves as it does, he notes, I say behaves deliberately because its design is entirely functional and it is by its functional behavior that its success or failure must be judged as well as by its aesthetic qualities. In designing the exhibits, James Gardner, Bradley notes quote, was confronted with the problem of combining 44 separate exhibitions each showing the history, geography, economy, scenery, peoples of a different country into one harmonious whole. He succeeded Bradley adds in creating harmony, beauty and a constant variety of feeling which does not become either boring or confusing. I'm trying to take you to the next. The displays Bradley asserts echoing a critique is a triumph of naturalistic art. This naturalism he notes is a deliberate educational policy based on years of experience in this particular field of visual teaching. Because the ad, and I quote, because the average adult and child alike can learn more facts and learn more about them quickly and easily from a straightforward presentation of say a rice field in Malaya than from one that's too stylized, let alone abstracted. Speaking on the time, honor to diorama examples of which you see on the screen, I apologize for the images. I intended to go back and take clearer images last year but just have to make do with it. So there are dioramas of India, Varanasi on the left-hand side and then Northern Rhodesia and Gibraltar that gives you a sense of how alive the dioramas really were. So speaking on the time on a diorama so actively used the CI is later director JK Thompson would note in 1972, and I quote, design for design's sake is out. Where we can, we will certainly go for realism towards an environmental exhibition. If we are showing the South Sea islands, isn't it natural that our visitors should only learn the facts about corpora and phosphates but also watch the movement of the sea and the surf, listen to the sound of the wind and walk across the coral, unquote. A rhetoric of welding thus can be seen to be active within the official visual discourse at the CI. To Thompson and I quote, teaching about the Commonwealth is not an end in itself. It is a means about learning about the world we live in. This welding, much like the new post-colonial governments themselves was one of diversity without disparity. For India, Indonesia, for instance, the dictum unity and diversity comes to mind. Exhibitions sat at the core of this welding. The Commonwealth story is a great story, Thompson says. And like all great stories, it deserves to be well told. Certainly the Institute has no intention of being left behind on the exhibition front in the next decade. Yet the displays with its commitment to realism remains steep in colonial anthropological gaze, a trope that continues very much, of course, in post-colonial museum practices. Thompson notes, we are not frightened of novelty but we do not make a fetish of it. And in the Commonwealth annual reports, CI annual reports, the state of construction and deconstruction in the gallery was almost also quite literal and connected to the real politic of the day. Every time a nation would get independence for instance, the entire arrangement would have to be changed. And here you had the Tanganyika independence exhibition with Julius Nerere opposing in front of it in 1961. So there is some notes in the Commonwealth Institute annual reports about this constant state of flux which literally would reflect the state of flux in decolonization itself. This welding, however, takes on a very different echo. When we step into the Commonwealth Institute's art gallery that hosted a large number of exhibitions on modern art. From 1953 until 1961, the art gallery was being used for exhibitions of artists working on themes which would have things like earlier traditions of sights and seams of empire. And a new shift increasingly was marked towards displaying art and crafts from the colonies. It was in continuous use as the curator Donald Bowen would note in 1963. And I quote, and housed altogether 120 exhibitions of which more than 100 were works exhibited by governments, art societies and individual artists from every country in the Commonwealth overseas. The policy followed Bradley notes, Kenneth Bradley notes was to give a promising was to give promising as well as better known artists in different parts of the Commonwealth opportunities to show their works in England at a minimum cost to themselves. To make London and the Institute the natural home for the Commonwealth. Over the 1960s, the gallery would have and I quote, a varied program of one man shows, group shows, national exhibitions giving a wide geographical coverage and a balanced mixture of figurative and abstract art. What I also encountered in the reports is often you would have an exhibition on Canadian modern art being inaugurated by the president of India, for instance. And here you have the Caribbean cricketer and activist Larry Constantine opening an exhibition on Sadik and the Pakistani artist and the New Zealand artist, Art Derry. And you have among the attendees, for instance, the high commissioner of Ceylon, Pakistan the deputy high commissioner of New Zealand. So there would be a kind of montage of different Commonwealth nations in the way exhibitions would be visualized and steered as it were. And it is here I would like to introduce my specific case study for which I could not do more work last year, which was the Commonwealth Art Today exhibition which was in a way the opening exhibition of the New Building of the Commonwealth Institute in 1962. Eric Newton, the art critic and art advisor to the Commonwealth Institute says at the start of the Commonwealth Art Today catalog. No more than three words are needed to explain the scope and purpose of this inaugural exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute Gallery. Those three words, Commonwealth Art Today form the exhibition's title. It is a simple but self-explanatory title for an unusually ambitious project. The exhibition was, as Kenneth Bradley would note, handpicked by the national galleries, art councils and similar bodies in more than 20 different Commonwealth countries. The exhibition carried 180 pictures and 30 pieces of sculpture. It was, as Bradley admitted, in the introduction to the catalog too big with critiques commenting on the heterogeneous, even and uneven quality of the pictures and some others being astonished by their similarity. Eric Newton wrote to the foreword of the catalog. The exhibition is in fact intended to show a cross-section of the best art in the Commonwealth. Best art that the Commonwealth can produce today. And although a cross-section through anything so complex in its racial characteristics and its cultural traditions could hardly be expected to have any artistic unity, the value of such an exhibition lies precisely in its variety. For want of time, I will focus on the South Asia exhibits but also give you a sense of the wider conversations that were being generated within the catalog. I went through who were the selecting organizations who kind of steered the exhibition. Very interestingly for Ceylon, it is the British Council, for India, it is the Lalit Kala Academy and for Pakistan, it is the Pakistan Arts Council. And you have for Hong Kong, for Ghana, for different countries, you have the municipal museums, the city halls, the ministries of education and art. So basically you can see the apparatus of the bureaucracy working behind who would be represented in the exhibition. A recurring concern in the introductory texts to each nation represented in the exhibition seems to be the tension between the national and the international. G.M. Butcher, the art critic writing on Ceylon, for example, writes, and I'll talk in detail about the Ceylon exhibit. It gives us a sense of what was being written about actually overlapping themes. He writes, and I quote, several decades ago on the occasion of the exhibition called Ceylon, a painter's country at the South London Art Gallery, Sir Herbert Reed argued that as a result of the progressive collapse of traditional and regional values since the 18th century, a collapse whose symptoms, individualism, fragmentation of styles and eclecticism are everywhere the same. It was hardly surprising that contemporary paintings from Ceylon are only with difficulty to be reconciled to each other and to the country of their origin. I continue. The viewpoint is Butcher writes, is somewhat negative expression of the idea that art has become international. Just as in politics, the development of nationalism marches at roughly the same pace as the evolution of the United Nations. And Ceylon's continuing identity is a direct function of the fabric of world law and order. National identity and internationalism are not contraries, but complementaries. Butcher continues, as Bengal discovered some decades ago, a self-conscious attempt to revise the outward forms of the ancient art of Ajanta, led only to aesthetic disaster. So too does imitation of the outward forms of contemporary Western masters. And this is where it gets interesting, the equations to be solved lie at the deeper levels. Ceylon has taken only the first uncertain steps by the eye of posterity will be able to recognize common Ceylonese qualities, as certainly as it will also recognize how we are all marked by the century we live in. So you have in a way a shadow vocabulary of the dynamism of the times, the becoming international of conversations and the struggling of critics like Butcher, who have sympathies with the growing modernist fervor as it were in the new nations, but still do not have, it seems the vocabulary to respond. On Pakistan, for instance, Butcher writes, it was very surprising to me actually that nobody from the Pakistan Art Council wrote. And it's also very interesting which artists get represented in the Pakistan segment, because most of these artists as Butcher already notes in the introduction were already based in London at that point in time, including artists from East Pakistan who are represented. And some iconic artists even from India and Pakistan are not there in the catalog. Anyway, so Butcher writes, for practical purposes, artists who have studied in the West are those primarily represented in this sampling. Most of these, he says, have attempted to build a bridge between the East and the West. When they succeed, they assimilate values from Islam's past with principles derived from Western masters. When they fail, they produce confused limitations from bits and pieces from everywhere. It may even turn out that the conscious attempt to assimilate elements from the West is a mistaken effort. And all that Pakistani artists need to do is to struggle above all to be himself. Ultimately, those who have studied in the West as well as those who have not will achieve their identities as Pakistanis to the degree that they find themselves as artists. Now, similar, I have been looking at similar texts tied to Ghana, to British Ghana, where, for example, I have given you here Ahmed Pervez's image, the George Kate image, and then Aubrey Williams image called Guyana. About this painting, the critic Wilson-Harris noted, that the painting Guyana by Aubrey Williams may well confirm to the genesis of sensibility, compulsive blood roots, equally to grass roots. There are overtones too remote to be an influence which evoke a certain sensuousness and guilt, curiously reminiscent of the English painter Francis Bacon. So what's striking to me is how there is the pressure of a modernist vocabulary that wants to come out in this critical kind of text, but there is a kind of a haunting presence of an essentialization that in a way is continuous from the, of course, in the pre-47 period, but also through the 50s, 60s, and apparently even today. This tension between nationalism and internationalism, the country of origin and the origin of style, seems to be a recurring idiomatic battle that critics, directors and patrons of the CI writing on exhibitions struggle with, while a rhetoric of infantilization persists, hinting at the struggle and the journey that has to be still made, still to be made by Afro-Asian artists to arrive at cultural, and I quote, cultural independence. This was something for instance, Eric Newton writing on the Pakistani artist, Sainu Laveddin was writing in 1951, when he was talking about the striking realism in Laveddin's work, but mentioning nonetheless that he has to strive towards cultural independence because political independence is not enough. Meanwhile, for artists whose works were being displayed in this show, like Avinash Chandra, or Rashid Dharin was not displayed here, but Avinash Chandra for sure, the CI occupies a curious location in their practice, artists from South Asia who were based in London and some of who exhibited at the Commonwealth Institute. Avinash Chandra, for instance, recalls his first exhibition at the Imperial Institute in 1958, he says, and I quote, the exhibition was like being back at home. I had a show in Delhi before leaving, and then I had this show at the Commonwealth Institute, which in those days was called the Imperial Institute. The exhibition was organized, I believe, by the Royal Indian Pakistan and Ceylon Society, which funds from imperial whatsoever left from the colonial days. There was no difference between the show in Delhi and the one at the Imperial Institute in London. The people who came to see the show were the same, same kind of people. Exhibition was opened by our ambassador to Delhi, Vijay Lakshmi Pandit, Nehru's sister, and she also bought a painting because she must have thought that she should support an Indian artist. The exhibition attracted a large gathering amongst it mainly were, have written socialists, I think in socialites, but most people were there because they thought it was time to show an Indian artist. After that, my show was sent to Belfast because Belfast was a part of empire, but the whole thing he says was political and I felt I was being used. I had come to this part of the world to get away from the old colonial civil servants and here I was surrounded by the same people. Rashid, this is from a conversation between Rashid Arim and Avinash Chandra and Arim responds by saying and I quote, but that's a very common thing even today, particularly when it comes to the support and recognition of artists from the Commonwealth countries. It's all a part of cultural politics which are still being dominated by all type colonial bureaucrats. I mean, the Commonwealth Institute is no different today than it was 30 years ago. In the wider piece that I'm working on from this material, I'm interested in tracing this flux that marks the showing and telling about post-colonial artists in the new post-metropole as it were. The post-colonial burden seems to be that there is on one hand, a binary of national, international, almost outside the other formal binary of figuration abstraction, dominating the conversations in the 50s and 70s, 50s to 70s period under Cold War, of course. The issue, however, might not be to rise above either, not just to rise above either as scholars have been doing, but to trace how these two binaries map onto each other. The transnational, as the aesthetics of decolonization, as the aesthetics of decolonization thus, is a mesh then of the formal questions and locational questions. Whether those locations be the geographies of nation states, also the Cold War geopolitical demarcations or the geographies of dialogue, for instance, of solidarities, Afro-Asian solidarities, tri-continental solidarities, as Zainab also noted. What emerges from this mesh as a shared recurring trope here is the moot question of the quote unquote universal or the dialectics as it were between the universal and the particular. Coming back to where I began then, the question that I'm thinking about is, is freedom then, alibi, postcolonial freedom, a question of the universal or the question of the particular? As a historian, my answer would be a dialectic of both and one that plays out in different forums via different agents in different forms and voices. The Commonwealth Institute's voice becomes a curious entry point here. I will wrap up by highlighting some of the unique voices that the Commonwealth Institute can provide. At the Commonwealth Art today, there was a humanist rhetoric of universal humanity captured in this case by the Commonwealth underlining that is unity rather than difference across in this case, the Commonwealth. This surely comes up in the texts around the CI from the CI between the 60s and 70s. Here you have the example from the Commonwealth Biennale of Abstract Art and you see the rhetoric of, I've highlighted the points, a sharing a common and technical, a common technical and aesthetic language, whatever has provoked artists to express them in visual, themselves in visual terms and whatever philosophical or spiritual comment they wish to make, they have chosen a rather complex and difficult method of non-figuration. A similar vocabulary in the Commonwealth Artists of Frame from 1977, the story will vary from country to country, but common to most, if not all, explanations will be the attainment of independence. This resonates, this rhetoric of the humanist universalism resonates with a similar rhetoric of universalism from the UNESCO conferences. For instance, the UNESCO Conference of 1952 with the Venice Biennale with similar ideas of universalism and artists' journeys were highlighted or a show like the Family of Man that Zainab also talked about that toured 54 or 56 countries from MoMA in 1955. I would like to stress these resonances further. The CI, I will argue, speaks to the particular institutional vision of universalism as opposed to or at least different from subjective, effective and ideological visions of universalism active during this period. Such nuancing becomes important if we are to remain both alert to and unpack hegemonic, Euro-American and Cold War scripts of 20th century modernism. Two regimes of vision seem to be active at the Commonwealth Institute. Vistas of the Commonwealth as seen from London as visual scape as it were and vision from the Commonwealth as exhibited in London in the art exhibitions. And embedded in that as a core as it were was Britain's own self-perception as the home of the Commonwealth as Kenneth Bradley already stated. This home is one of contradiction, of course. And not just because of the rawness of the restrictive Commonwealth Immigration Act that parallels the opening of the Commonwealth Institute itself in 1962 or in our times, the Windrush scandal. This rawness is foundational and constitutional and in fact, constitutive too. And as such steeped in an internal contradiction that is typical to the post-metropole. At its heart is the question of a post-colonial modernity that is tied to the question of what constitutes 20th century British modernism and on what terms and what vocabularies will that composite be written about now? The CI discourse on universalism, I will argue, is pertinent for understanding post-colonial modernisms from without, that is from the post-metropole rather than from the newly independent nations. And this Commonwealth universalism must be placed at the interfaces of competing universalisms of the Iron Curtain. Such a discourse I propose is not entirely aligned to the United States while sharing nonetheless the post-war free world values and is inflected also at the same time by the very ingredient of empire. In other words, modernist universalism in post-war Britain, of which the Commonwealth Institute is a voice, is a site of both affirmative assimilation within a post-war world order, aligned, let's say, to the first world and a critical demand for inclusion and expansion of the canon of modernism. Coming, for instance, from what Stuart Hall has called black artists, artists of Afro-Asian, Caribbean descent living and working in Britain. This dialectical sense of home, the CI as home, marks post-war aesthetic universalism in Britain and needs to be conceptualized if we were to rethink Britishness in dialogue with decolonization. And I will close by showing you, still from the reports on, I think it's a late, late seventies image of the third world Christmas market. For those of us working on solidarity movements, this could be a starting point of conversations around solidarity institutions and the market, what warps us. I'm going to stop there. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Sunjita, for that incredibly rich sort of set of things for us to get into. I'd like to invite all of the panelists, the organizers and the speakers to join us as squares, square images. We already have some questions and I'd like to invite more. And of course, please know that if we somehow don't get to them, then there is a session for talking more like human beings outside of a webinar format that will follow this. And so I'll just remind everyone of that. So I have plenty of comments, but in actuality, I would like to seed my space a little bit to the questions that are already there. And then I can come in later. And Zana, you actually addressed a question in the chat to Aparna. And I thought, perhaps we can start there and get into the nitty gritty. Yeah, I don't know, Aparna, if you saw the question or... I did, yes. I mean, just going to pull it up really quickly. Yeah, go ahead, please. Perhaps one of you can restate it and then, you know, for everyone. Yeah. I can ask it. First of all, thanks for your presentation. And what I'm saying is let me put on my bureaucratic hat. How does the 1970s UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property as the main international law governing trade of cultural property relate to your problematic, you know? The impetus for this law really emerged in the 50s as decolonization was unfolding. Yeah, so thank you so much for this question. I feel like you're isolating the direction that I want to take this paper in, or I think the kind of potential broader implications of this paper, particularly as it relates to the UNESCO Convention, but also I think the discourse around repatriation and decolonizing the museum today. And I think from one of the things that I'm interested and I don't have an answer for you yet because this is a direction that I wanna pursue, but one of the things that I am kind of starting to think about is, I mean, my larger project is really centered around the kind of potential of histories of mobility, of histories of object mobility and kind of disrupting how we think about and write about the institution. And a couple of the kind of legal frameworks that I'm starting to kind of think about or situate I think the division of Indian Pakistan's museum collections in 47 against is not only the 1970s UNESCO Convention, but also I think the earlier moments of the kind of UNESCO conventions around cultural, defining cultural genocide that come out of the kind of post-war moment of war and destruction, how those kinds of definitions of fragmentation also kind of overlap with what's happening with the movement of cultural property and the division of cultural property, but then also kind of going towards an earlier moment in the kind of colonial kind of legal frameworks that are established through the archaeological survey of India and there are a couple of laws that come into place that really restrict the, that are geared towards really restricting the movement of cultural property in India or in South Asia abroad. And I'm really interested and I don't know because the archive hasn't really spoken to this yet. So this is something that I'm really trying to kind of figure out how to get at is how this Royal Academy case study can, I mean, how it situates in relation to these kind of legal infrastructure. And if there is a kind of, not genealogy, but if there is a dialogue that's happening between those frameworks through, I think the division of a cultural material partition. That's what I'm thinking about. So thank you for raising that. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. That's interesting. I'll be touched with you around the Canadian stuff. I have some things that I think are interesting. Yeah, thanks. So I love the idea of thinking about object mobility and my question for you was really thinking about just how exciting it would have been in 1947 to be able to put things on a ship and to not imagine them being blown up on the way to the UK, that you're coming out of a sort of a situation in which shipping was basically too dangerous and as people who've been locked in their homes for a long period of time, I think we have a very shorter notion of this, this sort of idea of an embargo on movement. And so that was one of the sort of, I was interested in kind of thinking about the post-war as one thing, but my larger question, and so I wanted to ask you that very concretely upon, not about that, but my larger question is about balancing that idea of movement of things with the expressions of desire that each of you have in your papers voiced from people like Basil Gray or George Butcher or Zaynab herself or as a desire for a particular kind of frame that is frame of work of understanding that isn't present, right? So Basil Gray is hoping for Art Capital A as some sort of universal to look toward as something that can go beyond territory, right? Or you have George Butcher who basically is in the kind of John Berger camp of I just can't understand this stuff. It's too many things sort of moment of 1960s, which was actually really freeing this course, right? Because the idea of things not being legible and it being a white critic saying, I don't get it as opposed to a white critic saying, this looks like crap, let's get, we have to place that as actually an important sort of moment, right? And then we have from Parol in from Parol Dave Mukherjee, a story that a set of a question that really asks for putting these sort of things into a larger history where she asks Sanjukta, is it possible to trace the genesis of derivative discourse leveled against many non-Western artists who are even those who are still alive today to this historical moment? And so what I'm interested in here is the balance of desire of what to be and these frameworks of knowledge and understanding get at it whoever wants to go first. Aparna. Okay, I can start with the kind of concrete question about thank you. I mean, thank you so much for this really rich thing, rich question starting point. For the, thank you so much for bringing this idea of this kind of post war shipping moment. I hadn't really thought about it in those terms, but of course it's very, very urgent. I mean, because of the post war moment. I, you know, in the archive I'm dealing with, you know, there's a lot of anxiety around the movement and shipping of these objects in this time period. But of course the discourse is more around kind of an anxiety of cost and insurance. And of course I think that that can really be tied to this larger question of destruction and, you know, possible explosion. And I have to think about that more concretely because, you know, one of the reasons why there is so much, the Royal Academy has so much anxiety about getting the objects or the plan in place so quickly is because the SS mozuffery was, you know, leaving the port as a certain point and there was a kind of anxiety around a very particular type of timing, right? Of this moment. And it all had to all tied together. And so thank you for that. I have to, I have to think a little bit more about that. I think, I mean, I can start us off with the larger question around this kind of, the frameworks that are absent. And I love the way that you put Basil Gray's kind of desire for a framework that can go beyond territory because of course I think that is the aspiration and at the same time, you know, he's trying to kind of concretize and canonize these definitions of masterpiece and fine arts that I think, you know, builds in many way the infrastructure and bureaucracy of the Royal Academy in this moment for a kind of British understanding of Indian art. But at the same time, and I think has aspirations that it will go beyond territory even though it's bounded by this kind of imperial vision still of what India is. But at the same time, I was really kind of excited by Xenob, the language that you brought up at one point in your presentation of this kind of overlap of decolonization and decanonization as a way to kind of think about the institution's role in homogenization but thinking about the institutions, the tensions of the institution's kind of role of homogenization because of course, I'm thinking decolonization but it's the overlap with decanonization that provides a lot of energy. And I think that this moment, that vocabulary has helped me see that the Royal Academy is in this moment of aspiring to a framework outside of territory and yet concretizing frameworks of territory at the same time in a really kind of contradictory way. And so that's really, Jen or Dan, thank you. I could pick up from there. Thank you for, I see more questions popping up but I want to remain focused. So Karen, thank you for that excellent point of the not yet. And I think this is what was making me uncomfortable when I was looking at the Commonwealth Art Today catalog and I was telling myself, am I going to slip very quickly into, oh, look, there is racialization and no understanding because that's not the case. That's not the case with Butcher. That's sort of the case with Eric Newton but he was a big patron. So you have Aubrey Williams saying that Newton was a great support and Rashid Arendt saying he just essentialized. So there is this wider texture of conversation. So yeah, there are people who are working with the framework of what is not present, like you said. And going back to Parul's question, which I cannot spot anymore, answered, it says. I have answered it. Is it possible to trace the genesis of a derivative discourse? Yeah, well, one could, but I do not think it's this moment really. It has been constant. I will say that this moment you have some maybe transformations and Stuart Hall talks about this when he says that the first wave, he says the artists in the 50s got way more support and way more understanding than what would then crystallize as quite and that was active. Karen, you remember the Bupenkakar show and the review the Guardian gave. So yeah, so that has been around now. I would say the 50s and 60s were actually that moment where this confusion of not yet what to think, how to make sense, it was a productive tension. But then you also have that derivative discourse thing. Yeah, absolutely it is there, it is there, but you also have, and I'm working on the artist, Pavishanal who curated the India panel. And there you have Pavishanal writing about in his other papers, how he's basically telling critics in India not to jump into the Cezanesque or the Picasso. So that derivation is there both in art critical writing in India as it is there in London or any other place. So I think now we really have to complicate the derivative discourse, particularly when we see both sides of the archive in India or in Pakistan at Dhaka or in London. So I would say that's more complicated but I need to do more work on that too. Really bring out that nuance. There are so many people writing in the Commonwealth Art Today catalog. And I took photographs back at a time when I had a sense I will work on it, but I was not sure and I could not go back for clearer photos. But there is a polyphony, let's say of voices. So I could not talk about that. I would rather call this period as a moment when the derivative discourse has not been consolidated. It probably will be much later. But there is a lot of amateur writing, of course, though Eric Newton and Eric Newton, et cetera, were very supportive, but Newton would die in 1965. In the 50s, he was a big patron of these artists. With the demise of this generation, maybe a more concrete kind of language of derivation or impatience, let's say, will come up. Whereas this, while being paternalistic, probably was slightly more patient. I don't know, that's just thinking aloud. What's really helpful there is the idea of a kind of personal sense of time, of patience versus impatience, along with these imaginations of history and an idea of a very strong idea of progress. Which is, of course, something that you flow with. And that's different from whether you're patient with or impatient, or whether you have a stance of not quite understanding when you are the kind of person who always believes that they understand, which is why I usually have Berger in my mind as smarter than most people in general. And just sort of having this sense of himself as sort of always knowing what he's saying, right, type of thing. So, Zainab, do you wanna intervene at all in this one or do you want me to move a little? I actually pose a question to Zainab. Yes, you're allowed to, yes. Zainab, firstly, thank you for blending actually so many of the themes that we've been working through those issues of politics and solidarities and friendships and framing them into that bureaucracy. I wanted to sort of go back to a couple of the various provocative things as Karen has mentioned that you raised. And one of them was this idea of how the global turn has made contemporary art look homogenous. And I wonder if I could sort of push you on that to say, look homogenous where? In the art fair, in the museum, if we actually look at where contemporary art is taking place, I would argue that some of the most politically astute and politically grounded art is escaping those institutions of art. And if we sort of look at the work of, and of course the art world then tries to bring it in. So the fact that documenta is being curated by a collective, which is bringing together 15 other collectives, or the Turner Prize has nominated five collectives, which itself is a kind of a reaction to for artists saying, we will become a collective to sort of defy the art world's ways of sort of claiming this. And I wanted to just pose that question to you as to, and perhaps suggest that maybe contemporary artists have ways of fighting back. Yeah, you're absolutely right. What you said is that homogenized art is taking place in the art fair, in the gallery, in the museum, in those conventional spaces. And if there is anything happening outside, which we hope there are, and you're suggesting there aren't, I think there are, but I think it's constantly being co-opted by the institution, by anyone who's even trying to be an artist, to bring in the new thing is constantly just homogenizing it in some way, shape, or form. And we saw this even in COVID, right? In really interesting ways, I think. So I'm really interested in your question because I want to know, where is that interesting work happening? Because there's been such a biennialization, right? It's like, and a festivalization of everything, right? And so I'm wondering where that really interesting work is happening. I don't know. I don't see it because I think it gets co-opted very quickly. And I think it's because of that sort of whole neoliberal frame that we're in, we can't escape it. I think I'll just touch on this briefly because this is a much wider conversation, but perhaps what it raises is the need for the right tools. And I would suggest that need is, and that's a challenge also for the academy because the academy is largely kind of reproducing that homogeneity that is framed out of the different institutions of art. As to think about what tools are needed to make such practices visible. Because quite often as those practices move away from the object, move away from the sole authorship, that's sort of a lot of our history and that sort of intertwining of decolonization and decolonization that you raised, they become very difficult for the existing tools to grapple with, you know, when you move beyond the object and the experience into actually dealing with relations, whether they be social, economic, or cultural, they pose a very different set of challenges than what sort of, you know, surrounded by art historians, than what, to say what art history is traditionally been dealing with. If I may defend art historians a little, Hamad, or rather academic art historians, I think that there's actually a little bit more room within academic art history to engage with some of these practices that you're talking about than there is in the museum and gallery world, which is contingent upon making exhibitions and, you know, staging a certain kind of spectacle that we don't actually have to do and grapple with in the academy. So I think that, you know, you know, obviously in smaller artist-run centers, there's space for this kind of experimental practice, but I would also not discount the space of academic art history in terms of what can be done there theoretically and also with new practice. We could do this one for a long, long time because this is also, because what I like also is there's an interesting kind of set of desire and fantasy for something outside that we're all looking towards, which I think is very productive. But Zeyna, you go ahead and then I'll do my job. Yeah, I mean, I think those tools, because right now I feel there's just a regurgitation, right? As soon as somebody's been asked, then everyone's going to ask them and it's like, that's it. You know, you get tagged in a particular way. And but I think the tools are in the language and the vocabulary. And I also think that we haven't got it, well, not we, the panel, but generally the art world doesn't know how it is situated in the political economy, its own political economy. You know, the fifties and they don't, this whole issue of artist labor and supply chains. And in the fifties and seventies, how there was a particular institutionalization of the artist and a professionalization and making them into this middle class, professional class, right? And all the way to now to the creatives, right? What happened to the artists anyways, but sort of export of labor that has occurred in the seventies and eighties and now to the current platform economy, where we're promised that the platforms will give us everything whilst literally taking it all away. So yeah, I think this is a really, I think it's the next, it's another panel. I just wanted to say, Kate. Yeah, I agreed. I do want that we have had some two kind questions and I want to make sure that we turn to them and deepen that part of the conversation that we were having. And so the first comes from Brinda Kumar and it's for Sanjupta. And I think actually both are for Sanjupta, but Aparnah and Zana, please look for the ways that it gets into what you're doing as well. Okay, so Brinda says, thanks for the paper. It seems that you're suggesting that the Commonwealth rubric was conceived in part as a way of straddling the tensions between the colonial, post-colonial and the national international, but was inevitably bound up in those binaries or with those binaries and that the unity it attempted was repeatedly undone by the states of flux with new independent movements and modernist movement. Does, if so, how does the behavior that you noted at the outset of the Commonwealth Institute change over time? And then Kelvin Chua's question is actually really handing love there. So please let's keep them up in the Q and A for Por Sanjupta, okay? But so she can look at them, but I just wanted to read this one too. Thank you for your presentation. I wonder if there are political and cultural connections webbing, for instance, the India Pavilion at the permanent galleries with the art galleries exhibition of Indian art when simultaneous displays are housed under the Commonwealth Institute. So that's like a layer of complication. What are the relationships between these two sorts of forms of exhibition in the same space or in different spaces within the space? Or should we read them as separate national projects or projections negating for space under the same roof? All right, so does that make sense? So you've got the broader kind of binary question and then you have the like, what's going on here question. Okay, thanks Kelvin. Thanks Brinda for the questions. These are great for writing an article. I'm not sure if I will be able to respond, but then yeah, the Commonwealth project, of course it is tied to making sense of political transition. And I think the Commonwealth Institute is so much about Britain figuring out a place for itself. There is a passage in my notes where Kenneth Bradley says, oh, you might be, or was it Donald Bowen saying, you might be wanting to know what influence Britain plays in the works of the artists who are displaying their artworks at the gallery. I'll tell you the influence of Paris and New York is more strong, but then we can say that these artists take their experience in Britain back to their countries and that shapes their institutions. Very similar to Ming, the or also work around the slate, right? So there is that kind of very institutional quasi-bureaucratic repertoire. I think the Commonwealth Institute comes up with that sensibility of finding a new space for Britain to reimagine itself. But of course the contradictions are not just the independence movements and the pressures from there, quite literal pressures because the different post-colonial governments played a very important role in how the displays would happen. And Claire Wintle has talked about it, that how we talk about decolonizing the museum now but the Commonwealth Institute within a paternalistic framework tried to do that. So there is, but also the pressure was from the modernist movement and the independence, like you say, but also from Britain's own domestic contradictory policies that was at the same time hardening into the stricter immigration laws and the token system and so on, which is what in the context of the Windrush scandal we talk about. So there were multiple contradictions. Geopolitical, aesthetic, also domestic and the Commonwealth Institute kind of is a study in that sense of contradiction. And I, Chris Lee's work on, I think Zainab began with that book, World Making at the End of Empire was the name of the book. He talks about how the study of decolonization is not just a study of dialogue, it's a study of contradictions. And I think the Commonwealth Institute is quite apt in that sense of how the Institute changes over the years, I need to do more work for that. My notes somehow stop in the early seventies. Maybe I was tired of the British Library but I really need to go back and see because the conversation shifts, but it becomes, I think, more and more bureaucratic, more and more bureaucratic. I would not, the tension you see in Butcher's voice or Eric Newton's voice, you would not see that later. But you might see more presence and more direction from the postcolonial governments, for instance, that's one thing I can say at this point of time. Dialogue between the India Pavilion and the exhibition of an Indian artist. Yes and no, maybe. It's a speculative answer from me. Depends because the Commonwealth Institute works so closely with the art councils and the academies that if an artist who is very closely tied to the Lalit Kala Academy in Delhi is exhibiting, so there will be a wider bureaucratic dialogue, but that's not the case with all artists. So it's a one-off. I would say that the India Pavilion is a very separate, a very different kettle of fish than the more amorphous kind of space of the art gallery. And I think that is where I do not find enough material. I would like to have more material on the art gallery, but my speculative guess of an answer would be that these are separate and these are very separate concerns. Had there been synergy, the whole conversation around the Commonwealth Institute would have been different. So what I said around the vistas of the Commonwealth and visions from the Commonwealth, there are two very different modalities operating at the CI. And maybe in our questions, we have to come up with framing of a problem that takes both into account rather than saying, look, Britain is essentializing the colonies. That's not news. So I think the CI does do, and I will echo Claire Wintel's otherwise very important point about how the decolonization starts early on actually with contradictions, of course. So I hope that answers it somewhat. But like I said, it needs more work. Sarah. Sarah. Thank you. Thanks just to come in very briefly and just to pick up on some of the threads of these conversations coming out of the papers and the overarching theme of the panel of bureaucracy and agency and also thinking, Karen, of your work about infrastructure as full. Because what I was thinking when I was looking at the PowerPoints across our three speakers was about the importance of the traces of exhibitions and events that are left behind. And often what we're researching isn't the exhibition itself, but it's the exhibition catalogue or the archive of the exhibition. So the correspondence, the, you know, we saw some really fascinating floor plans as well. And so it's like the afterlife of the event. And I think, you know, just thinking about an exhibition catalogue as a form of bureaucratic negotiation and its own right and the politics of design and all the kind of negotiations that go on separately to inform that as a cultural production in its own right. So I was just thinking again about how we, you know, what kinds of research we can do around the bureaucracies of cultural form. And so, yeah, archive has been won by the exhibition catalogue being such an important kind of document, which is a crucible, but of course so much is left out of that. It's so much, it escapes its pages. And I think it's sort of the imperfect records, aren't they? Or the very carefully curated records of an event. Yeah, and then just the other point, just a panel as well about, you know, your presentation got me thinking about who gets to be the cultural brokers. And sometimes that's quite surprising because, you know, the Royal Academy is not a national organization. It's a society of artists, a self-elected society of artists, you know, room for artists, you know, still today. Its president is always a practicing artist. So, you know, these, they might recruit, you know, administrators to help them run the organization, but it's, you know, it is run by artists. So I think that's quite interesting. It wasn't, you know, the British Museum or a government agency that was doing this cultural brokering. It was a society of artists. So that just got me thinking about sometimes it's a much more complicated story of cultural negotiation as well. So just some, something really provocative papers which made me think a lot about our overarching theme of, yeah, the traces of cultural bureaucracy. Don't just add something to what you just said, Sarah. I think that it's really interesting to see this tension between bureaucracy as a structure and as an infrastructure and the agency of the people who are enacting that infrastructure and that it's very easy for us to forget that actually bureaucracies are made up of actual people and that the agency of those people is what really, in the end, like the artists from the Royal Academy, really, I think disrupts or shapes in very different ways the trajectories of the kinds of decisions that are made. And so, you know, it's never as easy and as sort of clean as we would like it to be because of those various agencies but that's also what makes it really interesting. Yeah, I just, I can do a little jump in as well. Sorry, I was just gonna say, I mean, thank you for saying that because I spent many years as a bureaucrat working in federal agencies, government agencies and I think I actually just intervened at all possible times, you know, just to build literacy within the government itself. You know, I created this like out-of-box pizza lunch at the Canada Council and which I showcased media arts because no one's like, well, what's media arts? What's media arts? Like nobody knows what it is, although it's been around for 50 years and, you know, led to like this huge increase in our budget, for example, but all along I think not everyone does but there are many agents that really are used their agency in creating change within the bureaucracy, right? So I think that's a really good story. Sorry. No, not at all. I am equally, I'm so glad that Sarah and Ming you brought that up because I think that's one of the things that I've always struggled with but also loved about working with institutional histories is that kind of dynamic of how do you grapple with the institution as an entity but also as an institution that is built by human agents with their own subjectivities and own stakes. And I think, you know, in this kind of larger project on partition and museums, one of the ways there's just so little documentation on this, you know, I think a systematic kind of documentation on some of these exhibitions or some of these processes and the ways that I've had to enter into the bureaucracy is through the individuals and through the correspondence who talk about themselves but also talk about the institutions that they're a part of as these singular entities. And I'm really interested in thinking about how we as the art historian have to write and respond to those tensions as a form itself too when we're kind of working with institutional histories. And so, yeah, that's something that I'm, thank you for bringing that up because it's something that I'm also struggling with but happily, I guess, I don't know. I want to make sure, first of all, I have no idea when the hook is gonna come. So just someone else has to do it, so you know. I don't know when the final timing is but I wanna get to Brenda's question for you, Aparna which I'll read it so you have a sense of what she's doing. And she says, thanks for a wonderful paper. You talked about Mortimer Wheeler being at the helm of affairs in the division of the category three objects at the end of the exhibition and also referenced his anxieties at a time when the works were being leveraged. Were there anxieties too over how these works may be understood in the future in their fragmented or partial states thinking of the necklace, right? With the Royal Academy being the arbiter of the production of these future meanings. Thank you, Brenda, for your work, first of all on these institutional histories as well and for this question. Mortimer Wheeler is such an interesting figure and one of the things that I couldn't really emphasize kind of in the span of this paper is that he is kind of brought in to this moment as this kind of cross-border cultural arbiter to kind of oversee the final division of objects but he himself is not, you know, he's occupying that position but he himself is not the singular figure that's making a lot of the decisions. He is kind of supervising another kind of bureaucracy of officials on both sides of the border whom he came into contact with right in his capacity as a director general of the ASI. And so a lot of the kinds of, the final division of the objects, the Mohenjo-Darrow Necklace in the Royal Academy's kind of disputed collections are arbitrated I think through him but in conversation with a lot of these officials. And so I think in the larger project I kind of try to tease that out a little bit more. So it's important to kind of problematize his singularity as this kind of figurehead but also, you know, the fact that he does occupy it in a kind of imagined way as well. But also he does, I mean, in his correspondence his anxieties are really about the kind of preserving of this kind of hyper-objective equitable framework of the division process that I think is in part imposed on him by the kind of larger machinery of the partition council as a kind of bureaucratic apparatus but also is coming from a larger kind of fear of what the division process would do in terms of kind of the kind of climate of violence in that period. I think there was a sense in which, you know these officials had a kind of acute sense that the division of cultural material could provoke conflict. And so there was a way in which Mortimer Wheeler was managing those fears in kind of staying and concretizing these really kind of equitable approaches. And so I think in that sense it's a very presentist kind of approach to the division process, but at the same time he was archeological advisor to a new government of Pakistan. And one of his stakes I think even though he's a cross-border official is that he's concretizing the National Museum in Karachi. And so if there's anything that I think he's arbitrating or if he's thinking about the future meanings of this object, it's actually about what it's gonna mean for that national institution. And so I think in the larger project I think about how do we make those really complicated biases in Mortimer Wheeler visible. But thank you for the question. So as you can tell every question which is itself complex, it's complex opens out to this like massive set of ideas, which is great. I think we should move to a more equitable space of a Zoom in which the people who have stuck with us through the whole panel get to talk. So everybody let's close out this Zoom and open up the other Zoom. And the link, Sanjupta is in the chat. It is, if somebody else could put it, oh, here it is, I can do it. I am so pleased to be so pleased. So that's the link and I know. And we can go there and hang out and people can talk in a more equitable fashion. But one thing before we go, I just wanna like have my moment of rationality, which is the two, what do you think the mathematical formula was for dividing up the beads? Was it population? Was it territory? Like was it square miles or was it people? Because you gotta know there was some math involved in getting that slightly smaller necklace for Pakistan versus the slightly larger necklace for India. And that's the double rationality and irrationality of bureaucracy right there in a nutshell. So thanks everybody. And I look forward to more talking later and we'll see you all, okay? This goes, this goes. Thank you.