 I think I will make a start because we've got a lot of papers to get through this afternoon and we want to give as much time for conversation and the presentations as possible. Good afternoon everyone, my name is Sarah Turner and I'm Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Let me extend a very warm welcome to everyone logging on this afternoon or whatever time it is wherever you are based in the world to the Thinking from Asia panel. And this is the final panel of the London Asia Art Worlds programme. We have often described London Asia Art Worlds as a murmuration, a virtual meeting ground in which conversations, images and ideas have twisted, turned, swooped and swelled across a series of interconnected papers, performances, discussions and interventions. And many of the audience members have taken time out of busy schedules to join us on more than one occasion and we're incredibly grateful to everyone for being part of this journey across these five weeks. The London Asia Art Worlds programme has been co-organised as a collaboration between myself, Hamad Nasa, who's a curator, strategic advisor and senior research fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre and Professor Ming Tiampo, who's Professor in the Department of Art History and Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Arts and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. And Ming is also the second holder of the London Asia Research Award. And I just want to take a moment to say a very heartfelt personal thank you to Hamad and Ming here. It's both a personal thank you and an official one on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre. Their intellectual generosity, tireless appetite for boundary crossing and ability to foster conversations on both critical and convivial is written all over this programme. So thank you so much Ming and Hamad for your collaboration and your friendship, not only across the five weeks, but all the many months, even years that have gone into planning this event. And an event like this is the work of many hands indeed. And I also just want to name the people who are not visible to you on screen during the event, but who without whom this programme would not have been possible. And that's the events team at the Paul Mellon Centre, Shauna Blanchfield, Danny Convay and Ella Fleming, who's currently on parental leave, but who was crucial in shaping the administration for this event. And also Tom Scott, Lucy Andier, Tom Powell, Meisun Rahani and Harriet Sweet, as well as the finance team at the Paul Mellon Centre. Again, they've all supported us and made this murmuration happen. I want to also thank all the speakers, chairs and artists who have contributed to their programme. And I encourage you to explore the conference dedicated website to find out more. And on that site you can find out, you can find the recordings of all previous events online in case you missed any of them and want to catch up. And you can also find out more about the wider London Asia Project, of which this programme is a part and the work of the Paul Mellon Centre. Before I hand over to Ming to say a little bit more, let me just walk you through the Paul Mellon Centre's housekeeping guidelines for our online webinars. And again, I'm sure you're all very used to Zoom webinars by now, but each institution perhaps does things a little bit differently. Today we'll start with a keynote paper of about 45 minutes, which will be followed by a question and answer session. These events are very much about research and building a community of research around conversations and dialogue. So we really encourage you to load up your questions by typing them in the Q&A box and our chair will be able to read those out. And as we go along, you can also use the chat function, which to add links, to add thoughts, just to say hello to us. We really like that sense of community and connection as we progress through the Zoom webinar. We'll have a break after the keynote of about 15 minutes. And we'll also have a set of three papers followed by a question and answer session. And then at the end of that, we're going to have a wrap-up discussion between myself, my co-conveners, and John Tane of the Asia Art Archive to discuss more broadly the themes of the whole programme. Our event has been run by Sean of Lunchfield and Danny Convy, and they are on hand to answer any questions you might have about the session. And again, you can use the chat function to get in contact with us. The session will be recorded and made available to the public and if you'd like to use a closed captioning function, you can do that by clicking on the CC live transcript button at the bottom of your screen. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Ming Tiampo. Thank you, Sarah. Before I begin, I would like to express my personal thanks as well to you, to Hamad and to the entire PMC team for this extraordinary experience, a journey that we've all taken together a friendship, an intellectual fellowship that goes on and on, as you know, in many wonderful ways. And I look forward to seeing how this develops in the future. It's been really exciting for me to be a part of this and to be convening these conversations that I think over time are leading to a kind of decolonial turn in the ways in which we understand the entanglements between both British and Asian art histories, understanding world art histories in different ways through an awareness and a critical engagement with questions of empire. So I think these are really important conversations that we're engaging in. One of the ways in which we're hoping to continue these conversations is through the collaborative data project. And I'd just like to take a few minutes to tell everybody about the collaborative data project today. During yesterday's session on thinking through empire, Tim Berenger asked an important question about how we change our methodologies in order to ask different questions and to look at different objects as we conduct research that takes into account the epistemologies and biases of empire. And so I think this is something that has been central to the London Asia project at large, but also to London Asia art worlds as we seek to find ways of imagining new worlds alongside the artists who did so between London and Asia. And so one of the Armenian objectives is to find new ways of tracing all of these different pathways, examining different artists, and trying to write forgotten histories, seed new research to make these methodological interventions. And one of the challenges there is, of course, that the sands of indifference and racism and neglect have obliviated even the most basic information about many artists, their exhibitions, and their histories. So what we're trying to do in this collaborative data project is that we're trying to surface and reconnect some of these traces. And we think this is of the utmost importance. This is a first step towards co-constituting this transnational research space as a field of inquiry, as a conversation. And going forward, we hope to be able to include all of you. We're inviting you to join us in this enterprise, which we can use as a baseline, a sort of foundation for continuing these rich conversations. So to begin with, we're asking for your collaboration and your contribution in identifying artists from Asia who spent time in the UK, as well as artists from the Asian diaspora who were born in the UK, the art schools that they went to, and the exhibitions in which they showed. And the intention here is twofold to crowdsource and create a database of artists that can serve our community of researchers. You. As starting points for further research. Secondly, to visualise the entangled cartographies of this field of emerging inquiry between the UK and Asia, to between roughly 1850 and about 2000 between empire and decolonisation. So there are many ways of visualising the data once we have gathered it. And that's what's really interesting and exciting about this possibility, which enables us to see many different patterns, such as, for example, the art schools that artists went to, or exhibitions also can serve as a part of the data that we've put in. And here I'm showing you exhibitions that are grouped by year, just from the data that we've put in so far. And here we also have a nodal map of all the places where these exhibitions took place, so actual institutions. We hope to be able to experiment with data visualisations that enable us to creatively think about how art history is written and the patterns and frameworks. So, for example, on this map, you see the density of UK exhibitions by region and also UK exhibitions by location. Again, based on a very small data set that we've just put in so that you can see what this looks like and what might be possible. What we found very interesting about these two maps that revealed something new to us was that actually not everything was happening in London. In fact, there was quite a density of exhibition activity that was happening outside of London within the UK. Whoops. Ah, yes. So, what we're asking you to do is actually, you can go on to this collaborative data project website and the link will be in the chat. And you can see here that there are two links, one for artist data and one for exhibition data. And what that will lead you to are these two Google forms that are fairly straightforward. And what we're doing is we're asking all of you to input information about artists who are from Asia or from the Asian diaspora who are in the UK and giving us information about exhibitions and art schools that they went to and that we can bring everything together and start to see what these patterns look like. For example, what happens when we use critical mass data methodologies in the place of the historical filters that have been shaped by colonial racist and sexist attitudes? And what we want to know is what happens when we surface these histories of artists who are working alongside their white male peers winning awards, exhibiting, commissioning and building careers and who have now been obscured by the structural biases of art history. So what we're hoping is that this project will help us to surface that. So this is an invitation, a call to action to you, your networks and your students to join us in creating a data set that will help us to visualize these new cartographies. We'll be planning on following this up with a workshop or an editathon for those of you who would like to take stuff on this invitation. And this will also give you an opportunity to meet other people who are interested in the same channels of research. And of course, if you would like me to come to your class to explain the project so that your students can join us, I'm quite happy to do so. So please just get in touch. So please don't worry about the, any data that you enter being partial. We just look forward to continuing these conversations with you and to working together and to hope that this will encourage all of you to continue being in touch with all of us and to continue the conversations. And with that, I would like to hand you over to Hamad. Thank you, Ming. And as Ming has so eloquently shared with you, in London Asia art worlds, we are proposing new ways of imagining art history through and beyond national and regional boundaries and testing new models for writing art history through collaborative practice. It is through such methods that we think that art histories in both Britain and Asia are disrupted and their complexities revealed through layered connections via the infrastructure that we also recognise as belonging to the art world about exhibitions and art schools and institutions, but also paying attention to the worlds that they carry, to friendships and socialities, to aesthetics and politics and philosophy, or as we considered yesterday, the machinations of empires. Offering relational stories that negotiate difficult, colonial and entangled pasts, shared presence and possible collaborative futures, the papers, provocations and discussions of London Asia art worlds are an urgent reminder that the contours of nationhood are complex and of the importance of making worlds rather than closing them. And of course it is not lost on us that this series of events is being co-organised, hosted and funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the pressures, challenges and questions that such research puts on the framing of art practice and history through the lens of nation. Now in this last and eighth session of London Asia art worlds, we want to end on the possibility for the production and circulation of new forms of knowledges, knowledges that can disrupt the established order of things that we are familiar with and that have been circulated quite often through imperial structures. Key to this and as typified by my co-conveners and the pleasure it's been working with the team in developing this is the importance of friendship as method. And in continuation of that, we're really thrilled to have another friend and colleague, Ivan Kuhn, join us to chair this final panel, Thinking from Asia. Ivan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Hong Kong. Her publications include Nara Yoshitomo, a Chinese Canton, Painting, the Local and Export Art and a Defiant Brush, Sue Rensham and the Politics of Painting in 19th Century Guangdong. She is the recipient of many research awards including a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, American Council of Learned Scholars and Visiting Scholarships at Cambridge and Columbia University. Kuhn also works in the contemporary art field as an independent curator and in 2014 she was the guest curator of It Begins with Metamorphosis, Shubing at the Asia Society in Hong Kong and she was one of the curators for the 12th Guangzhou Biennale in 2018 and is presently working on an exhibition of Hong Kong art so long thanks again for the fish in Helsinki. My pleasure to welcome Ivan. Thank you. Before I begin, I want to apologise ahead of time if there are any short glitches as my internet connection is experiencing some instability. But with apologies given, let me begin. I would like to begin first by thanking the organisers, Hamad, Ming and Sarah of this incredibly rich series of panels of London Asia Art Worlds. I also want to extend my thanks to the team at Paul Mellon Centre in giving such a smooth operation, or making this such a smooth operation. The title of today's panel, Thinking from Asia, is in some ways a touchstone for many of the papers from this series and their starting positions from outside colonial centres. But the papers today foreground world-making, sometimes in dialogue with nation-building, the heirs of imperialism, and in Asia with all its many different variations as a site from where artists, writers, teachers and scholars can also be authors of global political thoughts that can impact and affect ideas of worlds in a post-imperial future. One way of contextualising today's panel on the last of the series is also to recall the conversations made in previous weeks. I'm only going to select one or two things that struck me and I would also ask of our audiences to share their thoughts with a directly of today's papers, but also please do feel free to discuss past papers and ideas in connections across panels. Please do write in a chat box with any thoughts, comments and questions to help build future research and further collaborative thinking. One of the provocations echoed across the panels that we will also hear today, is the recovery of anti-colonial thinkers as global figures and how they provide alternative pathways of thinking of decolonisation, including demystifying the easy identification of decolonisation in nation-building and to decode war historical materialism. That all the papers have been provocative is not surprising. It is embedded within the very title of this series of London Asia, which has provided a guiding concept and which includes scalar analysis as a method of repurposing existing structures of relations as well as producing new scales. We have seen units of scales from the most intimate of the body, such as Touch, as well as larger units like collections, kinships, city, nation, region and a globe. The process of scaling, often dynamic, challenges, orders and hierarchies, not least because the production of scales is always relational. That also carries along with it the subjectivities. In the past five weeks, the papers have demonstrated how new scales can be effective models to disrupt colonial enterprises and its tendency of sequestering people. For me, one of the interesting points to emerge, and one, again, which we will continue to see this afternoon, is how it can serve the purpose of introducing dimensions of mutuality and reciprocity in how we talk and write about worlds and what we do in them. I am increasingly feeling a sense of ethical duty to rethink my role as a scholar, a teacher and my complicity in accepting normative practices that sustain coloniality, a question that was raised in yesterday's panel. Am I doing enough to move beyond the singular eye of sovereignty? Not least, if we are to truly continue these conversations, we must figure out how to act on them to prevent the stagnation that has developed in the wake of neoliberalism. I am going to cite one of the anti-colonial thinkers who have made appearances, sometimes shadowy in the series, Akili Membe, who speaks of how becoming human in the world is a matter of journeying, where movement is transfiguration. He conjures a very strong image where the journeying figure is always moving and changing, is constantly creating and recreating worlds with potentially new bonds, actions make worlds, which also offer us to be present in order to anticipate futures without determining them. To bring that back to scalar terms, it can also be about the racial base and dynamic relations, moving back and forth from objectivity into realms of speculations and magic. So much of what has been discussed are subjects and things that are not easily made tangible or legible in our current systems, such as fictiveness, invisibility and a haptic experience that have been covered in the previous panels. How do we make those intangible things tangible, which is one of the things that we will hear again in our keynote paper today, but also in the following papers? What sort of toolkit is needed to find methodologies or can recalibrate our existing ones to articulate the consistently inconsistent relations that unfold in world-making projects? A question, again, which Ming has stated at the beginning of this panel, and that has continuously popped up. I will leave that question on pause and perhaps return to it in our Q&A sessions to follow. But let me move on to introduce today's keynote speaker. Patrick Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Arts Studies at the University of Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to... sorry, 2003, and curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. He is the director of the Philippine Contemporary Arts Network and one of the curators of under-constructions New Dimensions in Asian Arts in 2000 and the Guangzhou Biennale in 2008 with position papers. He was a visiting fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. Among his publications are Painting History, Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art, published in 1999, Remarkable Collection, Art, History and the National Museum 2006 and Past Peripheral, Curation in Southeast Asia in 2008. He has many curatorial projects, including an exhibition of contemporary arts from Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe, titled South by Southeast and the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015. He was the artistic director of Singapore Biennale 2019 and will be the curator of the Taiwan Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2022. His paper today is entitled A Roundness Awareness to Rework Art out of Asia. Let me pass over to Patrick. Thank you, Yvonne, for that introduction. I also would like to thank and congratulate the Paul Mellon Centre and the conveners of this conference for this initiative. Finally, I'd like to say hello to the presenters of this panel. I look forward to learning from their papers later. Let me now share my screen. A roundness awareness to rework art out of Asia. In the relay of words that conceptualizes this seminar alongside London Asia and art, it is the term worlds that is plural amid the singularities. In the explication of this particular session, the focus shifts to Asia, but one that is not fixed to a geographical or geopolitical point. Asia is rather imagined as a coordinate animated by prepositions from Asia out of Asia and beyond Asia. It is this kinetic position within a plurality, a reflective Asia within several worlds that strikes me as regenerative. I would like to begin with this implication of Asia within worlds, of a particularity within an ecology. In this beginning, I turn to the trope from the languages in the islands of the Visayas in the Philippines that intertwines the intuition of the universe with its sensing so that the image of a roundness intersperses with the condition of awareness. The trope is a calibutan. It's root referencing the orbit and the act of encompassing. In everyday speech, however, calibutan likewise speaks to consciousness on the one hand, and the state of either unknowing or disclaiming on the other. In the translation from Spanish in the 19th century lexicon, it is desconefer, a disavowal. In Visayan, it is embot, which expresses incognizance, indifference or exasperation, something that resists convenient rationality. That Asia is construed as the calibutan, a sense of aroundness and awareness, as well as an unknowing, speaks to Edward Said's idea of being out of place, which he relates with sleeplessness. In his memoir titled Out of Place, Said reveals that, and I quote him, there is nothing for me as invigorating, as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night's loss than the early morning. Worldliness seems to come for Said in the early morning, which may well be in his own theory, late style, which alludes to the timeliness of art, exilic and inventory. It may be according to him, a moment of, and I quote, in transigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness being in and apart from the present. I am drawn to the word half-consciousness as the matrix of possibility of being grounded or attuned to nature and history. In Said's mind, being out of place is akin to experiencing himself as a, quote, cluster of flowing currents. And he elaborates, and I quote, I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents flow along during the waking hours and they require no reconciling, no harmonising. They are off or out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally, yet without one central theme. And of course, it is in this polyphony pursuing Said's musical metaphor between the Visayan Calibutan and Said's out of placeness that I stage a proposition on Asia as restless and aleatory. In this reflection, I converse with two trajectories offered by the discourses around inter-Asia and Asian place. Inter-Asia as an intellectual solidarity is supported by scholars who think from Asia without reifying Asia and may well replace the preposition from, with, between, through the prefix inter. Recently, Go Beng Lan, we assessed this mode of theorisation that has endeavoured to move away from hegemonic forms of nationalism and global imperialism towards what Prasenjit Duwara calls circulatory histories and dialogical transcendence. Instead of the western encounter as the inaugural scene of the colonial critique, if critique it is that should take exception with the colonial and the post-colonial annotation, the project aspires to an affirmative ground, thus the references to a possible political ontology. Of late as well, the International Journal of Asian Studies through its editor, Jin Sato, has initiated a round table on the alternating tendencies of global Asian studies and the Asianisation of Asian studies. Sato and his co-league, Shigeco Sonada, Sonoda, endorse an inside-out approach that stresses the active experience of those who live through globalisation as agents of reflection and change and focusses on the impact such local agents have in forming the global forces themselves. To this point, Alan Ponsalan is an app interjects that, quote, global capital as such cannot fully capture the communal realignments and meaning-making capacities emerging from transnational kinship, regional community and alternative affective worlds that do not even occupy physical space. He continues that these translocal global formations forged from socio-economic inequalities break forth life worlds that do not necessarily align with linear capitalists and national developments. End of quote. Tamara Sears, for her part, transposes such an insight to the pre-modern era, the materials of which demand us to, and I quote her, think trans-regionally, even in the context of a single node or locality, such as the case of Bodh Gaia, the pilgrimage site associated with the enlightenment of the Buddha, where a series of Tibetan, Burmese and Chinese inscriptions attest to long-distance connections in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. In the work of Nicole Counier, a Boites and the Philippine Revolution, which yielded the first democratic republic in Asia, the geopolitics of the modern nation state gives way to what a Boites delineates as an Asian place, a locus of political action that is inflected culturally and hopefully, geopolitically. It is a deep and sprawling pan-Asian exploration through the urgent conjuncture of a revolution that configures code plays in the proto-national and revolutionary thought of turn of the century Filipino thinkers negotiations with and construction of the place of the Philippines and the place of Asia and the spatial registers of race connected them to their regional neighbours undertaking the same work and of code. I tease out this phrase, same work as the basis of a possibly coincidental Asiatic. What catches my eye in this elucidation of a Boites is a particular account of a Philippine soldier's education in Tokyo during the Pacific War and the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. The diary of Eucadio the Assis offers a picture of how the Orientalist imperialism of Japan created a cosmopolitan fantasy premised on Asian affinities. The Assis was sent to Japan as a captive colonial regime and a student of its culture. A Boites points out that his detention may have exposed him to, and I quote, a picture of a new kind of modernity at once regionalist, global and Asian. He mentioned in his, he mentions in his accounts a meeting with Burmese students in which he talked about Burmese independence with them and a visit to an exhibition on Thailand. The Assis was also struck by the dormitory of his compatriotus Bansantos according to him, and I quote the Assis. In this dormitory are quartered Indonesians, Burmese and Siamese. I was impressed by Santos's room. He has a Filipino flag on the wall, several religious pictures and images and quite a lot of English and Japanese books. I would like to constillate this text from a diary with articulations of kindred aspirations in painting by way of difference and co-presence. I begin with difference by way of the comparative. The foremost Philippine painter of the first half of the century, Fernando Amorsollo, worked within the academic realist tradition that sustained his largely picturesque imagery which attracted the market and its collectors. His portraits were remarkable, fabled for absorbing and emanating light and atmosphere. In the depiction of the face of the Philippine woman, he flashes out an ideal in contradistinction to typicalities exemplified by the Mongolian and the Malayan. The Philippine therefore is affirmed by the negation of other Asian types. I quote Amorsollo, my conception of an ideal Filipino beauty is one with rounded face. Not the oval type often presented to us in newspaper and magazine illustrations. The eye should be exceptionally lively. Not the dreamy, sleepy type that characterizes the Mongolian. The nose should be of the blank form, but firm and strongly marked. The mouth plays a very important part in the determination of a beautiful face. The ideal Filipino should have a sensuous mouth, not the type of the pouting mouth of the early days. So the ideal Filipino beauty should not necessarily be white complexion nor of the dark brown color of the typical Asian, but of the clear skin or flesh colored type which we often witness when we meet a blashing girl. I am intrigued by the painter's insistence on liveliness, sensuousness and vitality in his gendered and racialized idealisation of the native and potentially national woman. In conversation with this description of the face I point to a painting by Emilio Sanchago done in 1942. The first year of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in which three colonial episodes in Philippine historical life mingled. The work titled Christmas Eve dwells on a transitional moment. The Eve of Christmas, a woman presumed by the mother tends to a sleeping child. Around them are signs of the foreign that have shaped the internal world, the Catholic Cresce and its nativity scene, the Japanese lanterns, the American books and toys and the customary Philippine dress of Spanish lineage. I would like to consider this coming together as a machine that comes to terms with what Saïd characterises as clusters of flowing currents as well as the circumstances of the Calibutan with the terms and circumstances as Mars Briones argues referring to a series of encirclements around and within a painting which may well be a world picture of a liminal time. The Eve of Christmas and the Japanese and therefore not Christian auspices with the boy probably dreaming of American liberation as revealed by the gates to be opened in the morning. Between the artist Amarsala and the painting is the political figure and collector Jorge Bivargas who supported the career of Amarsala and collected Christmas Eve. He was the executive secretary of the American Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon and at the time when the Japanese began to occupy the country in 1942 he was the highest Philippine official. From the American through the Japanese periods he was active in government as well as in other spheres of secularisation. The University of the Philippines of which he became a region the scouting and sports movements and the collecting of all things Philippine inclusively called Filipiniana from books and documents to stamps and coins and on to art. Across this endeavours Vargas insinuated a collective preoccupation mixing the international the Philippine and the oriental in opposition to the Occidental. In his view western colonialism desicated the Philippine substance and I quote him the importance given to the things of the spirit gave way to the excessive love of pleasure and comfort politics with all the concomitant evils became the order of the day the spirit of self-sacrifice replaced the excessive individualism and selfishness the Filipino lost the charm so characteristic of oriental peoples and of course the notion of Kawilihan of his residential compound viewed as an urban pleasant will in the image of its exemplars in the United States is fundamental in the Vargas method of summoning materials. Kawilihan roughly means fascination that shapes the time and pursuit of leisure it signifies an avocation or even an absorption that in the case of Vargas was not disengaged from his more public persona. Fascination likewise pertains to the aesthetic or the affective the ethical demand for refinement the devotion to detailing and the bodily response to what is dim, beautiful proper, rare, tasteful or just curious or interesting this ultimately give rise to a certain conception of culture at once abstract and visceral distilled by sensitive intellect and imbibed by an avid body in the mind of Vargas it is culture that cobbles together cobbles together a national heritage in the wake of a ruinous war in the pacific according to a 1948 document that conceptually forms the basis of the Vargas collection the pieces were viewed as quote representative of a national art the same document refers to the first catalog in 1943 that spelled out the aims of the collection encouraging Filipino artists and assisting in their presentation of their works helping Filipinas to know and treasure our cultural heritage and contributing to the proper presentation of Philippine art the generous vision of Vargas has to interlace the flesh and spirit of the Philippine in the endeavour to express all the loftiness and all the greatness in his race in the creation of works of art end of quote as he puts it the soul's hunger for the beautiful is as imperative as the needs of man's body Vargas in his time in this time of reconstruction after the war had staggeringly pummeled Manila in the magnitude of Varso and Dresden located at the of the world of the world of the world of Varso and Dresden located this vision of the devastation and the travails of renewal and he spoke of the racial superiority that enables colonialism of any kind as well as the warfare that may be waged by and I quote him cultural guerrillas in a cultural war that's also from him the care and thoughtfulness and sustained fascination and the longing for culture would not have found its institutional framework Vargas did not aspire to an intellectual project that braided culture and nation in the context of a fascination with materials in a collection his essay titled What is the University of the Philippines in 1910 hints at another moment of the collective in the polyethnic community that was the university and also that was the nation as he writes the university as a meeting place and the various departments of human learning and resolutely working for the building up of their country means much to the Filipino people here are the differences of tribe, dialect and place are obliterated here the differences of tribe, dialect and place are obliterated with a community who worked out in common understanding higher ideas and broader views are infused and the studios early learned to appreciate the benefits of a common tongue his sympathies are widen the Visayan learns to love the Tagalo the Tagalo, the Ilocano and so on around the circle ideas around the common sympathies and the national formed the bedrock of the originally private collection that was eventually transferred to the university Cawilihan therefore complicates Calibutan Cawilihan is an assemblage of invocations it is at once real estate residence, collection, museum its root word really is also attentiveness, interest penchant, oneness liking, pleasure, enjoyment in the early lexicon it straddles between affection and in San Lucar a profound deep-seated affection and affection in San Bueniventura a habit, inclination, talent or an enthusiasm this word gravitate around love in one Filipino translation it is considered mataos na pag mamahal or a lofty devotion to a beloved if Cawilihan has a concept work hovers around a particular structure of feeling for a precious belonging and it is inevitably a cognate and by extension of curation in the sense of a possession being under the care or in the curiosity the inquisitiveness about things because the state of Cawilihan or the condition of willy is absorption love makes sense as a discursive articulation of the word the collector or lover loses the self who is absorbed in the collection or abandons consciousness to the unknowing of the possessive material in the serano lockdown dictionary the absorbed subject is aficionado, apegado and cariniado that is generally attached and is a connoesur such cultivated attachment and connoesurship are negated by an object of desire the example of the lexicographer is idiomatically allegorical and most likely moral hindi mawi willi an aso cwm de bini pigyan nang buto the dog will not be engaged if not given a bone willi, therefore, hinges the subject to the object to be distracted the philosopher and collector Walter Benjamin would refer to the transfiguration of things which mainly preoccupies the collector the trans that informs the figure demands having and holding as possession and property according to Benjamin and are related to the tactile and stand in a certain opposition to the optical is a people with a tactile instinct tactile instinct surely this is the bone of the collection that distracts or unhinges the collector I foreground Vargas in this discussion to index a condensation of a subjectivity that gathers and assembles by way of the agency of the collector who intwits a collective whether in the form of nation or culture through the collection I am interested in this intersection of the collective which references both the person and the thing such an intersection takes place in the Philippines that through Vargas redistributes as an Asian place I will tease out the strands of this trans position in the field of sports and scouting Vargas was a pioneer in the organization of scouting in the Philippines before the pacific war and after the war he was active in the national athletic associations and the Olympic movement he held the second Asian Games in 1954 I implicate scouting and sports as instances of harnessing the techniques of survival and citizenship as well as the mastery over the prowess of an alert and always ready and competent and adroit body this is one moment of the build doom of the subject the other is the emplacement of the citizen and the body in an expanded international field of both the scouting and sports movements this is Vargas with the Scouts in a speech in 1936 Vargas states better citizens are what we need in the Philippines of this stage of the country's history and there is no better citizenship training devised by human ingenuity than that afforded by the Boy Scouts organization good citizens are not made in a single day to make one it takes years of constant efforts a sigiwos instruction from the tender formative period of life from early youth if the child is father to the man then the courageous beautiful boy is father to the patriotic law abiding citizens what the boy of today is that will be the what the boy of today is that will the citizen of tomorrow be according to Vargas which Cahone notes that on his visit around the islands in 1931 as governor Theodore Roosevelt went to a leper colony and shook the hand of every Filipino Boy Scout he met expressing the view that in the health of the child lies the strength of the nation and the reason the Boy Scouts of America reached out to indigenous male youth the future of the empire rested not just on the happiness and health of white boys but on the survival of colonial boys Hone continues that health hygiene and athleticism were also precious ideas for the Filipino advocates of scouting he cites the Philippine scout master Lorenzo Alcantara who believed that and I quote Alcantara Scout training contributed to the toughening of native boyhood hiking camping fun tests, crowd control and other physical activities and laid the foundation for a strong efficient citizenry to ensure the survival in a world of empires it behooved the Filipinos to not waste a single man but to make every boy an asset to the nation end of quote this foundation of imperial masculinity built up the aestheticization and technique of the Philippine body in the sensibility of the humanist and bureaucrat Vargas civil, competitive skillful, aware of and around the world as the body was inculcated as essential in the formation of a sound citizen and subject so was it primed for competition to assert the local physique with the techniques of nation building and internationalist belonging another articulation decolective Vargas was in the thick of these initiatives the Asian Games in Manila is particularly salient in this argument Stefan Webner discusses how Filipino officials and their Asian collaborators attempted to use the games to promote democracy and the free world to other Asian countries including a focus on their discourses and the inclusion of new Asian Games Federation members the Asian Games was turned into an event for countries that maintained a pro-western or neutral stance in the Cold War according to Webner this was one side of the story the other side of it was tried to portray the Philippines as a free country that rejected complete American assimilation and of course the sovereignty of the body was therefore paramount within an agonistic situation in which the said body would be affirmed in relation to opponents or fellow adversaries fit for the mutual exertion of power at the Asian Games the locality of Philippine culture was sufficiently profiled and simultaneously certain symbols were deployed certain pan Asian symbols were deployed like the line youth of Asia ever onward in friendship through sports the collecting attitude of Vargas were for inflected equivalent affective formations in the Philippine scout and Asian athlete prompting us to initiate a shift from thinking from Asia to sensing from Asia such an assemblage could be seen as well in music or according to the Philippine artists and ethnomusicologists in Maseda the music of Asia the latter phrase was the title of the conference held in Manila in 1966 five years after according to Maseda the avant-garde music was introduced in Tokyo in his account of the Manila event they quote Maseda the music of Sinaakis, Varres, Bolae and Dulu was played in the same program with the traditional music of Asia the Chinese Nanguwan and Sound the Indian Sitar as played by Ravi Shankar the Tairana ad as played by Prasid Silapaban Leng and the Philippine Cwllintang as played by Amal Limontu Maseda father knows that the symposium may have stressed the difference in the aesthetics of two music hundreds of years apart but both apart of the contemporary world and of course in Maseda's theory the so-called old and the so-called new converge in the avant-garde fulfilling the desire of the body and the citizen to belong to a collective that is constituted by tradition and modernity Maseda has written copiously on this and I would like to focus on the two cifers of Asianness in his word the drone and the bamboo both of which layer the Asian place with time and sociality through everyday life and ritual broadly speaking according to Maseda and I quote in contrast to China the region of India and Southeast Asia was absorbed with another concept of the world another measure of time not a linear cost and effect entity of logic and matter the world with profound respect for nature and the divine for whom temples stone monuments and stupas were constructed a life replete with rituals and ceremonies in constant communication with spirits and deities with whom man corresponded to maintain an equilibrium with nature and the world if we go back to the painter Fernando Marsola's conjuration of the Philippine face and its negation of the Malayan and the Mongolian the Philippine we see in Maseda a similar identification of Southeast Asia with regard to the drone and its sounding and its sounding partly through the bamboo instrument he states that the poles and the timbre make up the drone they are the markers of time not the pitch a melody instrument may accompany the drone and sound but its pitches move independently of the pitches of the drone instruments this concept of drone refers from a drone in Indian music or ostinato in western music both of which are centered on pitch rather than poles or timbre and of course moreover it must be noted that the bamboo as a plant in the Philippine folklore is mythic being the bearer of the first woman and man to inhabit the world who are light from anode of the tall grass at which a bird would peck bamboo therefore is present in the cosmogony and a continuum in Maseda's music by Cory Vargas through the medium of the Philippinian the compendium of the Philippine information and the body of the able citizen Maseda imagines subjectivity as a vibration within a collective surrounded by spirits this would be elaborated in two projects Ognayan and Udlut Udlut Ognayan which partly crystallized under Emelda Marcus's cultural patronage and the government's developmentalist and martial law strategies sought to bring together communities through music aired by a radio Maseda recounts that and I quote Maseda, performers used about 40 radio stations in Greater Manila to broadcast a music of 20 performed by simple instruments recorded on tape and distributed to stations thousands of people holding radio transistors flopped in playgrounds and parks within a radius of 50 to 100 km around Manila. Gathered these sound sets into small islands or forests of sounds which varied in density according to the number of people participating in unit areas. The significance of this music lies in the use of radio stations and transistors as instruments and in the concept that native sounds united in another combination and with many people as participants can shape the density and direction of the music. Much like thousands of particles of raindrops raindrop densities control humidity in different parts of the city. The participation of thousands of people in music making in the open air is like their identification with nature Maseda continues. A concept manifests in Japanese and Balianist paintings where men, plants and animals are all treated as part of the jungle that envelops them. Ideas such as these can contribute to concepts of city planning different from the technological patterns of urbanization in our modern cities and of course. This poetic description of Maseda references the confluence of nature and the city the neighborhood and the mass medium of radio as well as the phenomenology of tuning into a frequency chancing upon a presence and a placing a world of waves. Maseda in another moment of the Asian comparative brings in Japanese and Balianist paintings to amplify the subjectivity of music. The other work would look likewise anticipated a sonic public sphere. Again I leave it to Maseda to some on this event. The work according to him was conceived to have a general public participate in a music for whose performance the simplest instructions were given. Eight hundred students in an open space played or sang repeated sound types of drone patterns. One pattern was a percussion drone or repeated sound of struck sticks. Another pattern was continuous change from one tone color to another and a third was a vocal sound sung over and over. A total effect was one of identification of this music with natural sounds or the sounds produced by instruments made from products of nature. It is as if sounds in rural areas were suddenly transported into the city. The unending repetition created an impression of continuity a concept of infinity as manifest in a native treatment of time which is also repetitious. The permutation of hundreds of sounds without any duplication of playing together of a rhythm by any of the hundreds of participants allowed for a sound drone which is also another aspect of continuity end of code. Both of these projects of Maseda happen not inside auditoria or palaces but in communal spaces attesting to the ability of sounds or music to dissipate the solidities of the self-sufficient self or self-sufficient agencies like the scout, the athlete or the collector. Just like Edward Said's idea of Paul's and Nicole Coney Aboeticist's notion of place that is an ecology I would like to end this keynote with the work of Singaporean artist Bani Haikal. I got acquainted with the poetry of Haikal when I heard him during the Singapore Biennale in 2019 diversified on intimacy through full. This year the exhibition titled in our best interest Afro-South East Asian Affinities during a cold war curated by Kathleen Ditsig and Carlos Kivan Jr. opened and one of the pieces was Haikal's we are not satisfied with just making noise. It came out of his research into the history and affect the cultural cold war through jazz in Southeast Asia. It is inspired by a performance in Singapore in December 1956 by Benny Goodman an American jazz clarinetist and bandleader known as the King of Swing who led racially integrated jazz groups. For Haikal jazz was an instrument of American cold war diplomacy as the US State Department circulated jazz musicians like Dizzy Gillespie Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington all musicians of color unlike Goodman all over the world. Benny identifies the clarinet as an exceptional jazz instrument that becomes an object of disruption characterized as the most dynamic and sounding the most human. The clarinet is capable of not only producing loud piercing tones but also gentle mellow and soothing sounds. Represented through a 3D printed replica Goodman's clarinet is deconstructed and presented in this installation suspended in a great soundscape that is an abstraction of the old badminton hall where Goodman gave his performance. Perhaps like abstract expressionism a marker of freedom and spontaneity jazz mystified the aesthetic autonomy of music in the cold war with America as a source of its defense. Goodman in this band towards Southeast Asia performing in Rangoon, Bangkok and Nongpen. The program included a history of jazz which would be portrayed by the notes as a mixture of I quote the tribal rhythms of African ancestors the Creoles music rich with French and Spanish influences that makes for America's most valid musical form such a mode of cultural diplomacy may have sought to spread the gospel of American diplomacy but also as a retort to the systemic racism in the United States and its intense civil rights movement. Peter Keppie reminds us that and I quote him jazz induced people to question and reconstruct the boundaries of race, class, national identity gender and the modern. Heikal's work complicates the Asian Sonic Ethnoscape evoked by Hosea Maseda through an avant-garde disseminated by a bamboo and radio Heikal's citation of jazz and the geopolitical containment or false consciousness of the imitative clarinet takes us back to the body and the citizen, the athlete and the scout from Asia who is made to imbibe a strain of sound that improvises as it improves upon the faculty of the senses and the quality of the democratic feeling and the sensible judgment. In Heikal's further research into this material he looks at a Filipino musician who worked in Singapore as a possible phase in this sequence signaling the diasporic moment and therefore enlightening the idea of worlds contemplated by this conference and the agenda of murmuration. Indeed, the intelligence to improvise signifies virtuosity. Edward Said has remarked on virtuosity through the pianist Glenn Gould theorizing it as a dislocation of expectation a source of eccentricity as it is implicitly of mastery and hence of disruption in Heikal's versatile clarinet. The Asian body achieves both across the domains of sport, scouting, and music whether avant-garde or jazz within mass or counter-culture. Filipino musicians sing the 17th century through the present or the first half of the 20th century have played live for foreign audiences at sea or on land in Guam, Sayang, Selangor, Sumatra, Hanoi, Saigon, Kuala Lumpu, Nompeng, Shanghai, Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Osaka, Okinawa and Tokyo, among others. In the Munger District in India in the 30s, for instance a Filipino in the person of Ivan Evangelista played swing with his band and travelled all over India as a musician. Angeline Degios points out that this live performance of migrant Philippine artists sorry, that this live performance of migrant Philippine artists would make guests out of strangers by, quote, meeting all the affective, embodied, and flexible labour requirements entailed by interactive service work. As a way of closing this keynote I would like to return to these worlds and their formation as an art historian I am interested in how collections or archives and materials are gathered and made to appear representative of a culture. In annotating the history of art through collections and collectives like the nation and the body politic it should be more productive methodologically to activate intersubjectivity through the tropes of for instance vibration and drone which reference both bodies as media and continuities defying the centredness of singular pictures through counterpoints and the play of ornamentation or even serendipitous flourishes part of this intersubjectivity is the risk to try out different registers from painting to music from more rebargas to Husey Maseda to Edward Said Palestine and Philippine experiences from sports to scouting. Moreover this reflection takes us through the Pacific War and the Cold War crucial instances of the formation of nationalisms and regions in Asia and this engages from the strictly geopolitical portals of nation states, area studies and international relations. When I use the word rework in the title in relation to art out of Asia I think about the effective labor that materializes artistic initiation and iteration and work it's to be functioning but rework I would find out is a specific term in geology indicating a sediment that I quote that eroded again after deposition to be redeposited as a younger layer an explanation for fossils of a different age occurring in the same deposition end of quote this particular meaning of rework excites me because it imagines layers and depositions erosions and sediments in the scales or strata in the thickness and interval of the Asian place it's Calibutan which in the vein of curatorial because constellational thinking is really about minding the world or having the world in mind caring about and caring for it I would like to recover the pulses as Jose Macedda puts it in the nature of this life world as it forms from quote cells into small islands or forests of sounds thank you thank you so much yes I'm back on thank you so much that was an incredibly rich paper and one which I'm still digesting as I'm sure many people are as well before I ask a question I would also again like to remind audiences to feel free to write into the chat box and share your thoughts as well and if you like me you are still digesting the information it is also fine just to simply share not necessarily have a question but it's just to share a couple of things that may strike you or if you want things to be further elaborated and certainly that's where I'm coming from with my first question which is I'm really interested in a way that you use language and in particular how you often use words that seem to have lexical completeness that they're very open and they're words that we don't often use in academic art history but I think it's the lexical incompleteness that I'm fascinated by and why you are drawn to these because I think one of the things thinking about toolkits as well is that apart from thinking that we need anti-colonial thinkers as global figures we also need a different set of vocabularies to forward our project so I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you think through language and where do you see the role of the use of words that doesn't necessarily have fixed positions or ideas That's a great question I don't know how really to answer it but it might come from my own experience as a user of language I wasn't born in Manila so the national language was I think my port language we moved around Paitalat in the central islands of the Visayas so we moved around three islands so I would learn three languages in my childhood so I think this like overlapping or layering of registers in the encounter of language would give me a different intuition about it to find maybe coincidences or inconsistencies or idiosyncrasies that might not be yielded strictly by the official or the lexical definition so I think that kind of palimpsense interests me it resists some form of consolidation of information or communication so it resists that fixation and then another layer of course would be English it would be my fifth language and I use it professionally I don't speak English in everyday life so I use it professionally so that's another layer of language use that I think I don't know maybe enlivens my attitude towards language so I mean in a way to answer your question it's this idea of learning language I mean the kind of self-consciousness so there is distance with the linguistic but also some kind of intimacy with possible idiosyncrasy that I notice within the pragmatic sense of language which is language in use and I think that was the inspiration of Calibutan right I mean it often has this what I love about Calibutan and I'm still trying to figure it out as a concept of aroundness and awareness of that which goes within and outside the objects of what we're thinking about so we're always in circulation I mean it's such an entantilising idea and it really does go against art history in a way that we think about art history right which we often deal with things as even if we don't want to we often place them in static moments we deal with objects that can be static we tend to allocate the artworks into moments of making that renders them static as well whereas what you're actually saying is this constant moving of in some ways of being rather than belonging would you say and also unknowing because one part of it is consciousness a sense of being in the world and performing the task of presence of course but the other part of it is the unknowingness or the untranslatability that you do not know and there's something about that that's kind of where research takes we can always argue that's kind of where research can take place too is in how we try to grapple with the unknowing or that which cannot be known right yeah and then there's okay I'm going to pronounce Kawali Ham itself this is almost this idea of desire but the way that you were also talking about it in connection with Vargas there's also a desire to anticipate a future as well and would you say that's also part this is also where Calibutin and Kawali Ham has a sense of difference am I mispronouncing it so I'm sorry if I am it's okay it's Kawali Ham but that's an interesting question was anticipating some kind of a cohesion or a wholeness after the fragmentation of war and so to some extent he allegorized this wholeness through the collection that through by piecing together fragments of art and culture in one place stamps, coins, books everything pertaining to the Philippines the Philippines we would be able to recover a certain wholeness of culture so he was anticipating that future mediated through a collective ethic but what is interesting about Vargas is was that he was also a political figure so it was not as if he was isolated from the production of a nation state he was part of it too so quite a rare intersection of a subjectivity who anticipated the future through culture and also through governance I do have a couple of comments from the audience from the floor which I like to share this one comes from Simone Will who said I love the way that Patrick moved from speaking about rather conservative paintings sports events to connection to be drawn to them is something very intriguing and I'm wondering if you can expand a little bit about that as well okay maybe for another seminar but maybe just to say maybe just to say that speaking to the concerns of the conference I wanted to look at different sorts of materials different sorts of objects to be studied in relation to art history and these other materials were also quite organic in the practice of Vargas it's not as if I imposed them on my discussion of Vargas because he was really part of this sports movement and also the scouting movement I just wanted to create those involvements to bring involvement into the context of the formation of culture so the production of a subjectivity or the body that is ready also to partake of this culture there's also a couple of other questions which I'm going to combine them as well and it goes back to the question of Calibuton and and this comes from Ming and he's asked can you please tell us how you imagine the relationship between Calibuton and Caliwalihon yeah and then to add on top of that how is the use of these vocabularies able to posit Asia and Asian art regionally and not just nationally big questions again paperwafee it's just that the Caliwalihon reflects the both speak to worldliness worldliness Calibuton pertains to the world itself and also the consciousness of the world and also maybe the unknowingness in relation to the world and Caliwalihon speaks to the the worldly pursuit the worldly pursuit of possessing objects collecting materials and so on and so forth so it takes us to this world of materiality so this also this fascination this subjectivity of possessing with the two Calibuton and Caliwalihon I'm trying to develop a theory of the collective the theory of the collective through a collecting practice that was quite expanded because it reached out to the scouting movement and also the sports movement and of course politics and also I must note that Vargas was from the Visayas yeah so I'm sure he knew what Calibuton meant right so it can be and so just to follow up how do you use deposit asian art regionally once you have this thinking through this theory how would you see it perhaps mutate in other areas when you expand it geographically largely through I think the Pacific war is an important theatre to stage this movement outside movement beyond and through the coat of of the axis I mentioned that it was exposed to this kind of in a way transnationality in Tokyo so I think that might be an interesting place to revisit the Japanese interregnum in Southeast Asia that might have because it's quite interesting the mix of Orientalism and Orientalism and also Nationalism and and of course it implicates the idea of America so I think that theatre is quite an intersection the Pacific war and then the coming back of the Americans to reclaim the region that might be interesting the tangent of course was Maserda the composer and also the music colleges but it was some kind of methodological maneuver to pick up also from Saïd's counterpoint argument and to further expand the notion of Asia and introduce the Sonic and the Migrant as part of the mix I mean that's definitely another parallel or another kingship that I was seeing you doing with the migrants and the Sonic was a really interesting another interesting vector point which I think can also expand what you're doing I'm sorry I'm trying to read free all the questions as well because they're coming in far superior now which is great and this comes from Caterina Santiago he wants to ask what surface for me as I listen to Patrick is another word which is calabunga and I'm going to spell it in case I mispronounce it K-A-L-I-B-U-G-A-N as I'm fairly sure I mispronounced it I'm sorry Patrick as that concept that is in between and surrounding as well the notions of Cawilihan as to be related to entertainment and distraction and Calabutin as wholness that is in constant flux the way that desires are ever shifting and changing are both internal and personal impulse and external and cultural and of course the worldliness of desire is something that might be an important part of a conversation about Asia and our collective desires given as well desire as flowing currents that's a great point from Caterina to foreground the erotic to foreground the erotic to calabunga this erotic maybe the libidinal so to foreground the erotic and calibrate the epistemic so it's a methodologically that was also my point to create eroticize to eroticize the methodology through this impulses like sound or the body of the scout the energy of the athlete and also the curiosity of the collector right and I slightly and again there's to follow up with that one it can this idea of desire or erotic, can it not also mean confusion which is what it means in most Visayan languages and this is from Michael that's also a good point so you know it becomes richer that way and this is a sedimentary building of meaning a real rework a real rework of Calibutan it's confusion again going back to the the unknowingness that is also embedded in Calibutan right and then sorry there's one again coming through again if Calibutan and around us and awareness were cultural concepts exhibited by people of pre-colonial Philippines so that is maybe why it's so alien to western conception which also tends to emphasise the tangibility of the art object would you agree with that could be that might be an interesting trajectory to to situate the discussion outside modernity because now it is within that through Vargas and Masedda and even Said so it's within that self-consciousness move maybe back or beyond or outside that context of the modern or modernity and try to explore more further what this word could yield well in a way Masedda would also signal that through this distinct musicological character of Philippine music that is based on the drone and the bamboo Masedda would enfold those into the modern as well it's in so much you can't escape the modern then in thinking through these ideas yeah correct but you can maybe unhinge a bit unhinge which is destruction which is part of of Cavillian and that's why the Philippine case complicates the colonial project for that's why when I participate in discussions about the the colonial I'm a bit more cautious and circumspect because the a Philippine colonial experience was quite different the level of the level of immigration you can see how it mutates through things such as the native everything just becomes a little messier as it were I don't know how at which point you detach that's why maybe it's interesting the Philippine case should be I mean we should turn to the Philippine case to complicate the colonial argument well this then may be a good time to perhaps this is more a comment from Sahi he said this picking up some threads from the recent Asia forum where Patrick mentioned his distance from the great traditions and the postcolonial this paper felt like it was positioning towards de-imperialising history would you agree yeah it sounds good yeah only if we can theorise more maybe more sensitively the prefix I think that's what is usually that part falls through the cracks what do we mean by that prefix inter or be but what do we exactly mean by that so I think it's about time it's time, high time to look into that prefix when we try to theorise whatever noun is placed beside it I think that's a good point we have completely run over time but I think it was well worth it that was incredibly rich and I think we will probably get more questions in the afternoon and this was fabulous it was absolutely a mind-boggling kind of paper so thank you very much Patrick for giving us such rich material to start the last of this panel and we will come back we will take a short break and come back with the papers with this afternoon paper and then there will be another Q&A and we will have another chance to grill Patrick further about his paper too thank you very much everyone more than welcome so it's a 15-minute break and we will return at 1.45 thank you very much we still have a couple of minutes so I'll wait for that while people join us in a few okay so it's 1.45 we have a lot to do today to go through we have three papers this afternoon and four speakers so I'm going to introduce the first of our speakers and if it's okay with the conveners I'm just going to introduce each of the speakers as their papers come up so the speaker of our first paper this afternoon subcontinentment diasporous futurisms and world building is Amrita Dalu a curator and researcher based in London she provides support structures for emerging British artists through commissioning editorial projects creating artistic networks and intergenerational learning spaces her current research examines care healing and ethno-futurist discourse within arts education exhibition making and professional developments for artists she is the lead artist of the Candom Arts Centre 2018-19 peer forum she currently holds the post of assistant curator international arts at Tate Modern London where she is part working as part of the curator team for the forthcoming Libania Hamid's exhibition and catalogue sorry she is on the board of AN and Arts Night and is the co-editor with Priya Jay of a forthcoming publication that is emerging from Stuart the communal design and publishing platform and Neva let me pass over to Amrita thank you I will now share my screen can everyone see this that's working well thanks Amrita okay great okay thank you everyone so much for being here today and I also just want to say Patrick your keynote just floored me and there's so many connections so I'm really really excited to unpack them further with you so before I begin I would like to extend my deepest thanks to the artists who are using Soin whose work and concepts have really shaped and framed this research and she's been so incredibly generous with her time speaking with me a lot and also inviting me to add my own images and concepts to expand this work so I'd also like to echo the acknowledgement at the beginning of the artist's book we are opposite like that which expresses gratitude and respect towards the natural element of ice to ice our elder, our sage, our astrologer our shaman our timekeeper, our politician our philosopher our teacher, our protector our folly so to introduce my work as a curator often I work closely with artists who investigate the impacts of the body as a vessel for inherited histories and what it means for the body to be a place of diasporate communities to be caught in the aftermath of a traumatic evental history that occurred generations before we even arrived and over this past year and a half specifically my research has entered into a very particular space and this has been shaped a lot by the many many conversations I've had with artists and curators looking at the generative and imaginative space that has been carved out by many ethno-futurist movements as well as observing the case for a few of us our reorientation towards the natural landscape and an embrace of a more geological understanding of time and what happens when you bring all of these elements together to create new artistic methodologies which support particularly for diasporate subjects the imagining and remapping of geographies based on connectivity intuition and cross-continental relationships moving towards bridging the ruptures caused by the western cartographic principles so on an individual level I've been drawn to the hope and the optimism that a futurist aesthetic language can provide particularly after experiencing this past year and a half of deep pain and continuous grief across many different levels so I've been leaning on a futurist thinking to chart, to restore and even reconceive the complex relation between myself and my ancestral homeland of the Indians of continent and through this thinking I connected with the practice of Himali Singh Soi whose 2018 manifesto entitled subcontinentment announces a South Asian futurism which is responsive it listens and shapeshifts according to the spectral whispers ancestral rhythms and invisible communications that are generated between the polar regions and the subcontinent before I get into the details of the manifesto it's important to introduce the expansive multidisciplinary practice of Himali Singh Soi so the artist is based across London and Delhi and works across text performance, sound and moving image her practice centres metaphors from the natural environment as well as outer space and these are used to construct speculative cosmologies that reveal non-linear entanglements between human and non-human life so this poetic methodology as she names it has allowed me to see from a very different perspective the non-linear entanglements between London, Asia and the diasporic spaces beyond as her work draws from many different modes of knowledge production and circulation from the scientific to intuitional and indigenous and alchemical processes of knowledge so through my research really drawn to the interdisciplinary project we are opposite like that which comprises mythologies for the global poles told from the non-human perspective that has witnessed deep geologic time, the ice in 2017 the artist completed residencies in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Arctic Circle in Svalbard and through this experience became very drawn to the vast glacial landscapes and recognising them as these incredible archives and she started to think about the kinds of stories the kinds of ghostly traces and even warnings that are stored in these archives archives that have existed long long long before humans were even a thought on this planet so in the film next round of this project the artist embodies an alien like character wearing an emergency blanket and the shimmer of this foil reflects and reflects refracts the light of the white white landscape so we follow this solitary figure who is wondering and looking for a home on this journey the character finds herself in and amongst preceding ice caps, Soviet ruins old wailers graves and then she finds herself in a coal mine where her brown body is reflected back onto her and in that moment a heat, a energy is generated between the two and then a kinship is formed between the character and the landscape in this moment the ice is recognised as an agent of resistance as we understand that the landscape has resisted extractionism for a very very long time is from this field work in the polar circles that the artist devised the manifesto subcontinentment which also forms part of these fictional ice archives so I want to share with you all the opening standards of the manifesto but before I do that I think it's interesting to note that the very confrontation between the artist and the overbearing whiteness of the polar landscape is what provided the canvas upon which to build a South Asian futurism but then it's this disconnect which creates an in-between space becomes the place of reckoning and an understanding between the two so I'll begin subcontinentment South Asian futurism does not fantasise about a future because it cannot isolate the future from the past it fantasises about a life in between it wishes to grab language by its horns grab the English language by its horns and bring it off its yeses and nos and everythings and nothings and hang it out to dry in the equatorial sun in the middle of the infinity its locus is entangled material and spiritual subliminal and subversive and submissive at once bipolar South Asian futurism is a witness to the ash warmth of the morning when people have smacked the iron-clad gates and a few are lost in trees or transits South Asian futurism dismisses its title denouncing South Asia as a universal region without specificity denouncing futurism as an accomplice to the violence that comes with acceleration South Asian futurism would like to call itself subcontinentment a skewport monto a subcontinent and contentment an idealistic futurism that is scientific but does not believe in science as a solution its science fiction does not project a dystopia despite the carbon it wants an alchemy of knowledges it wants rumours, humours, hypotheses it wants ancient imaginaries and everyday erasures it wants to rest where happiness is fleeting our contentment finds rest not rest like stillness mind of rest in music a held pause an interval with a pedal down or like a lily pad floating flat against water an absolute zero coated in an armour of wax repelling the too muchness of life likeness born by horizontality likeness born by horizontality we are the poetry of brown bodies we take your criticality and raise you immediacy subcontinentment says it is a part of and apart from subcontinentment says we are one body that is killed over and over again if we are not cautious the spectre of freedom in a world which cannot be reversed but reprinted in the form of 2,000 rupee notes purple hearts hatching life on Mars where money will be cosmic and Gandhi will look through lotus-cutted glasses and sea temples built on tombs praying palimpsests of polarising precarity praying to the gods of geometry their indeterminate equations to the reflection of light by the moon praying to the gods of geometry praying to the reflection of light by the moon to suspension, apparition, gravitation levitation in direct vision so I'll leave it there for the moment subcontinentment has provided me with a very open space upon which to project my own imagery and reimagine ancestral lineage across space time the artist presence is deposited and we do understand we are entering to this conversation with ice ddech chi'n ddweud am yr oedd ffordd taeth, a ff dadir hyn mae ymddyeb i eisiau. Yn y gallwn unig yn ddweud sy'n defnyddio bod yn gallu ei hefyd yn ddweud mewn mynd, ddweud ond yn ddweud, nid y guestydd ynd a'r byw, bohau bod yn ein wneud yng Nghymru ac yn ystod yr unig. Yn y gweithio'r gweithsgrin ac y gwirio hwn yma yng Nghymru,之b yn y lle hwn i'n cyfnod i'r busau sources ac yn y gweithsgrin eu interessanteolaeth, fibers and the use of boundless imagery within his practice in order to inspire others. Matingeration feels sensuously alive and connected with all of the life educating that surrounds them. And so when he spoke about the audience coming into contact with these metaphors he said you went diamond able to grasp the mysteries of life a gold has the capacity for continuous growth. Gweithio, mae'r ddweud o'r tyfnwys i'w ddim yn ymgwaith. Mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud o elfen sy'n gyntaf. Mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud sy'n cyfrifiad yma, sy'n gyfweld i'r manifesto yma, yn y Lili Pad, ac y fflafft hordd o'r struchio oherwydd ei bod yn rhai. Ymwysig yma yng nghylch o'r rhysgau, ond rwy'n credu ymwysig yma yma yng Nghymru, os yw ddim yn ymwysig a bryd i'r gwahanol gwahanol, a'r wychau sy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, lle mae'r gweithio yn eu gwisio a'u gweithio ddiolch. A dyma y dyma'r sefydliadau a'r gwneud o'r hyn o'r hunain gyda'r cymdeithasol yn y gweithio. Ysbryd y metafol botaniau erbyn ei dda yn gyfwyrdd honno ylleydd ynghyd oedd ysbryd i eithaf ynghylch yn ei gweithio hynny sy'n gwneud ymgylcheddau hynny, i'r cyflawn i ymddangos hynny, i'w fawr i yw'r cyffredig. Felly, byddwn i ddim y gwybod'r cyffredig yn ymgyrchol a'r cyffredig yn ymgyrchol i'r fframwg ar yr archipelogau. Mae'r archipelogau sydd yn ymgyrchol sydd yw'r cyffredig yn ymgyrchol, sydd wedi'u lleidiau ymgyrchol, a'i amser unig sylfaen. Roedd y cyffredig ymgyrchol yn ysgrifennu sydd yn ymgyrchol i'r gwybod, y cyffredig yn ymgyrchol sydd yn gallu byd yn ymgyrchol a rhaid i ddim yn ymparwg yn enw. Fy datblygu soedd cyfnodd munud y Roedd Asia ac yma ydych chi'w awr yn bwysig, yn cynhyrchu teleodol, syniadol, a roi'n ddarparu gyda unrhyw i'r cyfrwyng. Oherwydd, mae'n gilydd pethau sy'n ganodd yn ymryd Gwerthiau Cymru yn dd一個 cyfrwyngu cyfrwyngau ac mae'r iddynt yr diodareddau cyfrwyng. Ydw i'n ymwneud, mae'n gyrddur cyfrwyng, mae'n cyfrwyngu cyfrwyng. ac mae'n hyn ymweld eisiau'r ysgol yng Nghymru ar gyfer y gynhyrchu ystafell mwyafol gwellus yng nghymru a'r ffuncfyniad. Mae'r ysgol yn eraill yn gweithio'r fflaesif yma. Mae'n groesfynio'r tîm ysgol yn ymweld yng Nghymru a'r arferfyniadol fel y Ghtfogol a'n gwybod o'i syniadol. Mae'n gofyn i gyfnodd arweinwyr, ac mae'n gofynu'r ffataill mewn ffataill ynghylch, and Futurism, particular within the circuits and the systems of an art world. Distancing itself from the modernists and the Italian Futurists, it condemns the violence associated with acceleration and that celebrated obsolescence. It refuses the ism in Futurism, that association with rigidity and a static moment in time. Ac rydyn ni'n gwybod i'w rymdau bod gynnwysbryd yw ddweud o gweithio, yw'r tynnu ffordd i warchaidd. Ac mae'n gweithio'r gweithio a ffordd o'r cyfnod. Ac mae'n mynd i'n mynd i'r blaen o'r gyfer ynghylch a'u bod yw'n dod i'r gweithio'r gweithio. Yn amlwg ychydig i'r gweithio i'r archifau'r dyn nhw, ydyn ni'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio a'r gweithio'r ddweud? Ynny wedi'u phobl gynnwys am y llai'r llyff,... ...y gallai unrhyw ymddiad a'r llyffau a'r llyffau... ...fynodd y gyrdd. Mae yna yw amllun cyd-fysg yw... ...ymglwyd a'r llyffau yw amlun cyd-fysg yw... ...mae gyd-droed â Meid SeaFarwyr. Acべch chi'n ateb ager Cherfers... ...y cynnyddu'r llyffau wychخyrau ymddiad... ...ialol ymddiad. A'r gennym ni ar negro arall mewn... ...y wych chi'n byddio mewn yma ar 2020. felly we really did bond over our shared interests and investment in futurisms in various moments in time, and recognising that their role could be in inspiring and optimism in historical moments of deep despair. So I shared with the artists as well that at that time, I still am, I was involved in developing a collaborative new futurist movement called Dart Futurism, with a Somalian artist, Salmanor, an Afro-Carib cultural producer, Helen Starr. And we were looking to create a multi-layered practice which descended European discourse and embraced the intersectionalities of technology, arts, ritual and time. And in the same vein as subcontinentment, the very foundations of this movement looked at the ecological entanglements between our ancestral homes of South Asia, East Africa and the Caribbean. And in her research, the incredible Helen Starr, and I still to this day don't even know how she managed to find this, but found that a desert sandstorm which hailed from Somalia encircled the globe within the horse latitudes, which are located about 30 degrees north and south of the equator. And this sandstorm brings the vital nutrients to the poor soils of the Caribbean and Amazonian basins. And then they come around and they shape the crucial monsoons of India. So here, Helen was able to track this sandstorm and see that there are these connections between us that relate to the ecological relations that have existed long, long, long before any kind of trade route between these territories were developed and exploited by the West. So here, and with both of the artist's permission, I've layered the dark future as sandstorm on top of the subcontinent mentalist's glaciers. And I think the images really speak to each other and feel very in sync because I think it's indicative of how these emergent futurist movements, all the ones I've spoken about today and how they're developing, are really looking to what Singapore calls the ancient telepathic communications between the earth's geological sites. And these natural rhythms and cycles become agents of decolonisation that are centred in our artworks and art worlds. So when I try to connect this all to a thinking around what a diasporic South Asian futurism could look like, and I've returned to subcontinentment here, I'm drawn to the oppositional antagonistic forces that are conjured by this manifesto as a foundation for a psychic diasporic landscape upon which to build new futures. The embrace of the in-between, a land which represents neither past nor future, but a cyclical motion between the two. Yes, antagonistic forces meet, but they don't try to overpower one another. They combine and they meet and they give space to infinite possibility and transformation. The South Asian futurism as this in-between space serves as a useful metaphor with which to develop a diasporic aesthetic language as it indicates the many crossings and transgressions that these artists whose work I'm interested in are dealing with. For example, the crossings of boundaries that are geopolitical, gender-based and even caste-based. Just like the geological landscapes that we are in dialogue with, our identities as diasporic subjects are constantly shifting and moving, and so it's important to create theoretical and aesthetic ground which acknowledges that. And so the next stage of developing this research is to consider the artists across Britain and Asia that are using different kinds of aesthetic modes, but also hope and joy to build new worlds. So this slide is just, you know, the start, it's a little teaser, and it's just a group of artists that I think do subscribe to some of the themes that I've spoken about today. So their practices don't necessarily deal with the return to the motherland, but instead it's about conceiving a new imagined space within which a solidarity and kinship between artists can be developed. And I don't unfortunately have time today to go into their individual practices, but I think it's interesting to note that there is this move towards employing sonic and new technologies, and in some cases, 3D modelling technologies to disrupt memories of a homogenous subcontinent. And through their practices, they each call for a new kind of mapping, one that allows for diasporic storytelling to layer onto the cultural palences envisioned by Simsoin's manifesto. So to conclude, I think it's really important to note that the context in which the artist wrote the manifesto was extremely different to the one that we find ourselves in now. Simsoin wrote the piece in 2018, and when I look at this retrospectively, I think that there's a real prophetic nature to the manifesto because it predicted the brutal consequences of the policies then freshly set by the Mordi Government, particularly that of demonetisation and its impact on rural communities. Also the impact of the incessant architectural campaign building new temples, new government buildings as a vehicle to declare an ethno, religious, dominion, domination, sorry, in India. In a recent conversation with the artist, we both acknowledged that the contentment in subcontinentment feels extremely difficult to commit to in this moment in time. But when I reflect on my changing relationship with the texts, I realised that it has evoked this sensitivity and, I guess, a better awareness of the trauma that is constantly flaring in the world around cases that relate to spatial and land injustice, thinking about the farmer's strike in North India, as well as the ongoing occupation of Palestine. Can we use subcontinentment as a generous framework to reimagine spatial politics and equity? We both acknowledged that the manifesto needs to be added to in order for it to maintain its role as a caretaker for an archiving loss, to maintain its resilience and its ability to absorb and reflect back onto us the grief we are collectively experiencing. However, this isn't necessarily a difficult task as the manifesto is so spacious. The artist has intentionally left pauses, breaks and many generous open spaces upon which we can project our own images of hope and futurity. Subcontinentment is a present living archive for our future selves, ongoing, open-ended and ready for future generations to build onto it using our own mythologies and new forms of testimonies. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was a great paper and I will also encourage our listeners to start thinking of questions in our Q&A sessions to follow because I'm sure there were plenty and there was certainly a lot of connections between Amrita's paper and what Patrick just said. There was just so much crossover, so I think this afternoon's conversation is going to be very exciting. But let me introduce our second paper, which is entitled Contesting Publix and Art Education in Pakistan, and our speakers today are Farida Batul and Sir Jaleen. Farida is an independent artist, researcher and educationist. She received her bachelor's in fine arts from the National College of Arts, masters by research in our history and theory from the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales and a PhD from the Centre of Media Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, so as in London. She has been teaching since 1997 and currently heads the Department of Cultural Studies at the National College of Arts, Lahore, and has offered a book, Figure, the Popular and a Political in Pakistan. She was involved in many art projects and community workshops for awareness raising among women communities in several urban and rural areas of Pakistan and also conducted cultural and political dialogue among different communities. She presented papers and presentations at international conferences and workshops and she has also exhibited extensively in many international and local solo and prestigious group shows. She is an active member of Owami Art Collective, which aims to use arts in public spaces to generate a discourse of peaceful coexistence. She is also joined by Sir Jaleen, who is a visual artist, researcher, writer and a PhD candidate. She obtained a BFA in 2006 and an MA honours in visual arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore, and urged to find midpoints between material and surreal, practical and theoretical, connects home with diverse media and archive. Doing public art in Lahore as a member of the Owami Art Collective since 2015 further support this subversion. Most recent curiosities are Indian soldiers in World War II through personal archives, entertainment in times of restraint, memory archive and proving status scientifically to discover cosmic unity. She is the lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies at the National College of Arts in Lahore and she was also participated in various group shows, art research projects and contributed to publications both nationally and internationally. Her solo shows, Stray Reflections, in 2018 and 19, was created at the Javid Mansell House Museum of the National Poets, Alama Akbar. She presented her co-authored paper, The Sky drew some new lines on the case studies of Owami Art Collective projects at the Urban Heritage Conference in Berlin in March 2017. Please join me in welcoming our second set of papers. Just to say to everyone as well that Sarah and Farida have sent their paper in pre-recorded for now but they will be here for Q&A and we're just going to share a YouTube link as well if your internet is slow and buffering you can watch there but please do come back afterwards for the third paper and the Q&A. Thank you. On 14 August 2020, a group of gardeners under the leadership of their artist horticulturist launched a huge public sculpture to celebrate their love and devotion to the National Poet Mohammad Iqbal. The sculpture was made by collecting materials from the park's resources and regular visitors' interest in the project. While it was not financially commissioned by the local government, it was envisioned to add attraction to the park by making a selfie point which it was until on the fateful day of February 2021 at 9.49 a.m. after six months of installation, a tweet by one of the most important journalists mainstream media anchor who attacked present government's member who happened to be the poet's grandson by stating, Do you know whose sculpture is this? Does it resemble Poet of the East at all? Your government has commissioned this sculpture on nepotism and installed it in Gulcaneg Valpar. I feel devastated by looking at this sculpture. This tweet went viral in a few hours and opened floodgates of netizens reaction from other cities and countries demanding the local government of Lahore to take immediate action against an object of insult to the National Poet. Interestingly, most of the Twitterati did not see the sculpture in person in the park. Awami Art Collective however issued a statement in support of the makers of this sculpture stating, This sculpture has an innocent appeal of pure love of people which is original in its shape, materiality, execution and size. The amazing effort should not, this amazing effort should not be discarded. Instead, we must hail the makers of this sculpture and own this piece as an original public art. This park interests in many artists and they started to came forward in support of the sculpture after we, Awami Art Collective posted this message on social media and many revised their early statement of seeing a piece of disgrace to a more powerful expression by local gardeners quote unquote, which should be recognised. The sculpture was done the less disinstalled and we was taken away, probably destroyed. But it generated a controversy where people were divided and left with many questions like who was and were the makers of this sculpture and would it have made a difference if the sculpture was commissioned to an artist. If the issue of resemblance was the key issue, then what about numerous public sculptures in the city and others which do not have any resemblance and in fact are installed in a much ridiculous manner and very careless manner. Why they don't get this reaction? Is it a matter of aesthetics, this juncture with the past and current creative force practices? Is it an issue of class, academic hierarchies or hegemonic control over public space and art? Many social media comments on the Iqbal statue revered a viral post of a local academically trained sculpture creating national sculptures with full academic realistic protocol. There were numerous comments which condemned the gardener's sculpture and compared it to childlike drawings and the ancient king priest. They were also those who stressed that only someone who is trained to do something should be granted the liberty to do it. This commentary is not the focus of this interrogation, but it raises an important question on the ideal of our locale. Bami coleg Maria Khan created a meme on her comic illustration page where our own Indus Valley ancestors were seen in appreciation of the statue of the king priest. Khan satirically asked through her meme what if the king priest was made today? Would it have been criticized or removed? One wonders what happened in the history of South Asian art and pedagogy to manufacture a public aesthetic for a power politics which forced an execution of an Iqbal sculpture which did not meet societal artistic ideals. The fact that during the whole week of heated debate over this sculpture in social and mainstream media the makers were continued to be referred as Mali's meaning the gardeners, but no one referred to the makers with names. These gardeners took the initiative of making something attractive for people popular selfie point in the public park using parks waste material and visitors contribution. This dismissal of artists identity reflect on the issue of class and power in Pakistani society. It might be useful here to look for a complex and nuanced understanding of the high and low art practices and their political ramification in Gramchi's hegemonic model. The popular practices are considered low in status or the popular public's affair catering to popular consumption as is evident in the case of sculpture of Alam Iqbal which remained a popular selfie point for the local visitor for few months until was targeted by media to serve political motives but nonetheless continued with hasty assumptions about the aesthetics of the sculpture and dismissed it due to the social status allocation of these practitioners which was outside the four walls of the white cube the established institutions of high art. In the Gramchiian model of hegemony the state takes the most position from where it controls art and culture to construct its own ideology which is reminiscent in the commissioning of numerous sculptures of founders of Pakistan in public spaces. The state funded sculptures have also been ridiculed by public and artist due to their stylistic issues and poor workmanship but the state never felt under the pressure to remove those pieces. This further raises a question that which sculpture will survive in public space. For instance, for a few instances of removing sculptures in the public space in the past history of Pakistan needs a deep analysis where a majestic statue of Queen Victoria installed in 1902 in front of the Punjab Assembly Lohor was removed after the inception of Pakistan and was replaced by a bronze replica of the holy prawn because the Islamic summit was to take place that year. The statue of leading Hindu engineer Sir Gangaram who was to his credit some of the city's iconic buildings like National College of Arts and Gangaram Hospital was attacked and damaged by extremist groups. While we saw the removal of horse sculptures from an elite residential housing society public square other horse sculptures continue to adorn the public squares. The extremely high-priced commission pieces in Lohor's elite residential societies continue to be the center of attraction for large public and are not questioned by the media. The continuous presence of the painted images of national heroes and political leaders on the painted trucks as part of our truck aesthetics surround us and people continue to enjoy them despite them not painted in western tradition or portraiture with resemblance. Within the hegemony of creative industry the popular vernacular cultural expressions are relegated to the lowest level enabling the popular expression to continue its visibility in the public sphere. How do we then understand the idea of public publics and the public art within the hegemonic modes of direct and indirect control? The conscious decision of not teaching art and cultural heritage in schools by the military regimes of Zauldag continues with the colonial project for disconnection with the past. The disjuncture with the indigenous expression of arts in the public domain was once severed by the narratives written by the colonial project of archaeological discoveries, education and cultural modernization. Placement of Gandhara's cultures for instance in Lohor Museum was one such venture where cultural past was studied within the four walls of the museum outside of its geocultural and religio historical context as the court starts. The use of these cultures were being deciphered less to learn about India and more about rediscovery of colonial western self court ends, states Shailabhati. She further elaborates that they were not symbolizing a mysterious or exotic other but seem to be a missing part of western history that needed to be reclaimed intellectually and physically and was being assisted by the rise of classical archaeology as a modern mode of scientific inquiry in India. The presence of high art sculptures within the institution of museum and low art in the public sphere reflects the continuous fight of the public for their public space that was never lost. According to Martin Zebraki in his essay Beyond Public Artopia, public art is perceived by public. The public art response is dependent on the educational background of people and important to public art perception. Quote, in human geographical research on perception, much attention is paid to how the real world is directly or indirectly read as an environmental message and filtered through the perceiver's senses, brain and personality and culture being attitudes, norms and values that are derived from the perceiver's cultural background and competences. This leads us to excavate a selective range of South Asian pedagogical influences just as an attempt to understand the plurality of aesthetic perceptions in the region. An oxymoronic scape may be the center of these influences as West and East, academic and traditional, colonial or co-postcolonial, resistance or acceptance morphed through the varied timelines and regions. The 1920s and 30s in Lahore had Mio's School of Arts, Bhavesh Chandra Sanyal introduced individual expression with observation with live and new model studies. Later introduced, later expanded through Sanyal's Lahore School of Fine Arts, 1937, Aar Chukthai, 1899 to 1975 acquired and pushed the Bengal School to his own evolved Persian aesthetic after he met Gupta around 1915. This cosmopolitanism can also be seen and understood in Rhu Krishnas 1901 to 1968 art and theory pursuits. Rhu Krishnas residence above the bookshop Rama Krishnas and Sons at Anarkali, Lahore was the center for art aesthetic discussions. Krishnas international training at the Ecole des Bouks Arts in Paris and Royal College of Arts London along with earlier influence of Bindir Nath Tagore and training under Nandilal Bose at Shanti Nikitan Bengal created a space for avant-garde thinking and work with evolution and change was crucial to art. The art practitioners from our collective have lived in Lahore majority of us have our initial academic training from the National College of Arts Lahore which was Mio's school of arts earlier in colonial India. Resistance and deconstruction, subversion and collaboration has also been inherent in this aesthetic trail derived from this institution. From poet artist Ravinder Nath Tagore's and social scientist Benoy Kumar Sarkar's progressive artist group 1947 in Bombay which stressed on universal aesthetics internationalism and interdependence as integral to art too and understanding of the 1850s and 1860s when Britain became interested in the pedagogy and mastery of Indian art with institutional focus at South Kissington especially after the East India Company's contribution to the 1851 great exhibition in Britain. Consequently in 1853 Sir Charles Trevelyan proposed a British run network schools of train to train Indian craftsmen and promote their economically threatened industries. The emphasis was to apply western modes of production with model examples of traditional Indian forms. Kipling was a pioneer of this colonial pedagogy. He was the director curator of the curator of the central museum at Lahore from 1875 to 1893. The museum could boast a large and varied textile section and an industrial art department which displayed actual specimens, models and photographs of artisans showing the stages of manufacture material and designs of the arts and crafts of the Punjab. For our project Black Spring 2016 only formally speaking clusters of the Tixali area in Lahore were outlined by orange light on the rooftops which created a web of lights when seen from the sky. For those who was laid in the dark alleys 2015 a simple triangular paper bunting was printed in repetition carrying imprint headlines of those who were lost in the name of what they believed in or were caught in a unaware like the teachers and child martyrs of the Peshawar school attack. A circular labyrinth walkway carried the buntings. This sensibility and somewhat collateral aesthetic emerges from the locale, the community and the public itself. For a smaller project in 2015 when we took hand prints of public school children on cardboard tachthies traditional slates where the non-objection certificate to ribbon hang them around the barbed wire of the chairing cross Lahore the ribbons messages from young ones to the marchers and hand prints saw only a few hours of glory and were removed from the site when we revisited the same evening to see them. Avami art collective's practice is grounded in local experience and memory. John Dewey's focus on experience as art and knowledge has a certain renaissance resonance with our process. Dewey positions societal obligations and culture knowledge and learning as the creative act. Anthropologist Ellen Desenke viewed things and activities themselves as works of art. For Dewey unlike Plato art was not an imitation of nature and education was a force for social reconstruction. While working on the tuxali rooftops with hammers, buyers and the community, weather hazards with the paper installation or sitting and gazing into dismantled shrines or white paper buntings which carried lives and names on lush green grass, Dewey's texts of experience and ordinary life experiences as centre for growth and ideas become real in the give and take of this process where there is no finality and necessary human activity can be visual art. In colonial India Ravi Verma's 1948 to 1906 academic realism spread across the Bombay, Jijis School of Art and Calcutta School of Art along with the nationalist sentiment of the Bengal School manner in the early 20th century with E. B. Havel, A. K. Kumar Swami and A. N. Tagore as propagators. This opposition took over the first four decades of the 20th century. Bengal school made its way into Punjab through Samidhar Nath Gupta 1887 to 1964 as a student of Abindir Nath Tagore. Contradictions and conflict have been the key instigators of art and aesthetic in the subcontinent. As tastes, choices and perceptions are borrowed, returned, unlearned and shared, the art, geography and politics of this region may remain and thrive on. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much. That was a great paper and I love how you guys were giving the paper while you were in the public, you were talking about the public and you were out in the public at the street in the garden, which I thought gave a lot of resonance to your work itself. I'm going to introduce our last paper and again, before I do so, I would like to ask people to, you can type in questions into the Q&A box. We already have some coming in, it would be great to have some more too. So our last paper today, sorry, our last paper today is Thinking Through Empire from Asia, an object lesson and our speaker, Stephanie Bailey. Stephanie Bailey is editor-in-chief of Ocula magazines and art papers contributing editor and managing editor of Podium, which is the online journal of Mplus in Hong Kong. She's also on the advisory board member of Divan, a journal of accounts and part of the Naked Punch editorial collective. She also writes for Art Forum, Art Monthly, Canvas and Yushu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and has curated the Art Basel Hong Kong Conversations programme since 2015. Bailey's research centres on power relations coded into the production and exchange of cultures. Essays have appeared in navigating the planetary in 2020, future imperfect contemporary art practices and cultural institutions in the Middle East in 2016. The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed, part of the 20th Biennale of Sydney catalogue in 2016. Amenity, the catalogue of the Armenian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and Hapahipagrit in Fresh Health in 2015. She has also done numerous editorial projects including Children of Empire for Leap, issue number 37, which is in February 2016, with contributions among others, Usmar Rezvi. German politics on the edges yet another work, a dossier for art papers which was published in 2016 and non-aligned movement Leap 45, which was published in June 2017. Please join me in welcoming our next speaker, Stephanie Bailey. Thank you, thank you Yuan, thank you everyone and hi to everyone who's here. Thank you Hamad Ming and Sarah for including me in this gathering of speakers and honestly as a Sunday academic, it's thrilling and humbling. So for today I've mashed up the two titles of two different sessions, thinking through empire, imperial histories, object lessons and thinking from Asia in order to draw a circle from and back, but now after listening to Patrick, I'm thinking around and through to Art Basel in Hong Kong as the object in question, an annual art fair staged on the edge of Victoria Harbour and this is a very rainy view of Hong Kong with my back to Victoria Harbour, a body of water shaped and in turn shaped by Colonial Port City where lives, monies and histories intersect. So I've been working on conversations as mentioned since 2015 and I see it as a discursive space knowingly situated as the Asia edition of Art Basel, a fair like Art Basel in a city like Hong Kong, an ex British colony developed into a neoliberal free port in the late 20th century and now is simulating to the PRC and of course we mustn't forget that Asia itself as with so many geopolitical names like it, as with its geographies, histories and peoples not, is as elastic as it is crosshatching a little bit like Art Basel itself, which represents to some the apex of the global art world entitled capitals, neoliberal you might say, capitalist, homogenising, scare quotes if you like, definitely something to anyone who thinks about art fairs or which is to say a fair like Art Basel is definitely something to anyone who steps inside. So I'm just going to map very briefly the programme and you'll see there's just a scrolling slideshow of images of the talk, some of them I'm mentioning and it has all the speaker information. So on average between 2015 and 2019 I'd say we ran about 20 conversations a year, an opportunity for audiences and speakers and practitioners from across the region and beyond to explore commonalities and divergences in practice, historical trajectories, curatorial formats, approaches, institutional conditions and so on. In a way the fact that the talk space was kind of a catchment area where we gathered people together to speak a while, whether they were in Hong Kong for the fair itself or whether we had asked for them to join us. The programme is free and all videos go online. Here you'll see one from 2021 when of course several was doing the Zoom talks as we are now and because we have a broad mix of audiences including those in the future who we hope will use these recordings as documents, snapshots in time. But because of this the programme is tailored across frequencies, whether based on region, discipline, trends, debates and case studies and so on. But there are some running themes and here's one of them, Hong Kong of course is one. This was a rebel city, Hong Kong is a site and situation which we staged in 2015 to think about the aftermath of the umbrella movement from the perspective of artist practitioners in Hong Kong. This was followed with a city focused panel does political art matter in 2017, which was then followed up in 2018 with the panel, one of my personal favourites communism as communism, followed by what was to be in 2020 bearing witness Hong Kong as site and situation part two, which of course couldn't happen because the fair was cancelled because of COVID. We also hold regional panels, so just to give you a little broad view of the sort of thematics that run through the programme, we hold regional panels so in 2015 for instance when we did India and Pakistan at the Venice Biennale. We've done a panel called China Africa organised by Xinwang based on an exhibition she created at the IFA NYU in 2018 with Samuel Foso, He Xiang Yu, Hu Xiang Tian and Edzin Chagas and joining us in Hong Kong was He Xiang Yu and both my apologies it was Hu Xiang Tian I believe. Sorry, it was He Xiang Yu, sorry. It was Samuel Foso, He Xiang Yu and they were joined by Ola Remy Onobanjo who's director of collections and exhibitions at the Walter Collection. Okay, so we have regions, but of course we also look at geography as a concept in and of itself. Of course we have done panels on curating Asia square quotes but we've also looked at the concepts of geographies of the imagination itself which was actually the title of an exhibition staged at Savvy Contemporary which we then turned into a roundtable discussion moderated by Christina Lee with Raphael Chikukwa, Antonio Alampi, Natasha Ginwala and Mio. So we also as always we go through the art histories as well and you know this being a fair in Hong Kong and I think that we've seen this with other fairs let's say for example Art Dubai that these spaces once they're outside of the sort of western centre let's say they also offer opportunities to write histories. Obviously history making it at this point in the fair is almost like an archaeology for the future because you have to go back in order to catch up for what was erased or lost and I think that this is quite common in colonial conditions. So we also for example we did one panel on Incompanent Asian Modernisms which was moderated by M Plus Incurator Leslie Ma to explore the histories of modernism in Asia across the market academic and private public perspectives. So always practice is a core interest across specialisms, whether working models which was a panel with gallerists Homo's Hamatian Youngshun and Vanessa Carlos, founder of Condo, where galleries in Twin Cities partnered to show works in each other spaces and this was moderated by Silver Lenses Isa Lorenzo and also bodywork performance and practice which was beautifully moderated by the artist Wu Tang with Victoria Sin, Juliana Huckstable, Milati Suryodama and Sonia Carano. And this is a very meta talk of curators of conversation programmes coming together in a conversations programme, the image that just passed. So with all of these talks simultaneous translation is crucial and actually the discussion that Yi Wan was kind enough to moderate for us along with John Tain on Feminist Aesthetics which had speakers Frida Kahlo and Cathy Colwitz from the Guerrilla Girls, Yurina Gashima, Mila Maseik and Yu Hong. That conversation actually ran in Japanese, Chinese and English and you know to listen to it at that time was really something else. The translators were incredible. Okay, so that talk on Feminist Aesthetics this took place amid me too and is part of a stream that picks up on debates taking place within contemporary art and further afield and tries to expand them in a cross-regional, cross-generational and or cross-disciplinary way while also keeping an eye on those themes to try and keep that conversation going somehow. But of course it's really important to state here that so many factors feed into the programme itself so I'm but walking us through one strand. Then there's the elephant in the room of course which is art for art. You don't want to ignore the context so we have obviously organised conversations thinking about art for art there was that famous, it's a term that was coined and basically what we did was we asked artists to sort of reflect on what does it mean for them and I think in 2017 we had Ryan Gander and Pio Abbad who were showing in encounters that year so we also had Alexey Glass Cantor who's the curators of encounters with UCCA's Phil Tanari and this was followed up in 2019 with a talk titled A Commonplace Artists in Artfairs led by Asia Art Archives with artist Haesian Hoang, Elm Green and Dragset, Eva Navarro and the author of The Artfair Age, Paco Baragam. So the subtext running through the programme in one way or another is decolonisation or forms thereof, decolonising ethnography in 2018 being one example. Considering terms as decolonising ethnography in the context of artistic practices that challenge the tendency towards categorisation, artists Shawe Tye, Gala Poros Kim, Lisa Rehana and Yi Ilan described strategies to co-opt languages, systems and forms as part of the struggle to participate in the production of representation and its meaning and actually trained as an anthropologist Poros Kim's concern was about quote writing history not from a top-down view such as male or global north but from an individual domestic perspective, a democratic way of looking at our shared history unquote that acknowledges the representation and I'm quoting Gala again of history is almost impossible to achieve. So the impossibility of achieving a neat singular history given the multitude of views constituting historical experience not to mention those which are erased to think about history as shared and multiple contentious as a commons if there ever was one of debate, transaction, negotiation, stakes, interests and amid all that relation and growth both entropic and perhaps exponential so some still hope. It is perhaps one way of thinking about Art Basel Hong Kong which is to say a commons, it's a commons and so this is where we move from Asia to London to find a common ancestor of the modern and contemporary art fair of which Art Basel is the second of its kind after launching in 1970 following Cunt's Marked Cone in 1967 the year the term World's Fair was replaced by Expo apparently. So the 1851 Great Exhibition of Works in Industry in London and I really apologise to those who've heard this history before as I've mapped it out was a showcase of British imperial and industrial power and is considered the first World's Fair Marks and Engels called it proof of the concentrated power with which modern large scale industry is everywhere demolishing national barriers and increasingly blurring local peculiarities of production society and national character among all peoples. It was a time of accelerated transition when as organiser Prince Albert described modern invention as rapidly closing distances once separating the globe and at this time the first long distance trains and steamships crossing the Atlantic in two weeks brought around 6 million people to London over six months. Prince Albert also saw the event which showcased spoils, innovations, discoveries, artworks and inventions as a gesture towards the fulfilment and I'm quoting him now that great end where all history points the realisation of the unity of mankind which is a one world view that not only recalls China's one world one dream slogan for the 2008 Olympic Games not to mention the one belt one road initiative which revives ancient trade routes to establish new global paradigms in trade and diplomacy but also Pamela M Lee describing art fairs and biennials as both object and agent of a market system inextricably linked to the processes of globalisation. So the so-called unity of the Great Exhibition positioned the British Empire at the centre of the global of a global economy of its making inscribed with the necro economics of industrialised extractive colonisation thereby forging per Dan Smith western modernities formation of display spectacle surveillance and commodity the crystal palace as you can see in the slide here was divided into sectors the western half devoted to Britain its empire India Africa the Caribbean Canada and the eastern half accommodating displays of other nations such as China France and the United States. As Paul Young has extensively detailed Aboriginal products were stripped of any cultural resonance and offered up his raw material any cultural significance omitted the China exhibit meanwhile which apparently had no little to no participation from the Chinese state was described in one review as exhibiting the qualities exemplified by the early stages of civilisation. So as Young summarises what occurred here was a pronounced exhibitionary drive to strip non-European communities of cultural and historical significance that they might be so that they might be easily and profitably assimilated into a global economy. Yeah so there are being other so this is an image of New York State pavilion so the world's fair phenomenon has continued I think it's happening in Dubai this year actually um so there are being other empires in the ring at the time this is the 19th century moving into the the turn of the 20th um the world's fair became a seriously popular phenomenon in the United States and Europe with events notoriously shipping in indigenous people as exhibits so it in a way it's no surprise then that the Venice biennial organisers we all know by the national pavilion format as much as as and as much by national funding sources emerged out of the world's fair trend in 1895 it was actually a national's fair and then it was eventually developed into an international exhibition. The pavilion timeline in Venice starts with Belgium the oldest building completed in 1907 during the reign of the butcher Leopold II followed by Hungary, Great Britain and Germany in 1909 the latter pavilion rebuilt in 1938 according to a Nazi approved design the year of Kristallnacht. The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 the year the world's fair in New York saw the building of what would become the Queen's Museum where the UN General Assembly actually made decisions like the partitioning of Palestine for a time just after World War II um was but so World War II was not enough though to stop the 1940 Venice biennial from happening albeit without Austria, Britain, Denmark, France, the Soviet Union and Poland where the Warsaw ghetto would be established in October that year. With Mussolini already in power he showed Hitler around the 1934 edition of the biennial the US presence in 1940 is described by critic Lawrence Allaway as quote a reminder of the general acceptability of fascism at the time that the show happened while half of Europe was fighting for survival he continues is as impressive as it is bizarre such are the contradictory measures of indifference action adulation that the Venice biennial no less the art world some might say can elicit from its participants as a cultured stage where not only explicit and indirect politics play out such as the 1974 edition which was staged in solidarity with Chile following Pinochet's violent coup overthrowing Allende in 1973 but where ambiguities and fishes arise because among other things there are imbalances that the national pavilion format can reveal which in turn is a reflection of international politics as well so one example is Greece whose debut in 1932 happened after much debate between a state seemingly unwilling to bear the cost of participation and those who were stressing the national prestige that it would bring and eventually the debut was deferred to 1934 because of the country defaulting on its foreign debt so it's a case of yeah history feeding into the present these histories and asymmetries they feed into the moment so that we are in when we're in spaces like this just as the 1851 great exhibition proclaimed an idealistic message of global unity through racialized capitalism so the art fair and biennial tell a different story beyond the public messaging around a global community and as an example in 2017 artsy's race and ethnicity right down at the 57th Venice biennial counted 57% white at the top and 1% first nations at the bottom when it came to participating artists which recalls a which entails description of the global art world's basic structure as concentric and hierarchical so I'm just going to round up here guys I'm sorry I've run on all of which connects to the historical framework from which the art fair format and biennial to send through which forms and processes of world making whether ideological relational or transactional are reflected and enacted in this analysis you could read the global art world or its industrial complex as a space of biopolitics routine the history of western imperialist modernity and the art fair and biennial its nodes they've nodes that form a fragmented commons for a transient network that replicates and expands itself which is why I tend to speak about biennials and art fairs as a pair so often these are both world making formats that facilitate the gathering of communities gathering of a community of communities drawing people out and in whenever it stages itself across the map merging melding establishing circulating speculating on ideas cultures histories as much as markets all moved by people and objects that circulate world space transforming places sometimes imperceptibly in the process and these are engines of capitalist modernity which makes them sites well as these are engines of a capitalist modernity they are sites of an ongoing struggle and a historic one the arduous work of disentangling into intergenerational trauma wrth across systems and minds around the world by imperialist and colonialist colonialist violence and I believe there are many words to describe that process this is where things have become interesting in recent decades however in the wide frame art fair art fairs and biennials markouts of course a global exhibitionary complex that is intrinsically contradictory if you take into account the historical trajectory that these formats are connected to but what makes it interesting now is how both formats are being used in post colonial or perhaps rather decolonising or neocolonising contexts as they are being used to engage in world making in a world where everywhere seems to be on the make and here the Sharjah biennial and not Dubai are two really great examples tied as they are to stay cultural policy with echoes of the approach that Singapore takes to culture as nation building device but we can talk about this in the Q&A if you'd like a bit more information all right so as a frankenstein form there's many ways that we can look at them we could look at them as apparatus of security structures that act like plugs in which users can connect into it connect into a system a grid in which a particular commodity here art is circulated, supplied, demanded and valued we could see them as free zones what Kela Eastlain describes as a highly contagious and globalized urban form in a vivid vessel in which multiple forces state, non-state, military market and non-market have now attained the considerable power and administrative authority to necessarily undertake the building of infrastructure or we could even apply Eastlain's early conception of the spatial product a hybrid site defined using cruise ships, ports, resorts as examples, familiar commercial formulas of retail business and trade that aspire and I'm quoting Eastlain aspire to be worlds unto themselves, self-reflexive and innocent of politics but in fact can become political pawns and objects of contention imbued with the myths and desires of capital. So how this relates back to thinking about thinking through empire from Asia using Art Basel Hong Kong as an object lesson is in the phenomenology of the structure whose form originates in a western model dripping in the hallmarks of imperialists sorting and spectacle but is now located in an ex-colony being assimilated into what some have described as a neo-imperial world power. Contradictory of course complicit absolutely but a populated and organic space too social cultural and political in its potential is a place where a motley mix of people in no way shape unified as one form a microcosm of mainstream globalization for a minute creating conditions that recall Stuart Hall's description of a dissolving politics of the center that quote reveals the contradictions and social antagonisms gathering beneath in a city where the free market is posited as a liberatory force against communist China China by some corners Paul Werner's assertion that quote the very admiring of art becomes an adherence to a free market ideology is as much a can of worms as unfurling a colonial flag as a sign of protest in Hong Kong to think of something like the art fair as a frame and format London made almost is to consider like it is to consider the fair almost like a circus tent on a rainy day with many groups sharing the tent for cover an image that brings to mind a Nestor lacklals definition of an empty signifier though in this case we're talking about a structure a format whose quotes emptiness unifies diverse groups a unity made possible in the east and I'm quoting lackla here in the establishment of a frontier of exclusion that institutes an antagonism with a repressive power but even this lacklown note signifies hegemony a link back to the world from which an event like our Basel was made so at this point I'm going to stop I'm sorry that I went on a little bits and this was just a very broad sketch but I'm hopefully we can extend on things in the Q&A thank you very much thank you so much Stephanie that was definitely a broad escape mapping of the welfare and thinking about art our Basel as an object is a really interesting way of repositioning it as an active place I would like to invite all the speakers to share their cameras and perhaps show their faces while we start our Q&A we already have some questions in place but before I start that's a huge round of applause for all of our speakers today and thinking about the interconnections between your papers and and I also will ask the speakers if they would like to also can think of their own connections with some of the other papers as well so let me start because we only have about 20 minutes in time so I'm just going to go straight to one of the questions which was submitted which is addressed to Amrita and this is from Sahib and he wants to thank you geological you're back now never mind you just pause for a moment if you wouldn't mind repeating the question oh I'm sorry this is my patchy connection let me say this again in discussing futureality I'm keen to know how you reconcile geological propositions with technological propulsions that include a production of big data visualisation you shared particularly because the latter more often than not seems to be a big factor and geological disruptions and global warming I'm smiling because I think that's a huge question it feels like an impossible question and I'm not sure if you're going to like my answer but I want to give it a go so I think firstly to be direct I don't think I'm trying to reconcile the two and I think that you know what I was also talking about was the very the idea that there's many multiple antagonistic forces at play here and that that opposition is just one of them that relation is just one of them and I also think the closer and more I guess intimate I become with this manifesto and this text and this way of seeing the world I guess the more comfortable I become with these oppositional forces and not trying to reconcile them although the one that you pose is a huge one because it's so detrimental to basically life as it is so I understand that but I think I think for the artist though what seems to be super urgent right now is actually trying to record the stories of those geological forces before it's too late so she talks and refers to the ice as this archive in loss so actually getting to those pieces and boarding those movements and also getting to this pace as quick enough so that we can start to learn to think like those pace why I brought in Glissant as well because he was very much invested in that as a way to actually build and mend and heal for the future. In terms of the visualisation I shared as well I think it's important to clarify what that was so it was a gift it was an artwork and what comprises that that visualisation is actually fragmented and cut up pictures of the sand the grains of sand and the sand storm itself so what like I'm showing there as well is perhaps rather than reconciling we can sort of set a balance between the two forces and perhaps we can actually imbue technology with these forms of knowledges whether that's the sand storm or whether that's the cosmologies that we are thinking and drawing from but also ones that we are creating of our own so I think in a nutshell it's impossible well from my perspective it is but I think perhaps we can maintain a balance and it also made me think about and I brought in David Madala very briefly but when he made his sand machines there was an optimism to them even though one of them was called Lament and I think that was after witnessing a sand storm but someone can correct me there but I think there was also this like fascination and hope that you can actually use technology as an ally for the future and the health and the well-being of the planet so he was thinking about using solar panel as a way to irrigate the deserts for example so perhaps it's about maintaining that kind of relationship between the two that's my best response to that and it kind of feeds into your idea of radical survival which was such a tantalising idea that you kind of put out there and I'm just wondering if you want to speak a little bit to that and also as a response to a question from Helen Starr who wants to ask you to ask a bit more on Himali's concepts of acceleration of violence as well. So I think with that line in the manifesto it was aligned to denouncing futurism and my interpretation of that line and it may be completely not true but I thought that was a reference to the first futurism which was the Italian futurism and therefore when you think about it their ideology was fascist so you know again it's this like maintaining that balance rather than technology dominating over everything which is that that's what they were invested in they were invested in war they were invested in these churches of speed and violence and complete obliteration of of people actually and I think I see this denouncing of futurism in that respect as a warning to us to not get too carried away and to maybe pace our relationship with technology and I do think that the artists that are very you know quickly dropped at the end are thinking about that and again relating to this idea of how can we imbue technology in our relationship to it by drawing from the natural cycles and rhythms of the earth before we even came on to this place so I think we have to kind of go back in order to move forward and just understand the cycles of things but that's how I see what she was trying to allude to there um I want to sort of switch gears a little just to also bring in some of our other speakers but following in some ways in what you were talking about um in in thinking about the different kinds of ways that the public is all the spaces in which these antagonism can can take place I want to turn to Frida's um for our these uh to paper and sorry have I got a CS paper and they were talking about this the destruction of these the statue that's the destruction of the sculpture itself and but how the conversation then moved into the internet in some ways it became it kind of became resurrected and the position in a different kind of public even that was defined destroy from the garden it moved to a different kind of place one which is actually devoid or taken apart from locality and I was wondering if you can talk about a bit about that the internet is a different kind of public and what does that mean for public art yeah thank you um you see the the sculpture was not displaced I think it was destroyed because in the pretext that it was displaced there was no way that they could take it away and place it somewhere else also there were suggestions by some of the people who were really keen to have this culture but maybe just to move it somewhere else as if this place was very sacred and this was a disgrace to that place so so they suggested to to move it somewhere else and replace this this park with some more perfect kind of sculpture of the poet's national poet so first thing is that it was destroyed you know in dismantling this idea that you know for six months a local public which was visiting that park was enjoying it the whole motive of creating that by people who were working in the in the park was to create a selfie point so it was successful in that sense that people enjoyed it and you can find videos of you know people having a boat trip in the lake manmade lake nearby and they are viewing it from the lake and they're enjoying it that they're feeling proud of it and the social media which is like someone posted a selfie in front of that and it was taken notice by a leading news channel person who is very powerful and I don't know why he thought it was important primarily because it was a political there was a political motive behind because that channel is currently dealing with opposition ideas with and they are in opposition to the government sitting government so in order to point score so they thought this is that this is a very valid way of you know accusing them of some kind of nepotism or some kind of false a bad commissioning so he sort of you know did a person attack in his tweet that do you recognize who is this and he was his grandfather who was a senator in the current government so I think that triggered a lot of things that you know although he never replied the grandson never replied on social media but so many people on social media who I don't think ever visited because all of them were trying to figure out what is the story of who is a maker and till today you don't find the names of the makers on internet it is like they are constantly referred as gardeners so social media becomes like a very powerful tool but I would say that to just simplify it to the extent that it's a pressure of social media that the government was pressurized I think it's much more complex because it is usually there are so many times there is lot of pressure like you know currently the prime minister is being condemned all over Pakistan and in the world about his statement against women and the abuse and the rape you know that kind of statement I don't know if you have heard about it and people are constantly you know they have issued statement like human rights commission and women bodies are on the streets and they are protesting but they are adamant and they don't feel the pressure so I think it is something more than just simple social media pressure and said if you want to add something yeah no I think you have mentioned everything exactly what you have said just to sort of continue on that I feel that social media was a new tool at then today and it can be made as powerful or as as weak as we want it to be so yeah that's what I believe in that social media it has a huge sort of it has a trickle down effect and it can reach anybody but again in Pakistan it also has to do with the people who operate on social media because it's a different class altogether people who have Instagram accounts people who have Twitter accounts they are educated people and they belong to a certain class and I think it has to do with that as well. Thank you for the answer I'm just stepping in as chair because I think Yvonne's connection has gone down so I'll just take over chairing duties for the moment and just turn to the Q&A box and the chat box where there are a few points around a similar theme and these questions are for you Stephanie about your use of the term commons or the idea about the commons. Annie Cwan in the chat has asked you to expand further on the nature of the commons that you use and we've also got a comment from an anonymous attendee saying could you say more about your characterisation of Art Basel HK HK as commons and who is allowed in this commons so I think it builds on this point about who has access to these spaces and then from Sabi Akmer who says to you thank you the Art Basel Conversations has indeed been the highlight of every edition of Art Basel HK for several years but isn't an equating of globalisation with the commons riddled with multiple problems one of them being that the vast asymmetry of power resource and movement that globalization brings with it opposed to a very different aspiration that the commons invite so could you tell us more about how you're mobilising this idea of the commons some really thoughtful and provocative responses there. Yeah I mean I think it's it's a really good question and I think it kind of taps into some of the things that I touch on but lightly in the text which is also about words right and I think that you know a word is a commons if you were to think about the basic description of what a commons is you know sort of the medieval world it's a shared common resource that is that is sort of governed by central power because you know Thomas Hobbes I don't know decided that people couldn't trust themselves so they've without self-interest let's say right it's the Garrett Hardin's tragedy of the commons that because man can't act without self-interest then a central power a sovereign power needs to kind of you know create the social contract in which we can all live together but ultimately there is a pyramid shape there right um whereas actually I think that you know when Eleanor Ostrom did her work and of course I read all this stuff when it was you know the um you know the indignados movement in Spain the known unknowns in Greece the the so-called hour of spring was happening squares were being occupied all over the world there was a big discussion about the commons there was a conception that the commons is something that is free for everyone or it is open to everyone when actually it's a very managed space in the sense that even if it's a horizontally shared commons a commonly managed resource pool as Eleanor Ostrom put it in her example of the Elania Fisheries in Turkey it's a horizontal motive it's a horizontal contract let's put it that way rather than a pyramidal one which is sort of the the kind of whenever I think about the art fair as an object I think about pyramids sort of like in Philip K Dick's maze of death which is you know everyone sees the maze of death but it looks different to everyone so they don't think they're talking about the same thing and you know this question about the commons reminds me very much about um I was asked to write an essay about the definition of the planetary and you know I think one of the things I love about being a practitioner in the art world because I should always say that I'm I'm an art writer first and foremost and everything I've learned is through art and that's been a very interesting experience when I go into academic spaces and I'm realising how much like for example in school of law where you realise how much art can actually work in a different context as a visual tool but visual is just one of the many factors in the way it can function so anyway um you know I was asked to define the planetary and what was really interesting to me when starting to read through the literature of it globalization of course I think when we're talking about globalization I can hear it it's that sort of conception of the globalization as this insidious process that sort of runs in parallel with Thatcher and Reagan that sort of tries to encapsulate the world into a sort of techno sphere right sort of like an enclosure politics right which is sort of what destroyed the commons actually in Britain if I remember correctly and again I'm not a historian I learned this from Rachel Rose with her works on that subject so to the point about the art fair as a commons you know I think that the world is a commons I think the earth is a commons it's a natural resource we all depend on it we all share it and so actually to the point earlier when you know we all think about it when we hear we what do we mean I don't mind saying we if I if I think I'm relating I'm referring to everything that lives and dies on this planet then it's a we in a way I guess there's always a debate to be had um so to the point on art basal a commons is not a free open public space that's not how I interpret it um you would go into situations in London during the occupy where they would be claiming that this was free space but actually you would find out that this was private land now and they had the right to kick you off it was a a mercy that they would let you occupy and the thing is in Hong Kong if you think about the shopping mall culture that we have there this sort of very strange blend between public and private is something that I think is quite common and and you know you know David Harvey's talked about it the cities is a commons a commons is a resource that we share and we have to figure out how we're going to share that in common for me that's how it's it's a way that I can think about the art fair but really I'm not talking about the art fair as a commons and as per se I'm talking about art because you know if you think about the global art world and just how massive this network is this grand tour of these very fine events and these biennials and art fairs et cetera I mean it's uh it's uh it's all bound by this word called art which you could claim as a commons right because everyone has a claim to it in a certain way people have states people have interests and yet we have to all negotiate what it means to us in a certain way which I think is what makes a fair like art basal in Hong Kong right now especially interesting because you know we're all dealing with these questions of globalization you know COVID we're so connected but so divided and it's just been these conversations that have been going on you know for the last well let's say since Trump let's put it that way um you know the question is it's the question that's asked time after time how are we going to figure out how to live together um to start with an art fair perhaps is like the sort of model of the commons of microcosm for a world to figure out how to live together maybe that's actually more accurate than an idea that we're all going into a field and we're going to like start a commune and you know everything will go back to the way that it was in some prelapsarian time. Definitely I feel like this is um I can imagine if this conversation was happening um as a conference that was taking place in a physical location this would be the kind of thing that we'd be all you know going debating into the the wee hours of the morning with you and uh I could I can feel you know lots of conversation bubbling it's almost like we need a separate seminar but I'm going to hand back to you one who I can see on screen um and uh you and I was just sort of temporarily occupying the chair seat whilst whilst your internet was down but we had a really productive conversation there um in a lots more ideas raised in response to Stephanie's paper but back over to you you are. Thank you thank you um sorry for dropping off unfortunately internet took the better of me unfortunately we're kind of running out of time I know Rita has a hand up but I'm afraid I'm just going to have to move on and maybe we can carry on this conversation later on as well because I want to pass the last question to Patrick because I think this could be a good way of how to wrap up the the session as it is and this is actually a this is actually a question from one of our audience members and this is the question can you talk about how you chose to move across multiple disciplines in your sites of analysis? It's a big question um at the end of the paper I I talked about curatorial thinking so I think this has enabled me as an art historian to move quite nimbly maybe between registers and between disciplines and it's also part of my training as a humanity student the art history that I learned in in Manila was through humanities not the art history that we know in in the west so it was it had broader sympathies as a discipline and it allowed me to to look at different materials from different perspectives I always thought of it as somewhere between activism and anthropology the the production of art was somewhere between those two spheres so I think it's curatorial consultative thinking that has allowed me to do that. Thank you I think that's a great answer and one I think that really also encapsulate the speakers in our papers this afternoon who also came from very different places and who also kind of captured these different registers of ideas of where art is made but where do we see them where do we act on them as well I think that's been one of the most really interesting fruitful discussions that has come out and we're going to take a break for I think unless I am corrected for about 10 minutes and then we will return at 3 30 when we will have a wrap up the session and would be joined by the conveners and with John Tane as well so see you guys all back in about 10 minutes. I mean this was a legitimate question you're asking me asking me well you know guess what employers can't find workers I said yeah. Okay so I think we will make a start on our final wrap up session I think we've got most people back and we've also got a good number of the audience still with us we know that London Asia art worlds panels are like long distance events and the stamina is quite incredible of everyone involved so thank you for staying with us for the conversation and we're going to share this last part of the panel with John Tane so John welcome who is going to join with Ming, Hamad and myself and we can draw in other members of the panel as well other members of the audience into this conversation to really begin to I don't think we can wrap up five weeks of a program but we can explore some of the broader themes and ideas and provocations that have been presented so John I'm going to hand over to you now and perhaps we can bring you into the conversation and open up some of those ideas. Yeah sure thank you Sarah it's a daunting task because I think over the past five weeks there's been so much have we heard so first off I want to congratulate you Hamad and Ming on convening such a rich and wonderful gathering over this period and also to Shauna and Danny for so ably managing this and organizing it all so I think that you know one place that maybe we can start is by thinking about you know the the ground that's been covered I think both in terms of geography which is appropriate given that you know this has been a conference that centered around questions of London Asia art worlds right and but also I think there's been a lot of ground covered in terms of subject matter and chronology. I mean tonight alone for instance we've had a conversation that's moved through Benny Goodman and Jazz, Robindranath, Tagore Futurity, Art Basel and the Art Fair as Object, Social Media, Language, Athletic Spectacle, The Commons and Public Sculpture and last but not least ICE as Archive. Now that we're really at the conclusion of the program I was wondering if we could look back at the start and talk a bit about the first two terms in the conference's title that is London and Asia and the relationships between them. I think historically the connections between those two terms has been one that's primarily been defined through colonialism and Orientalism hence the strong present representation by South Asia for instance and during this conference. Of course colonialism has also run through several of the panels as a historical topic and especially yesterday's session on Thinking Through Empire and a last week's session on bureaucracy and agency but these have been leavened by other panels on sociality and affect potential histories and solidarity, circulation and counter that suggest other possibilities and other ways of thinking for thinking them together so especially as you noted in the start in the introductions that the topics and rubrics should be understood less as descriptions and as propositions. So you know I'm certain that you had an inkling for how these would shape up but now that you've had the chance to hear all of the different contributions I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about your thinking and about you know the relation the relationality between London and Asia and thinking through the different kind of topics and rubrics and their particular sequencing and maybe like you know a different way of you know asking this question would be to say like you know what are some highlights you know of what you think the conference has accomplished in thinking rethinking or decolonizing the relationship and if you feel if you're feeling maybe more modest or pensive what has you know putting those two terms together occluded or made more difficult so maybe I'll just open it up and as Sarah said there I think this is very much you know meant to be for everyone so it's not just limited to the three conveners so if you have thoughts you'd like to contribute please share them in the chat I think we're aiming for that. Yeah we felt the chat actually we were talking about this but we had a little pre-meat weren't we but the chat somehow is a little bit more open and people everyone can see the chat sometimes we know with the Q&A there's a bit of a time lag and you know it doesn't always come through to all the panelists and so yeah let's use the chat and we can just get the idea of conversation going but maybe if I can just start with thinking about your question John and I think the place that I would want to start is the comma between London and Asia in the title because I think that is an interesting point on which to rest and reflect and I think it is very different to saying London and Asia or even London hyphen Asia or London slash Asia and I think that comma again is it acts as a again a place a kind of maybe a point to think about relationships together and for me as well it also offers the moment when you say London comma Asia a moment to pause in speech or in the process of reading those two terms together and I think again that sort of change of scale it asks us to reflect on what's a city doing next to a region and I think for us again it's meant to be provocative in resisting easy geopolitical positioning or framing and I think you know to use E1's phrasing from the beginning of this session as well about what changes of scale do to the ways in which we think and how they can perhaps ask us to think differently about relationality as well beyond rather kind of formal or set geopolitical framings of a nation or a region or continents and so I think for me and again all the papers and presentations and commissions and projects are part of that provocation to not define what those relationships are but again to present provocations of what they have been and what they might be and what it does to our histories to think through those things together those overlapping territories intertwined histories to use Said's phrase and I think again it's for me trying to think beyond a comparative framework as well of A and B and again by thinking out of that into a much more messy and complex space what those terms do to one another not what does one do to the other so that's where to start with that comma and again just to try and get us in and it's really interesting for me obviously working as we've said many times in this introductions to this conference in an institution that is called the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Arts you know what then you know what that does to ideas about framing arts histories through nation and the pressures and the challenges to the work and to the program that we organise here by thinking these things by thinking arts and its worlds together so I'll hand over to Ming perhaps that she's on the right of me on the screen to maybe continue some of those opening thoughts. Thank you Sarah and thank you for that wonderful question John um I think for me I just really like to build on this idea that you know we're trying to think beyond comparison or we're thinking critically about comparison beyond perhaps and for me two really critical terms that came out of the conference were something very neatly bookending the conference that came from Lila Gandhi the idea of chiasmic abstraction on the one hand and the possibility of epistemological non-violence that that brings up right the idea that two elements can be held together at once in this possibility of abstraction that brings together various concepts and also Patrick Flores's idea of Calibutan the idea of you know being around and the way that he evoked contrapuntalism as well in his description or sort of theorisation of Calibutan and I think that one thing that has emerged from all of our conversations over the past five weeks can you imagine has been this idea of in-betweenness using that in-betweenness critically so that we are positioning discourses somewhere between a critical engagement with empire but also with decolonisation right that you know Patrick today was talking about the D and the importance of um thinking through the D um in a way that is not precious right that is critical and trying to find those stories that enable an understanding of what is produced out of that encounter and what is produced out of the sort of I guess what you described as the what happens when we think beyond bureaucracy and you know the structures of empire to understand these traces the affective production of sociality of art you know what does art do that's something that's really important that has come out of the discussions as well that it provides a space of exploration and expression that goes beyond I think what what structures exist and you know of course the other thing that is really important um I think is to interrogate those structures themselves and I think this is something that um has come out of all of our conversations um that you know in art history we don't really think enough about questions of bureaucracy um of circulation of encounter um of um of art schools as well um that you know these are just different ways of asking questions um that we are hoping will get beyond um the structure the colonial epistemologies so you know really just complicating things um and holding um different elements together I think maybe at this point I will pass it along to Hamat yes it's all sounding very neat and and orderly so yeah we'll we'll mess it up as we go along but I'm sort of going to go back to the comma for an instant because I think that is key and beyond the sort of the the readings that Sarah was sharing with you I also want to go back to the conventional use of the comma when it comes between a city and a larger place and it's about a claim and I think it's about thinking about London as a site within Asia it's histories but certainly it's it's art histories and as we look at your wonderful background John and the sort of the David Medalla work that we see behind you um I think it also sort of reminds us um as it's been so beautifully accomplished beyond any of our imagings I think in this final session is it's tying back to that that question that Ming was just raising about what art does and what art does is it functions at these so many different levels you know at at the level of the of the luxury good in art Basel at the level of the of soft diplomacy or soft power at Venice or of philosophical proposition or of a political urgency as some of our other speakers sort of highlighted and its ability to do all of these things at once and I think one of the things that we've been sort of trying to think through um and hence you know this juxtaposition of multiple commas and the ends as as you know the various using the structure of our different sessions was allowed this possibility to occupy that space in between to to both pause but also claim on on both sides and I think you know in terms of what we were trying to achieve you know I don't I don't think we any of us would go for that heroic one of that we've done we decolonize our history now let's move on next discipline please it was more of a question of you know what are the tools that we're going to develop and if we think about this conference as perhaps a way of inviting people in to shape some things together you know so we have maybe a few a few materials at hand and and it was that sort of invitation that the difference between when you when you invite people in of course there's always that frisson of that people will accept your invitation and then it's this question of well what will they do with it and that is in a way what's what this conference has been about people and accepting that invitation and then taking it elsewhere to places where we perhaps may not know where to go if I can add to that Hermad as well and just from a comment that one of the speakers said to me that how different it felt to speak on a panel with other people that you have never met before and you don't know because as much as we like to think we operate you know interdisciplinary in an interdisciplinary way or you know we work globally we still there's still structures which mean that when we go to conferences we're often on panels with the same people or you know our work is organized in particular modes that you know it gets put into certain framings and I think that trying to kind of create conversations across you know speakers and artworks or practices that might not immediately on paper sit together has been really interesting for me as well just that ability to think or create conversations across time periods as well as places yeah and I think that you know one thing that I was really struck by not just the kind of the the the way that each of the panels has been a kind of a different proposition for thinking the the the relation right the comma like understanding what is that comma doing what is that ffocrum what is that pause what is that space right but also the way that there's a certain kind of rhythm to them so maybe to employ the kind of the jazz or musical kind of language that Patrick was employing that there's a certain kind of cadence right so it starts there I think it's not accidental that you start with sociality and affect as a kind of a as the opener right and it's certainly I imagine no accident that this last session is thinking from Asia right and so the the way that you scored this kind of conference you know it's it seems like there there was a kind of a some thought put into that and I was wondering if you might share with us a little your thinking about how how they were arranged because it's not just like okay we'll do the like the the hard stuff like bureaucracy and you know like an empire first and then we'll like you know move to the soft stuff it was kind of like there's a certain kind of beat to it well that's a lovely analogy John and if I could give maybe an indirect response because and in a way I think it's going back to that idea of jazz and improvisation and I will sort of use an example of an artwork that actually sort of summarizes this or points to it and uses it as a metaphor and also points to that capacity for music and maybe we can also bring Patrick in at some point and talk about this is that one of the great things about music is it has this capacity to smuggle meaning where other types of meaning so whether it be books or certainly sort of broadcast etc may may face a certain type of policing music somehow manages to sort of seep through and appropriately enough at the at the pavilion of the united arab Emirates at the Venice Biennale in 2017 the artist Lanthien Shi as part of his project invited to Filipino musicians based in Hong Kong to come to Venice and play a sort of a series of works that rift from the soundtrack of his childhood which moved from American jazz classics to Egyptian jazz to Bollywood and that childhood was in the cosmopolitan of places of Dubai and I think in that was this juxtaposition of three things you know Bollywood Egyptian jazz American sort of classics and the fact that you know as again an evocative photograph that Patrick shared with us of the musicians in India from the Philippines so that's circularity and that rhythm that sort of flows that kind of music and improvisation allows and maybe I'll sort of pass on to Ming because in a way what we were also doing is we were having jamming sessions as we were thinking about you know what would be the structure of this conference Ming absolutely I mean it was it was an incredibly transformative process actually and one that was that took a lot of time and care I've never been involved in organized a conference where we spent as much time sort of crafting the shape of it and then choosing every single speaker very very carefully and then also engaging with each person before they spoke in advance and you know it was a process that took as its starting point the three foci of London Asia which were exhibitions art schools and institutions and whereas the foci of London Asia were almost place-based right they were sites hubs felt a little bit more contained what we wanted to do was we wanted to take those sites and we wanted to open them up so that they became operations so that they became you know a toolbox for unders for asking new questions about the history of art and so you know exhibitions became circulation and counter art schools became pedagogy and learning institutions became bureaucracy and agency right and then through all of those we were also thinking about of course you know the possibilities of friendship um which you know also grew organically out of this organizational process but also which we felt provided an affective way of accessing these histories um that otherwise are not being told right what happens when all of these people are in London at the same time what kinds of affective bonds are created that potentially spin out to new histories and then potential histories and solidarities are very well we're very much about the politics of those um encounters and friendships and what that produced um we didn't want to forget about art um aesthetics and ways of knowing it became the site where we were asking the question what can art do and then of course thinking through empire and thinking from Asia was very um important for us in terms of really um addressing the question of colonialism head on um and providing a framework that would enable both a questioning of empire but also um a speaking back that we did not want to render Asia into a geography we wanted Asia there to be a question mark we wanted Asia to be a concept a conceptual proposition which um you know I have to say Patrick you took that on so beautifully so um thank you for that um and I hope that gives you some idea of you know what the thinking was behind um the planning yeah that that's really helpful and kind of um wonderfully illuminating um I want to maybe return to this question of improvisation that Hamad brought up and um maybe you know talk a little about not just like you know the the content of the conference uh in our in art history but also the the the form of the conference because it's an online you know it's an online conference which now I guess we're all used to but it's still relatively fresh in you so you know there's some experimentation here and so it's not just like you know panels and speakers but there was also you know um Croatia's the cabaret last night um and um and I and also maybe something else which I'm wondering if you want you want to talk about or walk away there were walks to me like it about the work was about business in the government or how we wonder yeah how do you know where I was hopped up the walk was about I'm really miss them all like I was what Felly mae'n dweud. Mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud. Mae ei ddweud ond maen nhw'n cymryd gyda'r ymddangos. Mynd i'n mynd i'n ymwysig yw y credeb yw'r oed yn y gweithio'r cyfnod yn y sylwedd y system yw'r cyfrannu gyda. A'r panel yw'r gweithio yw'r gweithio'r gweithio. condensed version, i fewn gweld, a there has been a lot of conversation that has happened around those glitches in the chat afterwards. People emailing in saying what happened there, like is this is for real. And I think we can reveal now that this has been an intervention, as you saw by the artist Mitu Sen. Cymru yw'r ysgolion artistu, sydd fyddwyr i'r gweithio'r ysgolion ar yr argynno Llywodraeth a'r awdurdod y Llywodraeth. Felly, rydyn ni'n rydyn ni'n meddyliadau cyfrifio ar y dyfodol o'u gweithio'r ysgolion o'i cefnodd yma. The spaces of digital hospitality that such platforms create and amitter uses social media a lot, especially Instagram, as a space in which to connect and converse with audiences and the public. But we're also talking about what it means to host conversations like this online and the formulas of online debate and conversation and dialogue and the ways in which Zoom webinars are starting to structure the way we speak and communicate. Mike off, Mike on, video on, video off. Maybe it's a bit hard to jam sometimes. Improvisation can be slightly static as you're fumbling with your microphone and trying to come on screen again. So, yeah, Mithu created a series of videos of glitches to really ask us questions about the ways in which we had structured the event and made a glitch that responded to each theme of the conference. I think it's, oh sorry, go ahead. Oh, no, no, no. I was just going to say, I mean, I really, you know, I, like, as you know, I totally didn't know that this was planned. And I was really kind of surprised that shocked I think was the word I used when I found out, but also I think it's, you know, it's really kind of ingenious to take something which you know I think we think of as kind of an obligation, you know, having these online congregations, but at the same time to think about the format of it and find some way to kind of introduce these moments of accident or, you know, kind of unexpected, right? Yeah, well, I'm sorry for the spoiler, John. I think it's also, yeah, I think it's useful to think about the concept of the glitch and what that actually does in the context of not just this, the zoom, zoom a sphere. And the conference, but also in the context of discourse sort of writ large. I remember when we were having one of our meetings with me to, and she talked about how she felt like the scholarship she had gotten to go and study in the UK was actually a glitch in the system that she was a glitch in the system right. And I realized that it really enables a kind of critique that both takes from and engages critically with dominant structures. You know, the way that Patrick was saying earlier, you know, how do you, how do you detach from colonial structures? You can't really, but you can glitch them, right? It's just that, you know, we can glitch the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and that there can be this productive conversation that takes place through various, you know, I mean, I think it was very clever for her to use to use this format to do to do that. Where did the idea come from? It's me too. She's like, I'm going to, I'm going to hijack your, your conference at various times. And I'm sure Sarah wouldn't mind me sharing that there was this little, little instance of where there was, oh my God, what have we done? We invited somebody. What is she going to want to do? What will happen to the, you know, the Paul Mellon Centre Instagram feed, or what will happen to this? So in fact, now we're, you know, Sarah's got a broad smile on her face, and we're all enjoying this, but there was that free song, because it is about, well, when you make an invitation, particularly to an artist, I think that that invitation is also one where you are sort of going out, you know, where, where, or it should be, or it, and if it's not, I think it's completely within the right of the artist or whoever is being invited to take that agency. So I think that idea of host guest invitation versus smuggler, I think they're much more, they're much more overlapping, or perhaps one of the things that they're arguing is that they should be. It's interesting actually as well, like, you know, what, what space are we meeting in? Because again, and it just relates to perhaps something to, you know, the, the conversation that we only really just started about the Commons as well, and this idea, you know, that zoom is, it provides us with this sort of democratic space where we don't need a visa to gather here doing, you know, it's, there's been no charge for the conference, you have to register, and then there's a link, but of course there's a big subscription to zoom. A private company to make this happen. So I just think it's quite interesting, isn't it, in thinking about how different this conference would have been if, you know, as it was originally conceived that we would have done it, hosted it at the poor balance centre in London, and would have sent, you know, probably, I don't know, 75% of the budget on flights. You know, this was all pre pandemic and, you know, as I'm saying this out loud, it sounds crazy now actually in a way, and you know what's what I've really thought about as well as, as we've had the question and answers and the chat is, you know, when you organise an event in person, you spend most of your budget on the speakers, you don't pay for your audience to come and travel to be with you, and that's been really interesting in this, the kind of gatherings that we've had, you know, on this weekly basis that the audience have come in from very different places are, you know, historians, curators, artists, members of the public. And that's actually just made me think again about the future when you're, you know, organising events, it's not only who you invite to be on the stage with you and who you say, you know, here, have this commission, have this for us, for the artist, it was a digital space on the poor balance centre's website, but it's interesting to think about. Yeah, you know, who's who's in the audience as well and how do you enable those conversations that between speakers and community as well so it has, it's really made me think about the future of programming and creating conversations and you know again these very practical concerns about, you know, how do you shape something. How do you pay for it. And so I think that's been, it sounds maybe, again it's very bureaucratic in some ways but it goes back to these questions about the structures of art worlds and what gets exhibited what gets written about who gets to speak about it who gets to interact with it so for me personally as you know someone who runs a research programme. It has really, I think pushed, yeah pushed me to think harder about that. Yeah, I mean it's certainly kind of, I think it's something that all of us, you know, who are kind of working with programmes are thinking about I mean you know the kind of the shifts and changes right and the kind of conversations that you know being online has enabled. But I think going back to, to the zoom bombing we have a comment from diptych era saying, I must write to her and share all of my screen grabs in a session with the zoom bomber that I mentioned yesterday in our informal conversation, or maybe the PMC will invite me to send for a conversation response in a separate event. I think that's a really good idea because Mitty as well, I mean, again with the other artists because they're, the commission's a queer Asia's group, mapping memory project, and Sophia Balangoala's film were released on the same day you know they all had the artist bio in a way we made an exhibition space for them. And Mitty was operating in this, you know, different space so I think yeah we dipty, you know, I think you're right, it merits a conversation to discuss these ideas more with Mitty. Yeah, and speaking about that and maybe as a way of wrapping up, since I think we're reaching time. I was wondering if maybe you could talk a little about, you know, some of the, the kind of the future and we've been talking we've talked about futurity or we've heard about futurity and I was wondering if you could talk a little about futures of London, Asia, our worlds. And you talked a little about the digital collaboration project right at the start, but there's, you have a lot of plans for London Asia it's not it's not this is not really the end this is kind of like a beginning right so. Anyways, it's very exciting to see this gathering momentum. And, you know, one of our plans is to create publication that will come out or publications perhaps that will come out of this gathering, as well as subsequent workshops that we're hoping to have both with the incredible papers that were submitted but which were not the we were able to accommodate into this particular digital format. But also, as you know john through some workshops that we're hoping to have with Asia art archive around questions of art and pedagogy. And then the digital project, which I addressed earlier, you know these are really all ways of thinking collaboratively with others. I will let Sarah and Hamad talk about the exhibition that they have planned that they're working on together. Would one of you like to take that up. Yeah, sure, I'm happy to but I think before talking about the exhibition I think also sort of go back to the last, well the first publication that that we did, which was a digital publication. And at that time we have been sort of thinking about, you know, some of the principles I wouldn't be so grand this call it a manifesto, but it felt like that of sorts. In editorial where we laid out some ground rules for what are we, what are ambitions for not just what London Asia could do, but how it would do it. And one of the things we lay down was that we want to, we want to be able to sort of socialize a field. And although certainly London Asia is not finishing it's just the last panel of this particular conference as memoration. It is, as you rightly say john very much it's it's a staging post it's a milestone. And it's fantastic that we still have more than 30 people after four hours you guys are, you know, gluttonous for punishment. But, but it's terrific to have this core and part of this is well, how, where do we take this together means talked about the sort of the collaborative forms of research. And the location that will be informed and enriched and shaped by some of the things that we've been going through together these last five weeks and we'll continue in the next few months. And the exhibition project that Sarah and I are are co-curating with Amy Tobin at cattle's yard in Cambridge was also something that was cooked together out of a series of other other things a paper. It was the genesis of, you know, where where Sarah and I sort of formed London Asia, which in part was a paper presented arguing that the exhibition that you're that that you have behind you john is sort of the other story is haunting British art history. Before British art historians have a chance to exercise that ghost. New stories are being written elsewhere in from Sharjah to Taipei to Karachi. And one of those examples that we used was about Lee Wonshia, who was being positioned as the father of abstract and conceptual art in Taiwan. You know, a place he left in 62 and never went back, but was kind of missing from the cannons of art history in Britain. So it started as, you know, one paper, another paper, then a conference that accompanied an exhibition I curated at Manchester Art Gallery with Kate Jessen called Speech Acts. And out of that conference really came this energy again that collectivity that sort of Amy also sort of typified because she came to Lee Wonshia as really as an audience member first, as to say, and that's what shaped that particular exhibition. And what we are hoping for that to do is also not be just around, you know, to do that trick that, you know, museums often do or art history does is to iron out any of the creases to, you know, become this sort of monographic study about something. We're really interested in thinking through how we can have an exhibition and a publication that will allow the mess, or what Patrick in his usual and poetic way expressed better as a sort of territorial thinking, or that constellation of emotional thinking of allowing different things and relationships to emerge, which we feel is kind of essential for if you're able to open up the field of art history to actually even keep up with the field of art. So here, you know, Patrick's idea of rework is also very important that it's a way of taking the sedimentations of history and allowing them to resediment so that we are looking at old geological layers anew and sort of understanding what those connections can be when we understand when we see them from the perspective of today, yes, but also activate those histories, you know, to use and to use Azule's term, what potential histories are we able to activate through this kind of work. It's interesting as you know, as you're all speaking, it does make me think about the pressures that this kind of research and collaboration puts on existing modes of publication of exhibition making these practices which are, you know, multi vocal contain, you know, again today we've spoken about posters and jazz and exhibitions and magazines, you know, multi, multi form research, how you bring that together and publish it and make conferences about it and think about exhibitions that reach across time periods and geographies. I think, again, it is just one of these really productive challenges and I think the digital does help us in think through formats and modes, but of course it's not a kind of answer to all prayers. As it comes with its own restrictions so I'm kind of, you know, daunted and excited by the challenges of research in this in this in this kind of way. You know that brings to mind a term that we've been throwing around almost as a kind of a joke amongst ourselves practices of abundance. The idea that you know these this work has so many different facets to it. It's interdisciplinary, it's, it works between media. And, you know, the point of this really is it gets back to what you know Patrick and you on and to barren here we're talking about just that we're finding ways of trying to exceed these colonial technologies and that in doing so there is going to be a lot of mess and there are going to be these geological layers and sort of ice as archive that that their testament to the intertwined layers and the ways in which we're unable to separate them. I mean, I'm just that that idea of excess. I mean, a couple of years ago, I think in a conversation for art journal with Karen Zittsef, it's to try to sort of spell out this idea of art histories of excess. You know, and behind that was this notion that you know art histories which can exceed every type of container of the object of the institution of the nation and of the mode of inquiry. So, you know, for for something that could allow a study that can follow art in it as it goes, as it goes in its, you know, various ways as luxury good as, you know, proper philosophy as politics, etc. And the only way we can do that is through a collaborative effort. So part and on collaboration as we know is really hard work and it takes time and it takes. This is where the tree comes out. This kind of work is not possible without collaboration. Right. Absolutely. You two started putting words in my mouth. What I was trying to get to was that we have to, with collaboration, you have to sort of spend the time, because you have to sort of push, because it's an idea that it's not just up to you. It's also about you put something out there and be prepared for it to be, you know, chipped away or taken elsewhere or shaped in a different way, and then follow it and perhaps, you know, be flexible enough to allow that idea to run. And I think that's where me to really pushed us in productive ways. I really felt the vulnerability of that in a good way right that we were putting our invitation out there, and you know, her first response was, she was going to hijack something, and we didn't know what. And, you know, it was really very much about trust, right, right, and, and enabling the co-constitution of a public sphere through that kind of trust, empathy and, you know, emplacement, I guess, in her hand. Here, we just also need to acknowledge the work of Shauna Blanchfield, who is the manager, who many of people who have interacted with, because to make those glitches happen, and to get the timing right, so, you know, presenters were not completely thrown off, giving their paper, Shauna executed, you know, those glitches perfectly, so that was a collaboration with Mitu, that again, all these things that happened behind the scenes, but Shauna was definitely a key collaborator in making that happen, so thanks so much, Shauna, and also Danny, as well. And Danny, for her wonderful comments, like, don't worry, this won't affect your computer. So they are part of Mitu's team now, I'm sure she'll be employing them in, you know, for any other future glitch productions. They've been appropriated and, yeah. Yeah, we've had a lot of fun with it. So at this point, let's see, we had a question but I think it's been answered. Someone was asking, Sima Merah was asking if I'll have access to the webinar, I think Shauna is very capably answered that. But I think that, you know, in some ways, it's kind of a nice sentiment, so maybe I'll just read part of it, which is, I am an artist who works in and between South Asia and North America, which in itself struggles with being pleased as Hamad mentioned. I want to share the conversation with artists here, who are also working to squeeze themselves out and through the constructed doors of a monolithic Western globalization of the next moment. London is on my route from Mumbai to Vancouver, Vancouver that encompasses the world within it, and is experiencing the struggle of the native peoples and others who were shipped from post-colonial spaces in an effort to be able to be visible as Ming says, resediment. So. I'm sorry, I wasn't able to see that question, Sima Merah interesting. I'm also from Vancouver. It's true that there are so many further conversations to be had. I think also about understanding what all of these politics of entanglement mean when one moves outside of London to other parts of the former British Empire, right? That, you know, what does London Asia look like in Vancouver? I think that's an important question, actually. And it's a question that has interesting resonances in terms of understanding how, you know, Black British Art was understood in Vancouver, how artists in a Canadian sphere who are thinking about multiculturalism might address themselves to London, they might address themselves to the United States. And sometimes, and also to our own site, you know, on native lands, right? What does it mean to be a settler of colour in those contexts and how do those politics change when you move from one place to another? So many things to talk about in the future. I think for sure there's definitely, I think, you know, and I think, you know, for me it's been extremely interesting to think about this last session, thinking from Asia, and, you know, I think, you know, Patrick's talk was certainly very rich and dense in terms of possibilities, but I think that there's just, you know, so much to consider and take into account, you know, and thinking about the two sides or the kind of the two terms and the comma that, you know, joins them but also separates them, the pause that is also the connector, and, you know, how to kind of maybe think about that, you know, further, you know, from Asia. Yeah, and actually Patrick's point about the world being the only plural in the title, and then it made me think about, obviously, London's and ages and arts and worlds as well, so I thought that was, again, to think a little bit more about pluralities and, yeah, how that operates or they operate within the terms that we've mobilised it in the title, that just really, yeah, launched in my mind as I was thinking through, yeah, our title for this event. Yeah, I think that's a really good point, and I think that it enables us to think more critically about our terms than we did when we were beginning, and I think that's a good place to be. Yeah. Okay, so maybe that's a good, also good, good note, as I kind of wrap up today, and I don't know, should I hand things over to you, Sarah, to do the honours or. Thank you so much, John, for joining us in that conversation and, again, the collaboration with Asia Art Archive across many years, actually when Hamad was working there and through to, you know, currently with the conversations that we've had with you and your team again just incredibly productive for us as we continue to think through and around these ideas together so thank you so much for helping us shape this wrap up conversation as well no easy task when we feel like we're unfolding rather than wrapping up. But yes, thank you to our stalwart audience for being with us to the end and to all the speakers, not only of this wonderful final panel, but again across the eight panels that we've had and our audience that has just been amazing and the artists and all the support team that have made everything happen. And we hope that you'll share the recordings widely, you'll watch them again, and we will be just digesting all the energy and the provocations of the ideas that have been presented across the five weeks of the conference. So, I think I'll just say, thank you. Thank you to Hamad and Ming again, and yeah I look forward to when we next get to meet under London, London's Asia's art world arts and worlds umbrella, that will be something to look forward to indeed. Yeah, looking forward to the next generations. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thank you everyone. Bye bye.