 Well, thank you everyone for joining us. I think we will make a start with proceedings this afternoon. My name is Sarah Turner and I'm the Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Arts. Whether you regularly attend PMC events or this is your first time joining one of our online gatherings, let me extend a very warm welcome to everyone logging on to the first panel of the London Asia Art Worlds programme. Thank you so much for joining us. The Paul Mellon Centre is a research institute and educational charity based in Bedford Square in central London and it's part of Yale University. You can find out more about our programme on our website along with details of our research collections, publications, grants and fellowship schemes, learning activities and all of our future events. Before I introduce the conference and today's panel, let me just walk you through some of our housekeeping guidelines and tell you a little bit more about how the session will run today. First, we'll have a keynote paper that will last 45 minutes and followed by a Q&A session and after a break, there'll be two further 20 minute papers and also another Q&A. As audience members, we really love to hear from you and we really encourage you to engage with the ideas, the papers, the presentations by using the question and answer function that you'll find at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Audience members can also ask questions live by raising their hand and we will then unmute you and ask you to speak and give your question. You can also use the chat box for general comments or to alert us to any technical difficulties and the session will be recorded and it'll be available afterwards as well. Closed captioning is also available for this session and you can find the captions by clicking on the CC button on your screen to enable those captions. This online event is being run by the Paul Mellon Centre's Events Manager, Shauna Blanchfield and Events Assistant, Danny Convy. They're on hand throughout the session to answer any questions that you have this afternoon. And let me say at the outset that we would like to give them a very big thank you from the co-conveners myself and the co-conveners Hamad Nasa and Ming Tianpo. Shauna and Danny and many other colleagues at the PMC have put so much work into making this conference happen, so thank you so much. But now let me focus on the topic of this gathering. London Asia Art Worlds is a five week multi-part programme, which will take place in May and June of this year. And it reflects on the ways in which the growing field of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with and challenges histories of British art. This event marks five years of the Paul Mellon Centre's London Asia project, established in collaboration with Asia Art Archive, and which is co-led by Hamad Nasa and myself. The project is concerned with excavating the historical, as well as reflecting on the contemporary entanglements that link London and more widely Britain and Asia. It does this by focusing on three research strands, exhibitions, institutions and art schools. The London Asia project questions the boundaries of national and regional histories and explores new models of researching and writing about the transnational infrastructures and networks that have shaped the histories of art. Our intent is not to map the world, but rather to privilege approaches that critically question, test and tease, to socialise, research and convene gatherings, where the possibilities for methodological innovation can be explored. And we also want to exceed rather than to create or redefine boundaries or categories. This programme has been co-organised as a collaboration between myself, Hamad Nasa, who is Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre, as well as the co-curator of British Art Show 9, and recently appointed as lead curator of the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum with responsibility for delivering the Turner Prize, Professor Ming Tiampo, who is Professor in the Department of Art History and Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Coulton University in Ottawa, Canada. Ming is also the second holder of the London Asia Research Award, and this conference has been shaped by conversations and collaborations between the three of us and a wide community of institutions and individuals. And I am so immensely grateful to Hamad and Ming for their inspirational and tireless energy and commitment to creating patches of earth, both physical and virtual, where ideas, research and relationships can be really nurtured and grown. And on that note, I will hand over to Hamad. Thank you so much, Sarah. Perhaps you can also already tell from the title, London Asia Art Worlds, it is suggestive of our overall approach. The juxtaposition of London and Asia invites a kind of dissonance by bringing a city into proximity with the continent. It is also a claim on London, a city that resists easy national framings and Asia, a region so vast and diverse that it complicates any homogenizing categorization. And we embrace this ambiguity and uneasiness of scale and resistance to a sharp definition. In fact, our project is not proposing a comparative framework. Instead, we're encouraging new perspectives on the entanglements, historic and contemporary, real and imaginative of art worlds. London Asia Art Worlds was conceived as an in real life conference, but is now unfolding as a digital murmuration, a virtual meeting ground in which conversations, images and ideas will twist, turn, swoop and swirl across a series of interconnected papers, panel discussions, performances and interventions. The program will unfold across five weeks, focusing on eight different propositions. Today is around sociality and affect. Next week, we invite you to join us to consider potential histories and solidarities and circulation and encounter. We move then to pedagogy and learning, and then to bureaucracy and agency, followed by aesthetics and raisin of knowing. In our final week, we think about Asia through empire, and finally think from Asia. The series of commissioned art projects and interventions, a collaborative crowdsource data project that offers different visual and virtual spaces in which to test the interconnections between London Asia Art and Worlds is all part of the overall program. Next, the series of programs will inform workshops, publications, and an exhibition that will follow as part of the London Asia project over the next two years. With that, I'm going to hand over to Ming. Thank you, Hamad and Sarah, and welcome to all of you. Thank you for joining us today and for the next five weeks, hopefully. London Asia Art Worlds proposes new ways of imagining art history beyond national boundaries, monographic studies, and sequestered scholars. Bringing together researchers and artists from around this world. The series of gatherings offers a shared platform where the empirical traces of London Asia Art Worlds are laid down. The collaborative methodologies are developed, theoretical concepts are articulated, and the seeds of community planted. In this way, London Asia Art Worlds engenders art histories that are both entangled and multi-perspectival, proposing new models for writing global art history through collaborative practice. London Asia Art History and Asian Art Histories are de-restructed. Their complexities revealed through layered connections via infrastructure such as exhibitions, art schools, and institutions, as well as the worlds that they carry, friendships and other socialities, as in today's panel. Aesthetics, politics, and philosophy, as we will be exploring in consecutive weeks. Offering relational stories that negotiate difficult colonial and entangled pasts, shared presence, and possible collaborative futures, London Asia Art Worlds is more than just art history. At this moment in history, during this pause in global migration and with the rise in populist nationalism worldwide, London Asia Art Worlds is an urgent reminder that the contours of nationhood are complex, and the importance of making worlds, rather than closing them. It is my enormous honour and pleasure to properly introduce Sarah Victoria Turner, Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, and the chair of today's session. It is under Sarah's visionary leadership that the PMC's research programme operates, presenting a wide variety of events, projects, collaborations, and publications. Operating with an ethics of care and collaboration, Sarah has transformed the PMC into a vibrant site of research exchange and decolonial practices, holding space with scholars from around the globe, testing out new ideas, thinking together, and building new possible worlds. She is the founding editor of the award-winning British Art Studies and accomplished curator, having among other things co-curated the great spectacle, 250 years of the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy, and a leading voice on the history of entanglements between Britain and South Asia in particular, and the history of internationalism more broadly. Of her many publications, I am particularly fond of Imagine Cosmopolis, Internationalism and Cultural Exchange 1870s to 1920s, which I assigned to my students in teaching. Not surprisingly, she was named one of Apollo magazine's 40 under 40 in the European art world, and in 2018 was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In this session on sociality and affect, which is on some level about thinking through the methodological possibilities of friendship, I am particularly pleased to introduce Sarah finally as a co-conspirator and friend. Sarah? Well, thanks so much, Ming, and it's a real pleasure to chair this first session in our conference and collaboration. And instructing this event, we felt it was important to start with the idea or ideas of sociality and affect. Through the London Asia project more broadly, we've been concerned with exploring modes of imagining and enacting transnational relationships. And the research of our speakers in this panel, Leela Gandhi, Simone Vila, and Greg Salter, all contribute to new ways of thinking about the possibilities of understanding relationships, friendships, kinships, affinities and personal encounters, not simply as a biographical fact, but as sites of methodological and critical engagement for rethinking art and culture that push beyond the monographic. Our first keynote will offer some theoretical perspectives and our two papers will follow up with case studies which focus on particular artists and we're really excited about the conversations that will grow from this organisation. Our keynote and the first paper of the panel will be given by Leela Gandhi, who is John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University. She is taught at the University of Chicago, Delhi University and La Trobe University and has held visiting professorships in Australia, Denmark, India, Italy and Iran. She is founding co-editor of the journal Post Colonial Studies. She's a board member of the publication Post Colonial Text and a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. Her publications include Post Colonial Theory published in 2019, The Common Cause of 2015, Effective Communities of 2006 and Measures of Home, Selected Poems published in 2000. For us, Leela's work as a scholar has rejected neat binarisms and tidy linearity in favour of a kind of historical and critical writing that we've together the past and the present, always concerned with cultural forms of hybridity and alterity. So it gives me enormous pleasure to welcome Leela Gandhi to give the first paper of the London Asia Art Worlds programme. It's entitled Invisible Ink, so Leela will hand over to you to begin sharing your screen and welcome you to this virtual community of London Asia Art Worlds. Thank you so, so much, Sarah. I am very grateful for your extremely kind invitation and many thanks to you and Ming and Hamad and Shauna and Danny for making this conversation possible. It's a real privilege. I'm going to start sharing my screen now and see if this works. Abstraction is associated with the violence of capital and described as a force that cuts us off from life itself. It is also a species of epistemological non violence that thrives in the right felicity conditions. This is my main claim, epistemic violence. A reparative strain in human sciences makes much of the inverse variation of bad epistemology and human and non human flourishing. It is prompted by the extremist proposition that there's something intrinsically violent in any formalisation of knowledge as a canon grammar writing and so on. And it gains from the amendment that epistemic violence is not only a violence done by knowledge, but also a violence done to knowledge. And often, though not exclusively, by means of a logistics of visuality, such like assumes sight as the cardinal figure of the sensorium and of the politics of cognisance, e.g. where display is the main cognate of an epistine and or the sign of meaning. So in context, any erasure of knowledges, whether by silencing, internment or in a mission, is a matter concerning their discernibility. An epistemological life world can be cut off thus through strategies of coercive invisibility and on the premise following Bishop George Barclay of essay est per kipi, to be means to be perceived. There are several examples. Foreground or excessive knowledge object may block from view, oculate a background or recessive knowledge object. A new knowledge system may be stripped off its morphology when approximated to settled epistemologies. A person may fail to make epistemic sense of their own experiences, i.e. of harassment or discrimination, because the whole engine of collective social meaning we learn from Miranda Fricker is effectively geared to keeping these experiences out of sight. Strategies of coercive visibility produce similar effects. Occluded knowledge systems are doubly obscured by demographic over identification, e.g. Chinese philosophy, ethno musicology and so on, or show up solely as the influence of a prejudicial infrastructure. So, consider a visual gloss. Eme Mpanes, artistic meditations on the scramble for Africa, portray colonial encounter as an interface of hidden radiance and hyper visible shadows. So, the installation Congo Shadow of the Shadow expresses the annexation of Congo as an immense shadow thrown by a transparent figure which obscures the fallen. Another work, Olympia II, reverses the traditional figures of Mane's original painting to give centre stage to the black subject, yet through a visual trick whereby her racialisation is but the view observed through the slatted plywood medium of a wide shadow cast by the entire picture. It is a pictorial social historical on sombler on the rear wall. The repositioned made casts the only area of illumination on this same wall in another invisible inversion. Now the constructive aspect of any critique is imminent in its language of objection by a law of dialectics. Mae'r cael ei ddweud trafodd yn brosigol iddyn nhw yn bywyd llywyr pall, trailodd yn fysgu llywyr yn brosigol adael gan gan ddyn nhw, ond diolch yn cystafell hwnnw yn dda, ac mae'r cydrwch er meddwl yn ysgrifudd gwneud yn cyfreithio epistemolol. Mae'r digresion yma wedi'i unrhyw ddweud hynny'n llywyr llywyr ffrindol a'r llywyr llywyr yn ddyn nhw i'r ffrindol, Y gŵith yn ymwympwyr, rwyf yn ystod, mae'r mynd i'w ddweud bod bod yn digwydd. Mae'n hyn sy'n ymgyngor i ddysgu'r ysgolwydau o'r unig sy'n ymgyrch o'r stygmar o ddysgu'r ysgolwydau. A rwy'n gallwch i ddweud, mae'n ddysgu'r eich mynd yn ddysgu'r ysgolwydau. But of what sort? Abstraction. Abstraction no longer implies withdrawal and retreat from the world of things. Through the agency of a well-known Marxist and phenomenological philosophical tradition, it is long situated at the confluence of idealism and materialism as something concurrently sensory and extra sensory. This points to the chiasmatic quality of abstraction. By that, I mean a crisscross arrangement in which any customarily adversarial elements, mind, matter, spirit, flesh, visible, invisible included, are placed in an intersectional relationship and through which they partake in a shared state of reversibility. Now there are no intrinsic historical or geographical limits on such formations. Any abstraction at any time may be simultaneously solid but immaterial, present but absent and deliver unverifiable images in a sensorium of non-existence or receding objects that never truly vanish. Yet a hypothesis of modernity, let's call it, insists that abstractions only ever display the symptoms I'm calling chiasmatic at a high point of historical complexity. This makes chiasmatic abstraction into a litmus of modernity. So, for example, in the elementary sense, indicated by Franz Boas in the mind of primitive man, increased freedom from sustenance improves the allotment of material life and yields playful technologies, superfluous objects, abstract things, and so on. Marx gives this heft. The metamorphosis of total social capital delivers a modern magic of materialisation. That makes everything real, especially the spectres and phantoms of primitive life. Abstractions no less achieve an objective form. Such clauses incidentally make the state of abstraction acutely desirable, especially amongst groups and disciplines that traditionally complain about epistemic violence. Now here's a slightly complicated point. Those who insist on the symptomatic modernity of abstractions also claim that such tend toward appearance and are knowable only as a type of incorporated visibility. The argument, Marxist, phenomenological, a vitalist emergentist goes something like this. Though chiasmatic abstractions have a privileged place in progressive historical time, they do not follow a simple path of successive epochal development, namely transition from some determinant before to some determinant after. The reason is that they are final composite substance cannot be predicted from the traits and stages of independent parts. Thus we can't foretell the terminal quality of the compound visible invisible through divided histories of flesh or spirit, or of the compound mind matter through divided histories of reason or geology. Two further qualifications follow. First, because any chiasmatic system is always more than the sum of its parts, we will only get to know its final quality, its novelty, supervenience, coalescence and so on, when it's before us. That is when it appears or when it emerges. Raymond Williams' sense of emergence holds here, meaning mutation and something that's not species specific. Second, and here's a still more vague yet crucial explanation. Appearance or appearing as such is a qualitative attribute of progressive abstractions. This means that composite forms that endure only as a bundle or assortment of potentialities do not make the cut. A true abstraction is manifest and intelligible. It has a breakthrough quality. Such interpretations are not held by thinkers who keep from a hypothesis of modernity, who are not interested in a hypothesis of modernity. They are philosophers, agential realists, neo-spinosists and most affect theorists, all of whom deal with relational and composite systems across time and space. Abstraction and abstract theories included draw attention to vanishing points in trans individual relationality. Their emphasis is on intra-constitution and the systemic absorption or entanglement of discrete relata to take a few examples. Abstractions under this remit, one might argue, tend toward disappearance and are knowable as a type of incorporated invisibility. So, incorporated visibility and incorporated invisibility are the both and, we could say, of charismatic abstraction and comprise its sort of deferred agonism. And in what flows, I'll be doing three things with this proposition in no particular order. First, I'll canvas select genealogies of incorporated visibility and incorporated invisibility in which abstraction serves epistemic non-violence. Though my examples include abstract art and abstract objects, the focus is on abstraction as a form of knowledge. Second, these genealogies are set against the general background of the Cold War. There's a distinct weaponisation of knowledge in this context and that includes the knowledge of nuclear scientists, but also the transformation of intelligence. It's gathering an extraction in espionage and torture, e.g. into a means of war. Third, I indicate conditions in which disappearance, substance, serves a subalten form of modern abstraction. Nature loves to hide. There's an upsurge of interest these days in Carl Jasper's concept of an axial age. This describes a period between about 800 and 200 BCE in which there was a presumed eruption, give or take a few ancient trade routes of a universal tendency toward abstract thinking across many parts of the ancient world, including Palestine, China, India, Persia and Greece. Needless to say, this chronology disqualifies Islamic thought, nor do Africa and the Americas make the list. Yet many believe that Jasper's formulation attests to a progressive, perhaps even post-colonial European perspective on co-eval and multiple modernities. It's less often noted that Jasper's also enlists axial type philosophy as an agent of world peace, adequate even to the threat of extinction. This is the chief claim of his 1956 book, The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind. He was strongly endorsed by Hannah Arendt in her laudation for the occasion when Jasper's was awarded the German book trades peace prize, but a few years thence. By what qualities does axiality and its exposition become equal to the bomb and to violence? Any ecumenical epistemology willing to name Confucius, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus and Zaratustra in the same breath counters the parochialism of Cold War thought. We hear this over and again in a variety of neo-axiality propositions. More so by Jasper's account, axiality is a ballast against the technological or know-how culture of the nuclear age. It boosts discredited habits of inwardness, but has a new type of mundane abstract thinking that seeks its human condition on Earth. The set makes abstraction itself into a material, you know, as bronze or stone or iron, something we can touch and feel and mostly something we can see. Axial type materialistic abstractions are always fully on view. Some of this has to do with social history. Axial age philosophers have names and biographies, their teaching is codified and communicable and becomes hegemonic in discrete localities. They have the backing of institutions and patrons, even or perhaps especially when they speak truth to power. Though many such thinkers start out as renunciates, they quit the wilderness once they discover the secret of who they are on the understanding that secrets of this kind must appear in public in order to be fully knowable. So such commitment to spaces of appearance to borrow Arendt's term for the public realm is matched by another far more substantive commitment to a philosophy of appearance. This means that we get this from many commentators, notably Arendt. That appearance and its corollaries, such as light, disclosure, seeing, showing, clearing are the main topic of Axial philosophy. We have many ways of making sense of this conceit. We can follow Robert Bella, one of the most recent writers on the Axial age, who holds that a love of light in Zarathustra's teachings, for example, is much the same thing as theory in the old Greek sense of the word, meaning something like the business of being a spectator. And on the premise that truth is better seen than heard, I want to follow a further gloss from Heidegger that comes out of his work on Plato's allegory of the cave, and which became very influential in subsequent uptakes of Plato as the load star of Axial age philosophy. Now, Heidegger says that the Greek word ala thea usually translated as truth, but which he translates as unhiddenness, gives a more robust understanding of sight oriented thought, sight oriented knowledge. It clarifies how such thought is not oriented toward the visible as against the hidden. It must be torn and robbed and dragged from the hidden Heideggerites. And I quote, man advisedly must use a kind of violence to be able to ask about himself. On quote context, Heidegger identifies the hidden with something pre philosophical and indeed animal. Nature loves to hide. He says more than once these judgments actually became ubiquitous in Heidegger's critical milieu on the sway of his general influence. Roger Quilloire at the College of Sociology in France Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno of the Frankfurt School and Jacques Lacan as well. All developed hypotheses often in dialogue with each other that demoted technologies of concealment. By an interdisciplinary consensus, we could say such thinkers declared the hidden and its correlatives camouflage mimicry and masking included to be a kind of negative cognition sharply at odds with the modern compact between appearance and being ritual to philosophy. The evolutionary framework of the axial paradigm as a theory of secular modernity registers keenly in non Western settings. It is plain that the historical promise of any breakthrough philosophy of appearance only comes about at the end of a civilizing passage from pre to post axial consciousness. The way many earlier forms of knowledge, states of mind, paganism, superstition myth, idolatry, and so on are effectively overcome. Such inclusion here he is the point I really want to emphasize epistemology is of the hidden and of hiddenness and their potential for abstraction. The feature of axial historiography that rulings on expendable knowledges old knowledges primitive knowledges are precisely not shown to be the effect of some external imperial hegemony. Macaulay, for instance. These are attributed to local historical agents that can sustain axial personification. So let me follow one example. In his volumes on great philosophers gaspers in books, the ancient Indian sage. Ydynavalkia of mythela, ydynavalkia of mythela as an embodiment of axial thought. This view is Legion. Ydynavalkia is universally extolled in axial scholarship for his role in vanquishing the ritualism of Indic worlds. He is shown to take inspiration directly from the sun as a paragon of the philosophy of site. There are two low-key classiki with associated scholarly histories of commentary and reception for this vested depiction. Let me summarize this directly. The first has to do with Ydynavalkia's association with the Dharma Shastra corpus that deals with religious civil and criminal law and the duties of rulers. This body of work became a foundation for colonial law in India with due deference to Ydynavalkia for his early role in the codification of evidence, witnessing and testimony for purposes of incrimination. Now, such are key elements we know from Foucault and others in the modernization project of making punishment more reliably public, namely a set of signs to be generalized throughout the social body and which supersede elementary rituals of pain that can only be inflicted on a case-by-case basis upon the corporeal body of this or that perpetrator. Second, this contribution aside, the full import of Ydynavalkia's supposed route of ritualism is developed with respect to his association with the Upanishads. Repository of Sanskrit dialogues, debates and formal teachings that have acquired the status of scripture in formal Hinduism. From the outset of their transmission into Europe to this day, these works are set out by Indologists and others as the output of famous renunciate seers who put an end to the culture of sacrifice. They are taken as a capstone in the historical sublimation of ritual behaviors when the actual killing of sacrificial victims was supposedly swapped for aesthetic practices of sacrificing the self. This great emphasis in this interpretation on the brute materiality of ritual sacrifice, blood, altars, fire, the venality of officiating priests and the calculus of giving only in order to receive so on, so forth. The Upanishadic coup in context is set to forge a passage from outer to inner life, from ritual to realization. Now, in a linked interpretation informed by anthropologies of magic and religion, the transformation of sacrifice into renunciation is also reported counterintuitively as a passage from secrecy to visibility or more precisely from something like outwardness secrecy to something like inwardness visibility. Scholars of this persuasion, Durham Mose included, take subterfuge to be the salient style of sacrificial cultures by way of initiated specialists, clandestine habits, garbled speech, and so on. Many point to the importance of magical identifications in associated rituals where a complex nexus of correspondence between say a God and object and anything said is a means to hide manifest identities and meanings. This makes sacrifice a performance of secrecy. In which, I submit, bringing a secret about may well be a desirable epistemological goal, certainly one endorsed by an oft repeated Vedic incantation. Paruksha priya eva hideva, paruksha priya eva hideva, which means the God's love, the hidden. Now, many philosophers of the unhidden, such as Roger Kellwaugh, for instance, read the entire, this entire project unfavorably as a fiat of the personalization, a failure of distinction, and in which life itself takes a step backward. People can only enter history and civilization. So, Kellwaugh notes are masked. Secretive knowledges that are also knowledges of secrecy are closely associated with violence in axial scholarship, say rituals of pain in primitive punishment or rituals of killing in sacrificial culture. Arent once added the science of the bomb to this list, since it too was hidden from public view by invisible government, she writes by speech that does not disclose what it is, but sweeps it under the carpet. Even so, Heidegger's prompt to counter the bad violence of invisible knowledges with the good violence of visible knowledges is not quite non-violent. It's better described as epistemic pacification, the God's love, the hidden. Early in the 1930s, an endologist called A B Druva coined the concept of intellectual ahimsa or intellectual non-violence. Druva was a close associate of the pacifist MK Gandhi and a prominent anti-colonial educator who served as university professor of Sanskrit and pro-vice chancellor of the Benares Hindu University. He was committed in every part of his career to a philosophical groundwork to promote the sanctity of all knowledges as a corollary to the sanctity of all life. And his project turns on the revival of a form of abstract thinking known as Kevala Giana. This means rare or rarefied knowledge and it's closely associated with Jain epistemology and other linked heterodox outlooks such as Buddhism and yoga philosophy. All of these systems are known for giving prominence to the doctrine of non-violence. Now, Druva's project was not exactly a runaway success. Few endologists including the eminent Oxford philosopher Bimal Matilal further developed the concept of intellectual ahimsa by way of this Kevala Giana epistemology. In the later part of the 20th century and with reference to diverse precepts such as manyness, maydiness, emptiness, everythingness. And I'll draw on the work of such commentators and their network of ancient and medieval sources to present a composite picture. So, let's break this down. Kevala Giana describes a heuristic of omniscience that's only available to an advanced knower or Kevalin. Now the Kevalin sees everything at once. More so, and this is salient, she sees that everything is true. This is a step up from the perception that everything is real. Minimally, this is a position of epistemological pluralism, pluralism in knowledge that grasps the coagency of all perspectives. It includes the view that propositions must incorporate rival possibilities and contradictory predicates in order to be valid. So, all propositions, all perspectives ultimately lose their rigid starting point along with any claim to co-meaning in context of the fluid semantics favoured by this outlook. We could say antagonisms disaperate under the neutral gaze of the Kevalin who is gifted with a seeing that hides, seeing that hides. This emphasizes ubiquitous across, you know, pertinent contemplative manuals. A Kevalin recognises affected cognition when, and I'm gathering a refrain here, in me everything is dissolved or in me all achieves dissolution or the universe disappears in me. In process, and as but one among other advantages, the knower function disappears too. This is demonstrated in iconic images of the Kevalin as a presence in absence that are often used as a meditation aid or prop. The visual effect is achieved through metal cutouts of the human form that leave an empty silhouette in place as we can see in this meditation sculpture from the early 20th century. For the philosophers of intellectual ahimsa, with whom I began this particular section, Kevaligiana is chiefly a prompt to intellectual tolerance and dialogue amongst people with diverse viewpoints. Gandhi was a keen subscriber and credited this perspective with promoting respectful opponents and a capacity to see ourselves through the eyes of critics. He was equally drawn to the epistemological modesty by which a Kevalin delivers a form of knowledge that orchestrates its own disappearance. He frequently references zero or voidness thus as captions for a nonviolent frame of mind. All such interpretations are precursors to the epistemic violence debates of our time, our own time, and they have much to say especially to the manners that subtend epistemic violence. Yet they don't take up the kind of untold quiddities of invisibility in Kevala epistemology. Nor is much made of the intimations and the materials I've been canvassing that hiding the world and its acknowledges somehow renders these sacred in the sense sacred in the sense of inviolable to injury and injuriousness. That this is sometimes the case. We can learn from actual technologies of concealment, such as refuge, sanctuary, asylum and camouflage in strategic nonviolent practice, total camouflage for total war. Now, the cold war conditions that moved Carl Jespers, as I've been arguing, to set philosophy against the bomb, fostered a general research in nuclear pacifism the world over. This movement against the development, possession, and use of atomic weapons was much ridiculed at the time as a communist distortion of Gandhian methods. Though Gandhi was nowhere on the scene he was assassinated in 1948, his influence pervades cold war pacifism on both sides of the iron curtain as a prompt to establish a comprehensive global system of nuclear restraint. The Fellowship of Reconciliation in the US published a pamphlet, Gandhi and the H bomb in 1950 with a new agenda for disarmament. A few years after this, the Italian Gandhian Aldo Cappatini inaugurated an international coordinating center for nonviolence in Perugia to contest the Cold War division of the world. The Nuclear Scientist and Historian D.D. Gosambi showcased Gandhian strategies against nuclear proliferation at the Asian Pacific Peace Conference held in Beijing in 1952, a really important event that not enough is made of in my view. In the same year, this is the sort of London Asia bit of my talk, the same year a pacifist group in Britain took the name Operation Gandhi and launched the country's first direct action protests against atomic weapons manufacture. Their efforts paved the way to the formation of the CND and arguably to the emergence of a new left in Britain. There was general consensus across this sort of spectrum that I've just described to foil the policy of nuclear deterrence, along with associated proposals for selected defenders that had begun to emerge in the 1950s with an apotheosis of course in Ronald Reagan's strategic defense initiative. This is, some of you might recall, the reverie of a shield that, and I'm quoting here, could protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from rain. Uncote, comfort, better known as the author of the joys of sex, but also an active member of Operation Gandhi developed a propaganda campaign to convey the impossibility of such plans. And there are many tenders from him in the Operation Gandhi archives for boosters of an umbrella man to be plastered across London with the caption umbrellas don't stop the bomb. I don't believe the campaign ever saw light of day. Yet, yet, an apparatus by which I mean a knowledge structure of camouflage took hold amongst international pacifists. And this gained from Salvador Dali's advisory that total camouflage is an urgent pacifist aesthetic aim in his 1942 manifesto total camouflage for total war, and later 1951 mystical manifesto for the atomic aid. Dali argued that camouflage techniques to conceal aggressors heavy guns cruisers tanks during the two world wars had borrowed from the formal abstract principles of Cubism, once popularized by Pablo Picasso. A new mode of angelic abstraction surrealistic and daliistic inspiration was set to develop a perspective of for total invisibility for all in context of an emerging war against survival. The ability to provide total camouflage, Dali added, is only given to an artist with paranoid perception, and yes, he was in conversation with Lacan at the time. For Dali, this means someone who can see everything and therefore show everything as invisible matter, corpuscles, atoms, also the spirituality of all substance. In plain terms, camouflage is the art of collating a crowd of coevil and coterminous images. Dali writes, and I quote, an image can be rendered invisible. Without transformation, simply by surrounding it with other images, which make the spectator assume he is looking at something else, unquote, such an inspiration obtains indirectly in the cold war pacifist project of one world or none, which takes its tag from a publication of 1946. That title issued by several of the scientists who had developed nuclear technology and had profound concerns about the nuclear age they had unleashed. The project claims that the only protection against the sheer scale of vision is awareness of the holistic threat of nuclear war. That calls for an ethical grasp of collective planetary victimhood, much like the COVID crisis. It also entails a figural grasp of the political iconography of the entire earth as a means to conceal borders, combatants and isolated targets. The principle is elementary, and it re-enacts a type of seeing that hides associated with the knowledge of the Kevinin. It asserts that everyone will be safer once we know that no one is safe. There's a visual inference again. If everyone can be made concurrently visible, everyone can be made concurrently invisible as well. In 1958, the Operation Gandhi movement commissioned a young designer called Gerald Holton to develop a visual icon for the ideology of disarmament. As he's set to work, Holton was inspired to make a design that might give symbolic cover, as it were inter-pictorially, to the intensely vulnerable figure of the civilian facing a firing squad in Goya's painting, The Executions. Holton's final design presents an abstract image of the entire globe in the spirit of one world or none. Over the image, a lightly crosshair is substituted by the composited semaphore letters UND for unilateral nuclear disarmament. This is the icon we know today as the peace sign. Holton's peace sign was first displayed in public at an anti-nuclear march from London to the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Oldermaston, where nuclear weapons are manufactured to this day. There were 500 placards on sticks. Badges of the symbol were also widely distributed. These were cast in ceramic by a Norfolk botter called Eric Austin and issued with a circular from the manufacturer. It advises that the extreme heat withstood by the badges in the firing process makes them among the few objects likely to survive nuclear disaster. Nearly done. Coda. Totally unintelligible. In a note on how abstraction serves the history of extinction, the painter Aubrey Williams gives an example of the Maya. When the Maya felt their era would pass, they got involved in the process of their own disappearance by building artefacts in wells called Seinote. The word means something like the total or everything of us. The aim was less to preserve such artefacts, Williams hints, then bring dignity to their vanishing. Williams takes this as a cue to best practice in abstract art. It is impossible, he says, to honour through realist modes of recovery and representation the devastation of the Caribbean middle passage, the decimation of indigenous pasts, the ecological crisis triggered by industrial capitalism. Williams' ripost is a synesthetic medium in which a liberated sensorium sends off the reflex of visibility. So the ear picks up the colour of the vanquished past, skin speaks and so on. But how might curbs on visibility resonate with aesthetic restraints of the senses so common to cultures of pacifism and of nonviolence? Does austerity of vision corroborate elective silence, stillness, not hearing and perhaps not thinking too? At least whenever the eye is guide to mind. What is called not thinking? Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Leela. I'll give you a minute to have a sip of water and just gather thoughts after that incredibly rich and complexly led paper, which took us on a journey, I think, through different philosophical registers, different practices, different organisations as well. And it was really fascinating to hear that genealogy of the CND, which I think a lot of people will be unfamiliar with as well, and the relationships with Operation Gandhi and I. That point you made about Eric Austin saying that the badges will be one of the only things that will survive a reminder, a trace of history that links past, present and future, I think was extremely poignant. As you were speaking as well, I've been thinking through how your paper relates to some of the wider propositions of this panel of sociality and effect and also through the broader aims of the conference of thinking about art worlds as well. And for me, if I've sort of understood the trajectory of your argument correctly, or this is what I took from it anyway, I think you were sort of presenting a challenge really to us to push beyond just a search for the traces or the surfaces of relationships of intersectional thinking and to something broader, this idea of these moments, these breakthrough moments of charismatic abstraction, and the conditions through which these arise, and which you said, you know, don't always have geographical or historical limits as well. So again, it sort of pushes us out of this, you know, search for, for these, these empirical traces, but I thought as well, that obviously presents quite a challenge to, especially the historian in researching the hidden and the invisible, about whether the kind of tools and the skills we have, are we equipped to really think about these, these abstractions through art or through history. You know, where do we research them? How do we find them? How do we find the invisible? It seems almost like an impossible task. It's a challenge. And I guess I'm asking you, is that the provocation to think about where, you know, where are we, where are we looking? Where are we thinking? You know, where are we finding these groups, these formations? Thank you so much, Sarah, for, for, for so sharply putting this paper into conversation with your project in this conference, and that's very, it's very helpful for me, as is your question about the task of historians. You know, I think, in the quest for invisibility, you know, it's, I suppose it's just so many things to say. I've always, and if I could take a step back and just sort of to, I mean, as was just described, the method that has provoked this paper for this conference is that I've I've always been committed to the archive as you are, I know, in your work in the sort of small traces that substantiate grant theory. But, you know, as, as we now know, the structures of thought that underpin the most rigorous empiricism are loaded civilizationally, you know, by our assumption about what we think affect us or what we think knowledges, and so on and so forth. So I think in this paper, I was very interested in how so much under the sway of critical theory reformist radical critical theory, in all of us, I can take for granted this, the importance of, of the visible, of the visible. As, as a sign of knowledge, and we also, when we are not doing that. We assume that making something visible is the way in which to do reparative historical work. And this is an antique bias. It's, it's, and it's a bias in which the words with which your project is, is engaged now the geographies of colonialism play a really important role. And, you know, I think this moment of axial philosophy gets somehow gets in between and shows where it's coming from this idea that well look you know it's okay. But, you know, European philosophy is better than non European philosophy there was this moment when all ancient philosophies had a breakthrough moment, and everyone discovered that making things visible is what counts as knowledge. And we've never, we've never recovered from that. That's the provocation for me. And then as I started tracing these knowledge encounters, and the words that were being occluded in order to tell the history of the importance of visibility. I found there are knowledge systems that actually have an investment in concealment in, in remaining invisible. So, I think the best we can do is, is to know as historians when we encounter a form of knowledge or a form of life that sees its value in being hidden. Then what do we do with that. And, you know, it's really an attempt by taking the story through non violence to show some of the resources of hiding, some of the resources, quite literally of, you know, in non, and it struck me in non violent factors for example, hiding is really important. You know, hiding from danger in rhetorics of futivity and giving cover giving sanctuary sanctuary asylum, all of these words sanctuary asylum refuge are all forms of off taking hiding very seriously. So I'll stop here. That's, that's really fascinating. And I think that's again that your personal reflection on, you know, again, the choices of language that you use to write and to think about camouflage sanctuary hiding, you know, in a process of speaking of of in some senses revealing those as well I think is incredibly important and that that sort of was really helpful as well. I have a question from someone who's watching so I think it's always really a moment to engage with people and thank you so much for for everyone who's joining us and being part of this conversation. Let me. Let me just pick one of these. This is from Brenda Kumar who writes is one of the propositions you're suggesting and creating space for seeking contours of the invisible, the noble and the affable, and the strategies of abstraction are a way of arriving at such knowledge exactly exactly. That's an excellent question. You know, and Yes. Absolutely. Though if I may complicate my response a little further, simply as I was working through these materials in order to clarify this proposition. You know, it seemed that there are two ways of understanding abstraction, you know, and that the way we understand abstraction is that there are two ways of understanding abstraction, you know, and that the way we understand abstraction now is also historically Dilted by the sort of Marxist moment where, you know, an abstraction is not an abstraction in a purely metaphysical way an abstraction is something that is not an abstraction in a purely metaphysical way. And abstraction is something that includes both the visible and the invisible, so that it is always that. And I suppose my point and it's like angels on the point of a, you know, pin, wherever these angels, the, was it Hang out. Wherever they hang out. Is that in in in in various, I'm sort of tracing to genealogies of this modern form of abstraction where visible and invisible combine. And one is where visible and invisible combine, but they are in a way of understanding abstraction. And one is where visible and invisible combine, but they tend toward appearance. If you can sort of stand the kind of apparent tautology, and there's another where they tend towards disappearance. So it's, I'm sort of holding on to the idea of a kind of modernist modernist abstraction, one in which, from which we have inherited this bias to it appearance. And another, where there is this broken subaltern tradition that says, you know, no, actually, there are some modernist abstractions or some modern abstractions that tend to a disappearance. And so I suppose, yes, in response to your question Brenda, your very helpful question. That's exactly what I'm saying but in this slightly complicated way. Thank you so much. There's another question here in the Q&A box which actually relates to another of your projects and perhaps it's quite useful to weave a trajectory between some of your other work and this, what a new project as well. The person here, Sissy Lee, who's asking this question is referring to your book, Effective Communities. And it's something actually I was thinking about whether there is a sort of intellectual trajectory between the work that you did on often anti-imperialist communities of friends who gathered mainly in the Imperial Metropolis at the end of Sietla in that in that book. But this person asked about the relationships here between anti-patriotism, friendship and nationalism. They say how do you how to avoid building a friendship without creating a high level of anti-patriotism, how do we review, how do we view the relationship between friendship and nationalism I don't know whether you see any relationship there between what you're arguing in this paper at all, or more broadly between that project and this one about the cultural formations you're talking about. Dear Sissy Lee, thank you for your question. I just want to say, even as I was writing this paper, to just a bit about nationalism, I like it less and less, less and less and less. And by this I don't mean I want to distinguish nationalism from a commitment to the best, to the best possibilities of any community in which one finds oneself, the nation being one such form of community. And just to say, maybe try and draw a link, you know, I am very, I was very careful, I want to be very careful in this particular project where my interest is in ancient South Asia to distinguish my recuperation from the sort of the recuperation in contemporary India sort of cultural nationalist recuperation. And in fact the cultural nationalist recuperation is all about is all in sympathy with this axial view that you know where we had our own modernity, you know, we triumph we had our own form of breakthrough knowledge. So I'm more interested in what these accounts leave behind. And my critique of nationalism and affective communities is of the same sort, it's not, I mean obviously many of the people I was dealing with in that book and especially in my book Common Cause were nationalist. But in a kind of heterodox way, you know, so as to search for the best possible to search for the best possibilities of any nationalism, often means being critical of the available forms or the forms that are for us. And friendship belongs in that series. So it's not, it doesn't, it's not cosmopolitan per se in the sense of being against local communities, but it's often critical of the fossilized mainstream aggressive forms of nationalism that are available to us. And transverses or can operate between or across as well. Well, thank you. I'm conscious of time and that we can pick up so many threads of this discussion. I think in conversation with the next two papers as well. So we will have after our, those papers will have a longer discussion time and and I think that will be really interesting to kind of pick up and weave some of these propositions that you've put to us about thinking, you know, about these intersectional relationships. I keep thinking about these cosmetic abstractions. It's sort of a visual thinker. So keep thinking about these crossing points as well. So we'll definitely return return to these ideas. So Lila, I just want to thank you for starting us off in a way that is sort of almost mind blowing my my the cogs of my brain are churning so quickly and, you know, the sparks are flying and I'm sure amongst the participants and all the people out there. There's so many things that were, you know, just still thinking through and digesting, but I just want to thank you so much for, you know, setting us off in this very kind of sort of outward facing genre defying paper as well. So thank you so much Lila for that. And I want to give everyone who's listening. I'm just a short six minutes of a screen break. So we have time for to go and grab a cup of tea, take a comfort break and then we'll return at half past two for the next papers. So I hope you'll all come back and join us and but thank you so much Lila for your paper. Well, welcome back, everyone. I hope you had time to have a quick break and take time away from the screen for a few minutes before our next two papers in this afternoon's panel. And our papers in this section of the event will think about perhaps expound on even challenge and trouble, the ideas of sociality and effect through the work of two artists and will be thinking about Krishna Reddy and Sunil Gupta's work through the papers this afternoon. Our first paper in this section will be given by Simone Vila. Simone is an art historian, and she currently directs the research project patterns of transregional trails, the materiality of artworks and their place in the era, Bombay, Paris, Prague, Lahore, circa 1920 to the early 1950s, which is funded by the Austrian Science Fund, the FWF. Simone's publications include her books, Modern Art in Pakistan, History, Tradition, Place, which was published in 2015, and also another publication, Andre Lot and his International Students, which was published by Innsbruck University Press in 2020. And she's associated with the University of Innsbruck and is based in Vienna. So Simone, I will hand over to you to give your paper this afternoon. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Sarah, and thank you also Hamad and Ming for giving me this opportunity to speak here at such a lovely, beautiful event. Also thanks to Shauna and Danny for being brilliant co-organisers. Do I share my screen now? Yes, please share your screens. Can you all see? I can see that. Thank you, Leela, also for this wonderful paper. There is lots in it that I would love to explore from my own research, so I hope we get to talk later. So I'll start. The Indian-owned artist Krishna Reddy is primarily known for his unique achievements in the method of simultaneous colour printing from one single plate. He started to develop this in the early 1950s at Artilier 17, an avant-garde workshop set up and run by the charismatic British artist Stanley William Hater in interwar Paris. His reputation as a printmaker often overshadows his work in sculpture, which is, however, inextricably linked, the sculptural aspect of printmaking or the treatment of the printing plate as sculpture is but one important aspect in discussing his works. Another is that his work developed across a multitude of locations and while he was on a transnational journey with institutions, networks and friendships as formative constituents. In the literature that has been published on Krishna Reddy and in some important curated projects that reflected on his works during his lifetime. At the University in Chantilly-Caitain, the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, the Académie de la Grande-Chourmière and Artilier 17 in Paris, as well as the printmaking department of New York University have received attention. Yet much about his itinerant life and work has not been addressed and this has largely to do with the lack of accessibility to parts of Reddy's history that needs to be retrieved and excavated from archives in various places and in different languages from public institutions and often from private homes. I'm referring to his engagement and exchange. I'm referring to the European locations of Vienna, Ljubljana, Porto Roche and St. Marguerite in the time roughly between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s. He wants to add artists like Krishna Reddy to the existing narrative of art history, but also to disrupt the Eurocentric canon and move toward what Parthamita called a more heterogeneous definition of global modernism with attention to particular art histories. The context of their ideologies, contradictions and fractures in their engagement to modernity, then we will have to include this often peripheral archives and sites. Because the peripheries of the art world are to quote Piotrowski, not only postcolonial, Piotrowski worked towards a horizontal expansion of the canon where the margins in Europe are understood as the other. I think Krishna Reddy's career through the artist's mighty side journey that includes his engagement with Central Europe therefore has the potential to lead to a rethinking of the history of post-war modern art as shared histories of art concerned with, and I'm borrowing from Hamad Nasa's formulation, co-creating rather than annotating our histories. This paper I will therefore revisit Reddy's early transnational journey and view it in the context of emergent networks, institutions, collaborations and discourse pointing to the fact that the 1950s and 1960s to two decades under scrutiny here cannot be apprehended without keeping the larger international context in mind. The precious world of Cold War geopolitics, of post-war liberation movements and the formation of new alliances. Here I'm interested in asking to what extent Krishna Reddy's aesthetic and material decision can be said to have not only responded to the cultural and political atmosphere but rather co-produced it through active involvement. As a consequence then, how does this involvement relate to questions about the aesthetics and ideologies of the period as experienced by the artist? What role did new alliances and experiences beyond Eurocentric epistemology in visual strategies play? Krishna Reddy's understanding of art making is intrinsically linked to a range of institutions that exercise diverse pedagogical and philosophical approaches to art. He's ranged from an expanded idea of art making as practice at Viswaparati University in Shantana Caten to a reformed approach at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London where, according to Mim Tiampo, William Coldstream introduced a, quote, turn towards observational practices and methods of inquiry, end quote, as well as an informal workshop setting at Artillery 17, where Stanley Hater created an environment with an emphasis on collaboration, experimentation and process rather than on result. Closely connected with these institutional experiences is the complex political and historical context of late colonial and early post-colonial India as well as post-Europe. I'm here connecting with Lofi Hercan, Sanjuq Dasundran study of artists who put journey through London and its hierarchized infrastructure under the shadow of the Cold War, end quote. And I would like to point to the fact that this meant negotiating often contradictory aesthetics and defining one's own position. In India, one of Krishna Reddy's most formative experiences and that of many artists of his generation was the tragedy of the Bengal famine in 1943. About Reddy's time in Bengal, Sumesh Sharma writes that there was a brief involvement in the Quit India movement, but that perhaps more profound was Reddy's own experience of the Bengal famine tragedy. The man made catastrophe that was etched into the conscience of a whole generation of artists. And Sharma further notes that in Henry Morse sculpture class, Reddy found a way to carve his memories of the Bengal famine victims as anatomists in stone. The memory of the famine fueled Krishna Reddy's humanistic turn and allows for a connection with some of Henry Morse large-scale post-war works such as the Three Standing Figures from 1947 in Battersea Park. And this period in Morse work is marked by themes of a humanistic and traditional type as Roger Cardinal puts it, and his war drawings or shelter drawings have had a direct influence on these works. Perhaps when Krishna Reddy remembered Henry Morse work fondly in 2016 for its genuine and spiritual quality and for what he called, quote, the pure existence in his works and quote, was he thinking of some of these early post-war works. While this leaves us with room for interpretation, I would like to perceive pure existence here within the vectors of post-war humanism, a key concern that came to be positioned in existentialism. Reddy's own philosophical concerns and inquiries influenced by the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti resonated with this vision of human existence, especially with its emphasis on a crisis of being. While the nature of this post-war humanism was marked by both aesthetic and political battles, in the field of fine arts, the contested terrain was the real, exacerbated, to quote Natalie Adamson, by the ideological and geographical division of the Cold War. In this climate, displaying and manifesting the experience of trauma and devastation found new ways of expression in sculpture park and public arts across Europe, thereby using the medium of sculpture to promote ideological messages. Of spiritual and humanist values, but also to build new audiences for modern art. The increase of public sculpture displays in the 1950s was therefore carried, I would like to suggest, by an effort to establish sites of transnational aesthetics. In 1952, Reddy left London and the Slate School after he accepted the opportunity to study at the Académie de l'Argonne-Jormier in Paris, where he was further exposed to the potential of sculpture at Osip-Satkins Studio. Some of the works that Reddy produced at Satkins Studio survived in the productions. Reddy's sculpture for the Salon de la Chine sculpture, possibly from 1954, can be connected to some of Satkins work, not least due to its outstretched gesture. The work on the right, however, reveals motifs and procedures that are related to Reddy's preoccupation with the printing plate at Atelier 17, to which he transferred at around this time. Atelier 17 was a workshop, hater, fostered and encouraged experimentation, trial and error, but he also emphasised a strong sense of community and belonging. Atelier 17, Reddy's trajectory can be said to have taken on a collaborative character involving many friends and family. Atelier 17, he met his first wife, the American artist Shirley Bitebski, 1925-1966, and the two co-produced work and exhibited together in Central Europe on a number of occasions. As her name suggests, Bitebski's family originated in what is today Belarus, but the Bitebski's migrated to the US in around 1900, and they settled in Minnesota. Atelier 17, Reddy also collaborated with the Indian artist Kiko Moti, 1921-1989, who, along with Reddy, is acknowledged as having been instrumental in the process that led to exceptional results in the multi-coloured viscosity printmaking. His move to Atelier 17 also came at a time when the potential of graphic art increased through new transnational associations and alliances, which reacted to the divisional character of the Cold War. I'm thinking of the formation of the non-aligned movement, and the many new cultural configurations that this period made possible from within, as Atelier 17 puts it, and outside of the non-aligned axis. This, in fact, has been a central concern for the Biennale of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana since its establishment in 1955. Even though the early manifestations of the Biennale, and here we see Reddy with Stanley Hater, so even though the early manifestations of the Biennale, especially the first one, reflected former Yugoslavia's cultural process of de-stalinisation, over time, along with other Biennales of the South, it created an arena, to quote, Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, for experimenting with alternative modes of cultural exchange than those demanded by more dominant models of international relations. The bulk of the first edition of the Biennale featured 144 works by artists associated with the École de Barry, the School of Paris. Projishnik, long-term director at Moderna Galleria in Ljubljana, an instrumental in establishing the Biennale, is, according to Bojana de Dickenerts, said to have first persuaded Zatkin to participate in it based on their common Slavic background, which then led to other artists of the École de Barry joining. Reddy's work was part of this group, as was Witebskis and Moody's. Their work was thus shown in the company of Zatkin, Modigliani, Picasso, Brancusi, etc., which reflects the aesthetic eclecticism yet universalist profile and diverse origins of the artistic community of the School of Paris. At this point, in fact, the survival of the School of Paris was in peril, because it was torn in the conflict regarding figuration and obstruction, reflecting its entanglement with post-war politics and aesthetics. The fact that Reddy was represented in the first editions of the Biennale in Ljubljana in 55 and 57 as an École de Barry artist, but then in 1961 and 63 editions as an Indian artist, can clearly be interpreted according to the genealogy of how the non-alanguage movement was formed. But it also points to a broader shift in cultural configurations. I believe it would be interesting to study how these new constellations, in fact, contributed to the crisis of the School of Paris. Connected with the hegemonic battleground over rivaling conceptions of post-war modernism, the Ljubljana Biennale adopted a moderate position, trying to diplomatically bridge both sides. By building on the medium of graphic arts for its low cost and easy transportability, Ljubljana can be said to have contributed to an understanding of graphic arts as an avant-garde harboring of the capacity to transcend geopolitical borders and ideological frontiers. In the framework of the Biennale, Krishna Reddy's work received attention, not least for its achievements in the simultaneous color printing method, which, as Heta put it, distinguished his works from all the other artists using the simultaneous method. For Krishna Reddy, a series of personal sojourns in the region began in 1960, which leads to an understanding of the nature of his brief, yet engaged relationship with these central European locations. These included his attending and exhibiting at a UNESCO-led initiative in Vienna in 1960, a stay in Port de Roche with Yugoslavian sculptors in 1961, and a trip to Ljubljana to prepare his solo exhibition at Mala Galleria that same year. The following summer, he participated in the European Sculpture Symposium in St. Margarethe, and judging from personal letters exchanged with some of his hosts and organizers of his exhibitions, the tabscape accompanied him on these trips. Following up with a report that he wrote for Design Magazine published in New Delhi 1961 about the UNESCO meeting in Vienna, Reddy writes enthusiastically about the international spirit of the meeting. I quote him saying, I was struck by the harmony with which the conference did its work. It didn't seem to matter whether an artist was from a communist, capitalist or neutralist country, end quote. His summary about his experience at the Sculpture Symposium, also published in Design Magazine in 1962, takes a similar tone when he notes that it was, quote, an initiative to promote the art of sculpture and international context between artists. What resonates here is Reddy's perception of non-hierarchical dialogue that took place on a horizontal axis at these platforms that were committed to transnational exchange and mobility. What is striking about Reddy's works that circulated in and around Ljubljana and Vienna in exhibitions and that have formed part of several public collections since then, is there interplay between non-representation and representation, whether it is the universal element of water as seen in wave, water lilies and water form, or the timeless phenomena related to growth as seen in flower radiating and germination, movement and flow are here being materialized in the form of an aesthetic that cuts across ideological divides. The Sculpture, two forms in one, produced in Saint Magarit in the Quarry in 1962, resembles, in its surface structuring, his treatment of the printing plate. In a surprise discovery at the Film Archive in Vienna, I found a short film from 1962 made for Austrian state television, where we see Shirley Wipepskie and Krishna Reddy working in tandem, challenged by working relives into the huge limestone with hammer and chisel. The local media from 1962 credited both as participants, but the clear declaration of the work as a collaboration has not been made. And because the Sculpture symposium is hardly acknowledged in art historical narratives, I think it's important that when we do speak about it, that we acknowledge these facts. The aesthetic position of the organizers of the Sculpture symposium in Saint Magarit, especially that of the artist Karl Brantl, was from its inception in 1952 to work towards artistic informality. This was declared as an aesthetic solidarity with the artists who were working on the other side of the Iron Curtain, which was within sight of the symposium. The format of the symposium was a huge success and replicated in Central East Europe. Port de Roche was one of the first offshoots, but soon also internationally. The experimental and collaborative character nurtured at the on-plan air setting in the quarry in Saint Magarit, between international invited artists and the quarries artisan, evokes some of the aesthetic ideas of Royal Chantele Caten, but it also takes us back to Henry Moore, to issues of scale, the open air aspect of sculpture, its connection to the broader public, some of which are also principles of 1817. Having presented a glimpse of Krishna Reddy's work in connection to his transnational journey that unfolded during the Cold War era, allows an understanding of post-war and post-colonial modernity of the 1950s and 1960s as an antagonistic ground where creative adaptations of ideological concepts and border crossing strategies were constantly negotiated. In this atmosphere, infrastructures and collaborations created the grounds from where shared concerns about how to respond to the perceived rifts between art and public could be meaningfully expressed. Material decisions and aesthetic discourse are closely linked, and the fact that Reddy engaged with both sculpture and printmaking opened up networks of exchange and exposure to new infrastructure that were located outside the hierarchized politics between the former colony and the former imperial metropolis. The central European locations introduced here are a constitutive part of Krishna Reddy's artistic practice. Because they were geographically located at the transitional margins between mid-century political and cultural ideologies and reorientations, they stimulated manifestations of an aesthetic which took on forms of solidarity in Reddy's work from there on. And thinking here of works that he did for the Liberation, the Algerian Liberation War in the early 1960s, but also for those who are familiar with Krishna Reddy's work, with his work in response to the student protests in Paris in 1968. But I ended this point and I just wanted to thank a number of people who helped me with archaibur research across geographies. Thank you for your attention. Thank you so much Simone, that was absolutely fascinating. It's such a treat to see those works as well on the screen that the print works and then in conversation with the sculptural forms and I think those material conversations and collaborations, something that we'll return to. And I'm also struck by some of the links between what Leela was saying and the period she was talking about in that post war moment and some of the ideas about relationships and collaboration that are emerging out of that. So we'll return to those and questions for you after Greg's paper. So for now I'll say thank you to you and we'll bring you back on screen when we've heard from Greg. Thank you Simone. So I'll introduce our next speaker in this afternoon's panel and that is Greg Salter. Greg is a lecturer in art history at the University of Birmingham. He researches and teaches on art in Britain since 1945, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality. His first book is Art and Musculinity in Post War Britain, Reconstructing Home, which was published in 2019. And his current research project traces the transnational histories of queer art in Britain since the 1960s, with a particular focus on kinship. So Greg, welcome to London Asia Art Wells to give your paper, Queer Britain and Queer India, question mark, Sunil Gotter in the 1980s. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the opportunity to present today. I'm just going to share my screen. Hello everyone. So Sunil Gotter's exhibition at the Photographers Gallery in London, which opened in late 2020. And it's open again and it's open until Monday. So if you are in London for the holiday, please go along. This exhibition put forward one of the key aspects of his practice across his career as a concern with relationships and family. In a short essay in the exhibition's accompanying publication, the curator Mark Sealy embraced these themes as recurrent subjects and metaphors for Gotter's aims. So he said that relationships are the powerful undercurrent, tying his disparate series together, constituting a creative political and personal marriage that has, as its soul, the idea of family, be it real or imagined. So my paper today will take up family and the more expansive, yet no less tricky term kinship to consider the transnational queer histories addressed in several of Gotter's series from the 1980s, particularly relating to the historical and persisting entanglements of India and Britain. So I'm going to start with this image, which you've seen a few times today, which is India Gate, a single work taken from Gotter's 1987 series Exiles. Gotter produced this series on one of several trips back to his place of birth, which is Delhi in India. He left as a teenager with his parents when they immigrated to Canada. He's spoken about, I quote, the imperative to create some images of gay Indian men, they didn't seem to exist. This series was an attempt to finally visualise this issue of invisible gay Indian men. This series is made up of 12 staged photographs of isolated men or male couples at various sites around Delhi, usually people he knew and whom he was able to convince to pose. Each includes, as you can see here, short snippet of text at the bottom, taken from conversations Gotter had with men that he encountered at cruising spots during his visits. India Gate, two men embrace on the lawn in front of India Gate. India Gate is located on the Rajpath, a ceremonial boulevard in New Delhi. Both were designed by the British architect Edwin Lutians and constructed in the years following the 1911 dobar, during which George V declared that the capital of the Raj would shift from Calcutta to Delhi. After independence, the Rajpath became the site of the Delhi Republic Day parade and Gotter also knew the area as a popular cruising ground as well. As Flora Dunster has noted in her brilliant recent article on Gotter in third text, his choice of sites and composition for several images in exiles was shaped by a desire to evoke colonial photography's frequent depiction of these sites as reassuringly empty, repopulating them in Gotter's series with desiring living Indian gay subjects. So such a gesture here is in line with Gotter's stated aim that I gave you at the start to finally visualise this issue of invisible gay Indian men. But it is worth noting the ambivalent relationship between the men and the site, and this can be unpacked with this image, but it also recurs across exiles actually in many of the images in different ways. So to talk about this site I'm probably telling many of you things you already know at this point, but India Gate is a memorial to the 70,000 soldiers in the British Indian Army who died between 1914 and 1921 in the First World War and the Third Anglo-Afghan War, and there are around 13,300 servicemen's names inscribed on its surface. Additionally placed under India Gate is Amarjwan Jyoti, which is a memorial to unnamed Indian soldiers who died in the Indo-Pakistani War in 1971. And this is made up of a black marble plinth with a reversed rifle capped by a war helmet and bounded by four eternal flames. What I want to hear is that Gotter has placed his embracing couple in a space where opportunities for sex between men meet India's colonial and post-colonial military histories, if we think about what India Gate represents. I would also note as well that this series were in 1987, so only a few years after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and so would also encapsulate changing debates and tensions around the nation more generally as well. The couple's momentary contact, this staged moment of visibility that Gotter creates here, occurs in front of monuments that attest to the lives of some named soldiers, but also many unnamed servicemen as well. So there are several competing presences here. The named soldiers on India Gate, the unnamed soldiers represented by Amarjwan Jyoti, the Rajpath as a site of colonial and now post-colonial national display, the surrounding areas connections to cruising, and the embracing male couple in the foreground as well. The image holds these multi various aspects together quite unsteadily. While India Gate clearly seeks to articulate queerness as melded with imperial and national histories, I would also suggest that it complicates simple narratives of visibility by placing queerness within a site that speaks of very fragility and ever shifting understandings of these histories as well. One way of clarifying this point is to acknowledge the embrace, the moment of touch between the two men here, and as I said, this is a staged gesture kind of choreographed by Gotter in a way. At the same time, he's spoken of how it's common to see men being physically intimate with each other in public in Delhi, though that intimacy may not necessarily be a kind of gay and inverted commas intimacy. That's what the quote on the slide is about here. People hold on to each other for dear life, even if they're just friends, it's very touchy feeling. The extra step to something sexual is very little, and a whole lot goes on under your nose, but you don't see it. So Gotter here isn't denying the possibility of sexual contact, but points perhaps to a need to avoid reading intimate contact in the Excel series in straightforward and easily translatable terms. And again, we could talk about this across the series, and one way of noting this is by placing India Gate alongside an image like Jamal Masjid taking one of the gates of the mosque. Another space that Gotter knew offered the potential for cruising, and which would also enables momentary cross-class contact as well between men. And you can see the central pair here, their clinging affection, and the very open look to the camera suggests possibility, but at the same time, not necessarily straightforward legibility either. And this complexity has been echoed by Akshay Khanna, whose work on sex and subjectivity in India more recently argues that such instances of touch reveal that the erotic and the sexual need not be tied to a sense of selfhood in these contexts, as it might well be in the West, while also gesturing to the ways in which same-sex desire emerges in everyday encounters in ways that might bring into question the very presumption of the marginality of queerness to India. Touches like that at India Gates are moments of connection, though are not necessarily simply translated. The reading of this touch might also be shaped by the text that Gotter has included with the image as well, so in case you can't read that it says, even if you have a lover, you should get married and have children who would look after you in old age. It speaks to the fundamental pull of the family, and the difficulty, as Gotter and others acknowledged at this moment in the 1980s, of unraveling yourself from these familial commitments to embrace something like a gay identity. At this point we might note two things, that Gotter frequently stages his images of gay Indians, insights shaped by colonial and post-colonial histories, and that the way we encounter touch here is something that seems to assert gay Indians as found, present and visible, something also be considered as something not quite so straightforwardly legible, speaks to the complexity of transnational kinship formed through both perhaps recognition and misrecognition, and that is perhaps something that's being articulated here. It is also an element of lovers ten years on, the series that Gotter produced in London in 1985, so just before travelling to Delhi for exiles, and it helps us bring them into dialogue I think. There is portraits of queer couples, mostly gay men with some lesbians as well, and it was produced in part as a response to the end of Gotter's first relationship, which had come to an end after ten years the previous year. The series was also shaped by the early years of the HIV AIDS crisis, which had brought an increase in discrimination towards queer people, and it generated a significant amount of fear and uncertainty in the community itself. In this context, Gotter talked about viewing the queer couple as this kind of unit of uncomfortable necessity, a response to an uncertainty about how to navigate sex and relationships during an epidemic, noting, as he said in the statement around these images, couples seem to have come into their own. Gay self-help groups encourage a change in sexual behaviour and a reduction in the number of partners. So I'll show you a few images from the series, and you can see that he chose an approach that he used uniformly across the series, usually in black and white with a couple situated in domestic interiors looking out at the viewer. He spoke about how he wanted the photographs to be empowering and for his sitters to appear unafraid. He noted also, retrospectively, that the series also felt mournful and at times oppressive even. But the moments of touch in lovers ten years on are in one respect representations of ordinary daily affection between gay and lesbian couples. He captured again in a way that speaks to a couple's determination to make images of such couples visible to a wider public. But touch does not resonate in the same way in each image across the series. So there's Jonathan and Kim here, which the two men stand with their bodies together. He places his arms around the other who stands in front of him. He in turn places his arms behind his back so that they meet the body of his partner. They've posed in a way that appears to fuse their bodies together and their clone derived appearances only kind of underline this, I think. Touch also tips into a kind of anxious bodily intimacy elsewhere in the series. I'm in a John Paul on the left cling to each other. One is seated on the floor between the legs of the other who sits on a chair. Their limbs intertwine with a mixture of care and defensiveness. Fingers gripped around the body of the other. And in David and Peter on the right, one partner places his hands on the shoulder and hip of the other, a gesture that signals a kind of tense intimacy. They're aligned by the way in which they're shot against that stark white wall with the shadow of a body looming behind them. The frequent instances of touch in lovers 10 years on, within the context of the oddly formal setup of many of the images, feels as if they begin to stretch the series begun to cook to the stated aims. Alongside stability and representation, these moments of anxious intimacy posit instability and uncertainty in these images as well. The two moments of touch of tense affection between couples might resonate from our position with a sense of lost. This is the loss of Gupta's relationship which generated the series, but also of course the loss of the developing HIV AIDS crisis and Gupta has commented that later on, this group of people were to be hard hit by AIDS. We should note also that the series production coincides with the arrival of the AIDS antibody test, meaning that people could potentially ascertain their status. Some of the sitters from Lovers 10 Years On featured in an article on the AIDS test that Gupta and Jane Simon contributed to a dummy issue of a new left-wing newspaper called News on Sunday. At that year, they offer a variety of opinions in this article on the impact of HIV AIDS and the test on their relationships with some talking about preferring monogamy and others suggesting that they would not reduce the number of partners and practice safe sex. And these interviews, I think, give voice to something of the ambivalence that I think is inherent in Lovers 10 Years On, where formal serialised portraits give the initial appearance of sameness that quickly unravels into something more varied and less certain. We should note as well how the Thatcher government at this moment was pursuing increasingly homophobic rhetoric and policies that would culminate in Section 28 in just a few years, shaped by an investment in what Simon and what we refer to as a dream-like fantasy of a nation which only exists as individuals in closed family units. Gupta's series might feel on the surface like a simple retort to such ideas, a normative assertion of Cobaldon in response. But I hope my analysis of touch here underlines the contested and in process context of queer Cobaldon and queer kinship at this particular moment. And just as Exiles was informed, as I argued by colonial histories and visual culture, we might also draw Lovers 10 Years On into a similar frame. Though we are supposedly after empire here, imperial rhetoric lives on, I think. For instance, Gupta's series was produced only a couple of years after Margaret Thatcher's 1982 speech to a concerted rally in Chelten after the Falklands war. She claimed that victory had proved wrong, those who believed, I quote, that Britain was no longer the nation that built an empire and ruled a quarter of the world. We are also in a moment where the police were disproportionately and violently targeting black and Asian people, functioning for writers like Paul Gilroy and Salman Rushdie at this moment as the colonising army in the new imported empire. We might also note Annemarie Smith's vital work on the close relationship between the homophobic rhetoric and legislation at this moment and the continued influence of powerism, even in this mid 1980s moment. It's striking then to find Gupta producing Lovers 10 Years On in a format that recalls, for me, ethnographic photography in its black and white presentation, the serialised focus on couples in their domestic habitats, and the attendant use of material objects from Virginia Woolf to Raina Verna fastbender from antiques to modern interior design. And these mark difference and collective identity in ways that recall the colonial gaze on indigenous populations. There is an element of humour here, perhaps this idea of Gupta the ethnographer heading off into West London, which is why he went for these images in order to understand gay relationships after the failure of his own. But the format of the series, seemingly echoing ethnographic photography, draws these subjects into proximity with the subjects of exiles as well. I should note here the quote I put up on the slide of from the karate manis incredibly helpful. Recent insight that the very desire for representation might well be haunted by imperial ways of seeing. And Gupta appears to have been conscious of this. We might ask where a recognition of queerness articulated through lingering visual lingering imperial visual frameworks leaves us in terms of the transnational queer histories across in between India and Britain. What kind of transnational transnational kinship emerges here to try and articulate this and to finish. I'm going to finish with an image that I keep returning to in an attempt to answer these kind of big questions. This is the first image in Gupta's 1989 series pretended family relationships. It's titled from section 28, the British local government act, which sought to prevent local government schools and other institutions from promoting homosexuality explicitly denigrating homosexual relationships as pretended family relationships. It passed into law in 1988. All consists of 12 works, each taking the same form. On the left, there is the photograph of a multiracial couple represented in either public or private spaces. In the center, there are short snippets of poetry written by Gupta's then partner Stephen Dodd. On the right, there are thin cropped photographs taken by Gupta demonstrations against section 28 in London. Each here shows two men, one South Asian and one white, leaning against the wall together by the side of the River Thames in London. Behind them on the other side of the river are the Houses of Parliament. In some senses, this is an unashamed image of presence, a staged interracial couple in public standing in front of the building that generated the law that denigrates their relationship as pretended. But this succinct political visualisation of cobbledon is complicated by the sense of distance in the accompanying text. I call you my love, though you are not my love, it breaks my heart to tell you. As occurs so often in Gupta's work, these words reverberate with a calculated though productive indeterminacy. It might be words spoken between the depicted figures and the British state, looming symbolically behind them. An echo of the severing of any semblance of familial bond between queer subject and nation state at this moment. The presence of parliament also reminds us that it was British imposed legislation, section 377 of the Indian Penal Code introduced in 1861, to continue to shape and limit the gay Indian experiences of which Gupta had gone in search in exiles. Additionally, and without wishing to reduce the figures depicted here to simplistic archetypes of nations and races, the interaction between the image and text here can be considered to be freighted with not just the everyday negotiations of an interracial relationship, but also the historical and continuing intermingling of Britain and India, particularly in terms of transnational queerness. It addresses a partner calling them love while denying that love at the same time. It might draw us back to the litany of touches across exiles and lovers 10 years on. The ambivalent positions between national and queer histories such touches articulate and the complexity of the kinship forged across the spaces by Gupta, but also by the histories that he summons. There is some way towards articulating the transnational queer kinship that is present across Gupta's 1980 series, a simultaneous intimacy and disconnection of binding and unbinding from within the still lingering imperial frameworks of looking and desire. So, thank you very much for listening. Thank you so much, Greg, for that paper and the haptic registers of touch as you were speaking and taking us through some of Gupta's work really came powerfully across this strange landscape of Zoom conferencing where we're sort of one hand intimate yet another quite distant. What I'd like to do is ask all the speakers to come back on screen, and I'm going to invite Ming and Hamad, my co-combiners as well to join us because we want to again get something of that sense of community of research and of ideas coming across in this session that we've got for question and answer and for discussion. And just to remind all our attendees who are listening to this panel, we would love to hear from you, so do type your questions in the Q&A box. You can also raise your hand by touching that raise hand button at the bottom of your screen. If you would like to speak live to us, that's always quite an exciting moment when and if that happens so you know do try that out if you would like to. And also to just remind people as well that we are convening an after webinar meeting through Zoom again because we're really aware that often in Zoom conferencing there's not the same opportunity for the coffee breaks the reality that we often find in those moments in between papers when we're at conferences in real life. It's a terrible phrase. This of course is our real life as we're now. But we wanted to kind of create another space. If you do want to come and talk to us where we can actually see other people who are in the audience. You can register for that and I think Shauna has put the link for that meeting and it'll be very informal, just a chance to say hello and just see it like a coffee break at a conference. So, whilst that's, I've got that bit of housekeeping out of the way. Again, please think of direct questions to put to Simone and to Greg to really wonderfully rich papers, attentive again to the materialities, the visual forms of readies and gutters practice and you might also have questions that think across the session. We are very conscious in planning these panels that we would resist any neat chronological or geographical framings and try and get papers that perhaps did some of that crisscrossing that Leela was talking about and asking us to imagine in her paper. I think in listening to you Simone and Greg. I was very struck by in, you know, in both of your papers for thinking about places of solidarity or places of sociality. Simone, I think for you the studio, the Atelier stood out as one particular location in which those social relationships might form, but also the Biennale, the walls of a space like that where those relationships could be traced. And for you Greg as well that those places of solidarity, I appreciated how you took us into or through Gupta's work into the home, the domestic space of solidarity of sociality of kinship and then out into the public realm in front of the parliamentary buildings into these grand spaces of public and national performance really. So I just wanted to kind of wonder if we could sort of start a conversation about those kinds of places and locations in which socialities are formed, enacted and built on. Simone, I don't know whether you could say more about that in relationship to the studio in the Atelier. Thank you, Sarah. I think it's an important point. And yes, you're right, the studio atelier 17 certainly was that space, but I think it was more than just atelier 17. I mean you could include Montparnasse as the region. Yes, Ljubliana Porto Roche, but after Greg started with the first image, I think you know this site specific decision, I think that's really important and perhaps that was St. Margheritain also, the quarry of St. Margheritain where you would spend two months with fellow sculptors and then experience something away from the city. And that's really important and it's so under discussed in art history, so just because of the first image of St. Raikupter's work at the site in Delhi, so this pushing away from the usual, the metropolis, this going towards other places. I mean these possibilities that were there or that were sort of, I mean it was conscious decisions. I think there were other possibilities. I mean Christian already also spent summers in the quarries in Nincarara, in Italy, in Tuscany, but I think it's a different atmosphere. Thank you. And Greg, I don't know if you want to come in there and continue the conversation. Yeah, I think a couple of things to say in response I think was what's been really generative about engaging with Sunil's work from a kind of queer history perspective is the way that it articulates what kind, as you say, what kind of solidarities are possible in those different spaces and what kinds of solidarities are kind of are also shut down in those or limited by those spaces so thinking, particularly kind of the more domestic spaces which can be both spaces of kind of possibility and kinship but can also kind of can narrow down, I think, can create kind of slightly hesitate to use word normative but normative kind of limits, perhaps on the solidarities as well and connections. And also within that the kind of just build on what someone was saying the kind of seeking out of kinships and solidarities as well and this is very much what something like exiles is about it's going and looking for kin. And again one of the things I find really generative about exiles is that it is marked by the by the difficulties of doing that actually it goes back to the kind of visibility and invisibility discussions that were happening earlier as well I think. Absolutely I think that's one thing that struck me across thinking through these papers is about that the invisibility visibility questions and again that to us as historians as writers as thinkers you know how we do this kind of research how we articulate it then as well I think it pushes us to think through those issues. I mean, Hema, do you want to come in and maybe, you know, do some. Do you think of the kind of these that come here? He. A glitch from beyond. Hamad, I'll bring you in at this point. Thanks a lot sir. I enjoyed enjoyed the glitch. And I sort of also it kind of reset some of these relationships that I was about to ask you on and I think it introduces another one. One of the things I'm sort of thinking through Lila with your wonderfully rich paper was, and something that we haven't really sort of specifically talked about is the issue of time. And it comes in in the sort of the post war period from those kinds of mechanisms, whether it's the Lugiana, the analogy, and the sort of the non align movement, or in grapes paper around particular moves, political moves or legal moves around, you know what's permissible and not. And I think you use this term high point of historical complexity. And also these phrases of, you know, we've been talking about visibility invisibility is this idea of withdrawal and disappearance. And I was wondering if you're familiar with the work of Jalal Tawfeeq, the artist and scholar, and his sort of concept of the withdrawal of tradition, past a surpassing disaster. And very briefly, you know the point that he's trying to make is that in certain exceptional circumstances particular types of cultural products so you know films are books become immaterially unavailable. So you know they exist, but artists thinkers go on do their work as if they don't exist. And in some way, I mean I've just last weekend. I had the opportunity to see Sunil's retrospective, which was, you know, wonderful and quite an emotional moment. And thinking of that as a lot of that material was being reproduced. You know, so it's like that this material existed. It was invisible. And we're just thinking about what is it with time, or with particular moments in histories that make the invisible visible again. Now in Jalal's framing, there was like this is unavailable. And the only way you can make that available again is you have to have a resurrection. And he was sort of writing in the context of film, film scholarship and Hiroshima one or more, but thinking about the remake, or the reconstruction as a way to make these works available. And I wonder if in your sort of three different vantage points that you're coming from particular political affiliations, political human affiliations, or, you know, this, the plane of philosophy and geography that you're mapping out for us, Lila, is if you can think of that, you know, is that idea of the remake or the resurrection. A productive one. And how does one resurrect something that one does not know is missing in the first place. That's a deep question. It's a deep question. I like, I don't have an answer. And of course I sort of want my fellow panellists will have more to say, but I like very much in your question. The absence of agency in this question of temporal appearance that things of themselves become visible again, without us making them so. And that's, that's very generative, because it does happen, you know. I mean, I mean Black Lives Matter and colonialism. For example, is, you know, for many of us who work in critical race studies or postcolonial studies, it's become visible again. You know that there is that question of something that you've known suddenly becoming visible again. I mean, I find that very interesting. I also like then perhaps the possibility that there may be times when what what has been visible may need to go into hiding for a while. And that there is a politics to that. I was just wondering whether I could, you know, sort of tie that into what you were saying Hamad about exhibitions as well. And exhibitions being moments of resurrection, or, and especially retrospective, you know, when we use that language of retrospective as well that there's a sort of, I don't know, Janice face to that isn't there looking back and pointing to a future as well potentially. And Greg, I don't know whether, again, writing your paper at this particular moment, and thinking, you know, you framed it in the context of Sunil's exhibition at the Photographers Gallery and the kind of work of, is it resurrection? I don't know, but the kind of work that an exhibition does in a career, in restaging a history. Yeah, I don't know how well I'm going to be able to answer the question, but no, it's completely, but it really ties in, or I think it touches on an aspect of Sunil Gupta's practice that feels really productive, which is a very kind of, I don't know if this is what you're getting at Hamad, but a kind of very critical, a critical approach to history, I guess, without wanting to reduce it too much, a kind of very, perhaps coming from the perspective of both a queer person, but also someone who is, I'm thinking particularly at exiles here, someone who's left India as well and has had a certain distance from it, a kind of, I guess, a kind of critical sense of competing narratives about national histories, but also about queer histories. And it's completely, it is about kind of remaking and reconstructing and kind of uncovering histories in a way, because that's exactly how these kind of projects were framed, but they, as I say, they kind of bear the marks of that difficulty. They are all that impossibility, potentially, these series. And I wondered part of the little light that went off my head when you were talking about resurrection is what new connections are made and made possible through that remaking actually and whether I should be thinking about these series as not about, I think about them as simple, straightforward kind of claims of visibility or claims of repairing or correcting history, but in making those gestures and not fully completing those gestures. What emerges in that failure, if I can call it failure because I don't think that's the right word. I hope that makes sense as a response, but what new possibilities are possible in doing this. I don't want to come in, you've got your hand raised. Oh, you're on me evening. Hello, can you hear me? Yeah, okay. I'm wondering here if it might be useful to operationalize the concept of charismatic abstraction that Lila so generously offered to us as a way of thinking through these ways of bringing together multiple points of entry. So that we're not thinking about past and present and future as being separate elements, but that they are in this sort of charismatic relationship that they're sort of in a kind of relational engagement with one another that are kind of reversible that is like movement between past present and future, so that each can be read through the other. And I'm wondering too if maybe just in terms of carrying this conversation and threading it through a little bit more of the work that you Greg and Simone have done in your papers. We might think through this idea of charismatic abstraction as a way of thinking through both, let's say the Llewbiana Bienale as a potential site for charismatic abstraction in that it sort of offered the potential of nonviolent epistemologies through perhaps the non-aligned movement on one hand, but also through abstraction and realism on the other hand and I'd sort of be curious to hear you think through what that suggestion might open up to Simone. And then for Greg, these questions of visibility and invisibility and also sort of how we might sort of triangulate different ideas about queerness in India and Britain as they are defined simultaneously against each other and very differently in those two sites. Simone, do you want to come in there? Sure. Thank you, Ming. Can I just quickly get back to what Hamad was saying about before I try to answer to your questioning about the non-visibility at certain times, right Hamad? That's more or less what you were saying. I'm wondering if invisibility is the right way to put it because it's there, it's just that majority doesn't look at it. Is it really invisible or is it about it not being looked at? Well, it's the work that I'm thinking of Piotr Piotowsky, who I quoted in the very beginning of my paper, Polish art historian, who is sadly no more, and I mean he was complaining about the constant invisibility of art histories in former Eastern Europe, central Eastern Europe, and again the invisibility of those art histories with postcolonial studies because they were not part of the former postcolonial world. So it is there, and it is being discussed, but it's just not at a certain time. Do you know what I mean? So I think Ljubliana also, I mean why is there such a huge attraction and attention to Ljubliana at this time, at this point in time? Why was it not 20 years ago? I mean the Ljubliana Bienale, if you live in my part of the world, is a constant. I mean, you know, it's always been there, there have been huge exchanges within just a few places that I put on the map. So the visibility, I think it's really, how to say, I think that obstruction, Lila, that you, that horosnes of obstruction and what is obstruction. So in terms of fine arts, I find it difficult also to define, you know, when does an artist go towards obstruction and rather stay on this side. And I think Krishna Redd in fact is a good example because if you just look at the works that I showed, I mean it becomes slightly different after that period, there could be anything, right? It's not about obstruction, not obstruction, and also I think this act of carving into something, you know, digging something out, I mean that process of digging into the plate, filling the horos with colours so that they don't in the mix, I think there's something really, really essentially in that process also. And to bring it in connection with Ljubljana, I think, as I said earlier, I mean these places offered a possibility to, and I think probably at the moment an artist like Krishna Redd didn't experience it even that way. But bringing work, I mean I read the letters that he exchanged with people in these places and he was keen and, you know, having them shown his works in other places in former Yugoslavia and not many works sold, I suppose he also was interested in making some money, he had a difficult situation financially in Paris. But I think also getting that recognition back from, you know, from outside of Paris, I mean it resulted in him being included in the Paris Biennale of 1963 to be the juror of the graphic section, right? And I think he was one of the first non-French to do that. I think it's just so multifaceted this whole, where were you, obstruction, and places also where do you do what and what does it bring to your process? I think I haven't answered, but perhaps just opened up more questions. That's what we want, especially at the beginning of a multi-part programme like this. Lila, I can see your hand raised. Would you like to join in? Thank you. I just wanted to sort of thank Ming and Simon for their thoughts. And as Simon was talking, I really moved by what you said. And I wanted to sort of emphasise, I suppose, reiterate, also going back to Hamad's question about time, that there's a kind of invisibility that comes when you show something fully. I mean this is sort of Dali's point about camouflage, that there is, and that word recognition that you use. And I think this probably speaks, so I'm speaking here to the deep commitments in Greg's work about, you know, about forms of queer life, that there is a time when you don't have to make visible, because it has become invisible through recognition in Reddy's art. I was so struck by the images you shared and elsewhere that some of that effort. I also find that in Aubrey Williams, you know, that when you show everything fully, it disappears. It loses its, and that's a kind of, of course, a kind of aesthetic point, but also an ethical point, and something about where invisibility might become a political virtue. Ah, it's disappeared. You know, that we've moved on, that something wonderful has happened, we don't need to see this anymore. So anyway, thank you. Thank you, Leela. We have a question from the floor, which I'm going to read out. It's from Tim Baringer, who will be participating in a future session as one of our chairs next, or in conversation rather, with the artist Hugh Lott next week. And Tim's question, it says, our Zoom bummer rightly drew attention to continuities between the imperial and the post colonial. And I wonder if this might offer a way to respond to the Luchans and Pugin architectural forms in Sunil Gupta's imagery. I also wondered about the ways in which Gupta might be challenging the literal and symbolic whiteness of that architecture. India Gate only names white soldiers, leaving the infinitely vuster numbers of Indian soldiers unnamed. Pugin slash Barry's Palace of Westminster emerged from 1980s cleaning as a white stone building, but the Victoria Tower is very visibly black in the photograph in a way that formally echoes the verticality of the south Asian standing figure. Could Gupta be implying that imperial structures always contain dissonant elements that undermine their claims to white supremacy, perhaps cross racial intimacy, a feature of empire from the beginning has always undermined imperial notions of racial hierarchy. Tim, I hope I did justice to your question there. Gregor, it's a lot of process, hopefully you can read that on the screen as well, and just reading it out because the members in the audience can't see always the text. So Gregor, I don't know whether you have any immediate response or thoughts to add to Tim's questions and comments there. Lots. Yeah, I'll try and be coherent in response. These are exactly the kind of questions that I've been trying to think through with these monuments and what they're doing in these images. Absolutely. So thank you. Thank you so much for this. Yes, there is something about, something really interesting, as you say, about the naming and unnaming around India Gate, I think. And again, it's not a simple kind of retort, I don't think there, but it's a question in response. I think what Gupta does in that image and kind of asks what can be named perhaps in this image in response to that refusal, that claim of naming certain people with that monument and not naming others as well. So I think there's an unbelievably huge amount more to kind of unravel from that as well. And I appreciate and thought less actually about Pugin. That's might have been clear. But that's a really helpful comment. I think absolutely, I think that's something really, really, that is something really important. I've tried to dig down into a bit more with pretended family relationships is the kind of cross racial intimacy of all of the images or almost all of the images in that series and the kind of the way that it's both, you know, a discussion that is very much of that kind of section 28, that's right moment, but is also gesturing back to the 19th century kind of constructions of both homosexuality and savagery and colonised peoples as well and those inherently interlinked and long and complicated histories. I think absolutely. So thank you very much for the question. I hope I answered it in some reasonable way. Yeah, thanks so much, Greg. It's, you know, I think with all of these questions and ideas, you know, and here we're thinking out loud that's the purpose of these events like these, I think, isn't it not to to have final words on things but to kind of open up these questions to about the symbolic sites of either, you know, a sculpture of architecture of these spaces that we're looking at the work that the artwork does that, you know, Simone, you were talking about the work that sculpture that as a site of transnational relationships as well and printmaking. I think, you know, again, you've, you've been prompting us to think through these questions of sociality and effect, materially as well as philosophically and symbolically. Ming, do you want to, I can see your hand up so come on in. Oh, you're on mute again. There we go. The last question, Tim's question to Greg made me think a little bit about the distinction that Leela's making between coerced invisibility and embodied invisibility and I was wondering if Leela could say a few words about the relationships between the two and how we negotiate that. Thank you so much. Actually, that seems to be actually really clarifying. It gets to the heart of the matter. Yeah. I think that's the art that is the heart of the matter really, that we need to make a distinction between coerced invisibility and reparative invisibility or voluntary invisibility or committed or conscientious invisibility. And for example, I think, you know, you mentioned in knowledge production, you know, it's very easy to, we know now how to recognise forms of coerced invisibility, you know, sometimes through hyper hyper visibility, you know, I mean this thing about, you know, you know, Chinese philosophy or, you know, black politics as another form of making invisible by qualifying a form of knowledge or refusing to give knowledge its abstraction. I think that's one way of doing it and the other is simply to hide it, to not show it. But I think there may be forms of knowledge, say, say magical forms of knowledge that require incoherence, that precisely require unintelligibility in order to do their work, or forms of healing that cannot be expressed because when they're expressed then they lose their potency, so that what you do, what you do with that demand, this is a knowledge but it makes no sense. You know, and that is the truth of affective argument as well, that it cannot make sense that it is unintelligible, therefore it has to be invisible and inaudible in order to do its work. And it's really a question of knowing that these two things exist not in opposition to each other but in that chiasmus, you know, and we can never be free of the dangers. You know, that that is a kind of tightrope we'd always tread. You know, if you want to respect the invisibility that is integral to something you always run the risk of making that thing invisible. But then that's a risk we take just to be aware that there is a spectrum, I suppose, that there is no immaculacy possible in our politics. Well Lila, walking on tightrope seems to be a wonderful image and metaphor for us to kind of bring these conversations in this part of the panel to, you know, a close on. And to say to you all on the screen, thank you so much for your incredibly rich papers, again, which have opened up ideas and discussion and images and thinking. In ways that were just completely unexpected, which always feels, you know, so refreshing and why you want to do these things, why we want to gather together to explore these ideas and have these conversations. And to thank everyone who joined us today as well for being part of the conversations and, you know, and thinking through these things with us. And we invite you to join us again next week for our next panel, which will be the titles of potential histories and solidarities that's on the third of June. And that will be chaired by Pearl Davun Mukherjee. And with a conversation with the artist Michael Rakavitz and Omar Khalif, and then papers from David Morris and Maryam Ohadi Hamadani. So we hope you will join us for that. And we have another session on the Friday as well, circulation and encounter and lots more things to come throughout the next five weeks. So, again, a big thank you to the events team at the Paul Mellon Centre. These things don't happen without all that infrastructure, navigating the kind of wild landscapes of zoom and the exciting places we can go on it together as a community of people. And yeah, we hope some of you will join us for the more informal meeting by following the link if you've registered for that. So thank you so much for all our speakers and thanks to you all, and we will say goodbye.