 Hi everyone. Hi everyone, we are just allowing a short time for participants to join as the numbers are going up. So good afternoon. My name is Elena Crepa, I'm a curator of modern contemporary British art at Tate. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to today's session, or indeed welcome you back to what has been a truly energizing week of interlacing discussions involving the materiality, gathering of sources, labour and of course ideas underpinning different forms of collage from the post-war period to the present day. Today we are gathering for the last day of this week's webinar, while the conference will continue next week in a different format with two online workshops on Wednesday and Thursday, for which I know many of you have already booked a ticket, and there is also waiting list I think running with a few more spaces I hope to accommodate last minute participants. Today we are here to discuss collage politics and punk practices, a session dedicated primarily to artists who since the 70s and 80s have adopted collage and photo montage as a tool or method to trouble received histories, participate in gender and class struggle, interrogate the ways in which images and identities are constructed and produce new and nuanced histories to reflect the experience of dashboard communities in the UK. I would like to thank all the speakers and chairs contributing to our session today for sharing their research and their insight with us. And before introducing the panel I should just run through some housekeeping. So the session is divided in two panels with a short break halfway. There will be time for discussion and questions after each panel and hopefully also for an overall discussion at the end. So please do engage use the chat function to get in touch and send comments and feedback and type your questions in the Q&A function at the bottom of the bar. The session is being recorded and will be available online and we also have a live transcript function. So it is my great pleasure to introduce Catherine Grant with chairing our first panel. Catherine is senior lecturer in the art and visual cultures department at Gosmyth University of London, and she's currently researching the legacies of feminist histories in contemporary art. Among a recent publications is a letter sent waiting to be received. She is the co editor of Fandom as methodology with Kate random love from 2019, as well as the collection girls girls girls 2011 and creative writing and art history from 2012. She also edited the questionnaire the colonizing history with Dorothy prize for art history, which was published last year. So welcome Catherine and I hand over to you. Thank you very much. Welcome everyone. I've been enjoying this week's conference so much and I'm really delighted to be chairing this first panel on two very important artists Linda sterling and Shaila Kamara vermin. Also, I've enjoyed the writing of both of our speakers for a number of years so our first speaker is Amy Tobin, who is a lecturer in the Department of History of our Cambridge, and also a curator of contemporary programs at Kettle's Yard. She's published her research in tape papers, Mirage women a cultural review and feminist review, along with book chapters in a number of edited books. She's also a co editor of London art worlds mobile contingent and ephemeral networks, and the art of feminism. As you probably know, Amy's curated numerous exhibitions at Kettle's Yard, including the 2020 retrospective of Linda sterling that she will discuss as part of her paper. She's working on a number of amazing upcoming exhibitions, including one that is about to open on the work of should have business. In 19 to 20. Amy was the terror PMC fellow, and she currently has a leave a human research fellowship to work on a new project on art and feminist sisterhoods. And today her paper is entitled, I can't swim I have nightmares, Linda and photo montage, and I'll hand it over to Amy. Thank you Catherine. I hope everyone can see and hear everything as appropriately but just shout out if you can. I step into a white ice box called shiny tube tiny black holes. I close my eyes. I turn it on. I close my eyes. I turn it on. I can't swim. I have nightmares by ludus the post punk band that the artist Linda, sometimes also known as Linda sterling fronted from 1977 to the mid 1980s. The repeating lyrics of the song make up only one portion of the multiple fragmented passages, which also includes the car to drum beats and falls symbol tingles a three part baseline and interjecting run of saxophone prolonged guitar chords and vocal howls. The parts seem separate introduced in fragments that repeat again and again, eventually overlaying in a sonic landscape that emulates the strange reverbs of submerged sound, eventually a new refrain of lyrics. I'm hot, I'm cold, I'm in control, repeat and repeat until the song finishes with a crescendo or the instrumental fragments and voice fragments in sync. The lyrics refer to a shower in a gym in Dean's Gate, Manchester, where Linda practice weight, weightlifting. She describes staring at the shower head, anticipating the prick of icy water and linking this experience to the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock Psycho. The lyrics explained to me nightmares about landscapes flooding tides rising drowning for decades. I can't swim. I have nightmares pushes the nightmarish scenarios of confinement and attack against control and the strength to keep one's head above the water to keep from drowning. The liquid motifs in this emblematic song extend across Linda's work, often only implicitly present and sometimes hidden or frozen in the dried glue that suspend the separate parts of her photo montages together. The song was first released on Ludus's 1980 EP The Visit, which includes four other songs, each a mini thesis on gender, sexuality, domesticity, childhood and menstruation, rendered in commanding shouts, lilting refrains, punchy singing, smooth aria, falsetto calls, shrieks, deep howls and trembling gargles. Linda uses her voice in all kinds of variations, verbal and nonverbal, sometimes melding extra linguistic effect with wordy exhortations. This EP and the subsequent releases over the following five years is not really the music of punk characterised as it was by short, sharp songs with catchy mantras, heavy riffs and speed. Most people claim it as post punk, the intellectual art school version of a working class mode that ripped up convention and made it a new to paraphrase the title of Simon Reynolds influential book. But Ludus and Linda are folded into post punk, where they don't quite fit and connected to punk because of the milieu of the band we're a part of, and particularly because of Linda's connections to Buzzcocks and magazine, in which she famously made artwork for album covers, and with whose members she was good friends. But Ludus's music was not a subsumption to a current, but a wanton disturbance organised around Linda using her voice of language in concert with sound performance and printed matter. Because of the visit and the seduction released a year later in 1981 provide indexes for Linda's interests at this moment, both the monochromatic with graphic paper collages or line drawings that trace profile views of faces mask like representations of the band that also continued in the sleeve. The band also includes a drawing of an abstracted tree signifying menstruation, a theme extended on the back cover in the form of a figure trust in strappy bondage lingerie and menstrual pads. The band was originally titled Blood Sports, referencing both the upper class pastime of Fox hunting and the colloquial term for sex during menstruation. Linda stuck with the theme but opted for the de-anglicised ludus from the Latin for games and sports, as she had done earlier with the transformation of her own name, Linda to Linda. Her style is a kind of collapse of Aubrey Beardsley decadence feminist critique and our edge in the same way that her name, you know, itself performs that that combination. This is an intuitive combination of queer sensuality objection and post industrial grit pointed at the macho chauvinism of the factory scene, as much as to any other establishment. The form I think signals it on the cover but the full force of this collision came to pass in the photo performances, realized with the collaboration of Vera, the live performances with her band of course in the music to. This was a total artwork and Linda's continued to pursue this form in her ballets and Tableau performances, which she's described as expanded collage, often with her powers of bliss which is also a citation from another ludus song vagina gratitude, bringing themes of earlier works into the present. Linda's photo montages often do this complex work on a single surface. Sometimes she brings things together suspended in a dialectical tension familiar from data as montage, but just as often her photo montages achieved a strange kind of synthesis, something that feels right, even if it's visually and Linda has laid clues has laid the clues out in her careful selection of materials for juxtaposition, which are often more proximate than antithetical, as well as her interest in themes like metamorphosis movement and to put it plainly just sticking things together. The photo montages let the chaos in, they admit the desire and the trauma that are otherwise in abeyance. So over the past three years, I've been working with Linda as Catherine said on an exhibition that became Linda Rism at Kettle's yard. The aim of this project was to give Linda, her first kind of survey exhibition in the UK following Linda Femmanger in Paris in 2013, and the group exhibition House of Fame at Nottingham Contemporary in 2018. And there were many, many elements to this exhibition that pulled out themes from her practice relating to performance mysticism, spirituality, memorial body modification, the senses, modernism, many of which entwined with the histories of Kettle's yard. But perhaps one of the most important decisions we made in relation to photo montage was to mark a decisive shift in Linda's use of this form in particular. In the first section of gallery one, we concentrated on earlier works, those made in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many produced over a few months in the winter of 1976 seven, while in the second gallery, we included a selection of photo montages Linda has made since 2005, when she returned to the process in earnest after a break of at least 20 years. Linda and I discussed these two places as a descent into the underground and an ascent to paradise respectively. The underground was the radical hell of her early years, a time of confusion and anger, but also reference to the constraint of continually being associated with an earlier self in an iconic moment. Paradise wasn't any religious heavenly equivalent, but a kind of journey into infinite possibility. The room was called paradise experiments gesturing to the more exploratory, sensuous and pleasurable as we said in the wall text tendencies of the later works contrary to the incisive cuts and interventions of the 70s. And in my essay for the catalog that accompanied the exhibition, which was titled the red period, and rated a transgressive feminism in Linda's art that spills from the earlier to the later works and that purposefully unsettles the taxonomic the structural and the temporal. In the exhibition to Linda and I played with modes of display on the wall and gallery to which raised a narrative progression across diverse works then then prioritize other formal affinities in a dense cluster hang that you see on the screen here. We build her 1970s lingerie masks like sculptural busts, and we let later works creep in between earlier ones, like weeds and place the iconic photo montages and disjunctive rhythms on bright white and vibrant red walls. The aim was to suggest order and land and then let the work resist it. We were precise in our disordering, and we stopped when it stuck. We connect photo montage as this symposium does in its title with the act of cutting and consequently with precision. We associate this precision also with investigation with cut with intervention. And the photo montage photo montage artists can see things differently perhaps more clearly, they can slice through the rhetoric, revealing something marvelous or a comedic effect. And as classic texts which itself, which itself inspired Linda to begin photo montage traces the varieties of technique that range from the didactic to the automatic, the transformation of relationships between familiar objects to magnifying focus. In 1976 when Linda began photo montage was a more direct way of engaging with the printed matter and popular imagery that she had already been drawn to in her practice through drawing and non photo montage I think we could call the work on the bottom. The act of cutting was part of the attraction. It was a means of giving something ugly back to the world made from its images of beauty and desire, both pornographic and consumerist. It was a cool medium without expression, which Linda lent into enjoying the idea of being a Monter, an engineer of culture rather than an artist, something that wittily fulfilled the expectations of her family who cut a deal with her to attend a graphic design course rather than a fine art one, since it had better career prospects. The engineer worked with a scalpel and Linda chose a swan Morton with a number 11 blade that allowed her to trace the outlines of bodies food stuff furniture stationary and other consumer goods from all kinds of paper stock. The artistic associations of the act were not lost on her. She called the works of this moment a cultural post Morton acknowledging the, I can ever say this apocalyptic sensibility of 1970s Britain, especially seen from the aspect of the north. In 1978 she contributed for photo montages to mixed media montages, a portfolio, also including the work of Edward Bell in Pollock George snow and Ian Savage, which was conceived of as a data is dispatch from the end game of bourgeois Britain. While other contributors engaged with world events, urban politics and dilapidated masculinity, Linda turned her attention to kitchens and bedrooms. The other works made that year. She engaged with themes of binding holding and the restriction of the senses to critique the heteronormative and gender normative disciplining of the home. There is much to say about these works and all their various effects, but blindness and or not seeing are important for now. When vision is made a central theme in these works, the eyes of figures are replaced with new ill fitting ones or by technology cameras or televisions instead. Sometimes eyes appears or we can track the burn marks from the cigarette that originally raised them. In the sense these shifts thematize photo montage itself as a process of visual transformation, one aimed at puncturing the culture of spectacle distraction and alienation. But they also speak to Linda's particular experience of sexual abuse of being forced to look at pornographic images as a child as a child by a family member. The narrative to look to be forced to see is problematized in these works, and yet at the same time Linda's combination of pornographic material with scenes of bourgeois domesticity also recirculates this imagery. This is an act of exposure, a revelation of taboo that speaks to the entanglement of trauma and sublimation. There was one work in winterism that always compelled me. And it's from a series Linda made that engages with Barbara Hepworth, in which figures are punctuated by voids in Hepworth Esco style. However, these boys are made by overlaid images of furniture or glassware or cutlery rather than cutting away. The figures are all taken from fashion plates, circa 1970-75, the last years of Hepworth's life when she was physically incapacitated, coincidentally also the early years of the women's liberation movement. This photo montage shows a model Marie Helvin floating in a pool hands on head between strokes with eyes closed, apparently swimming and sleeping. Overlaying her are four crystal bowls, two empty, one containing a lit candle, one a split avocado, sandcore, along with a downturn knife, fork and spoon. The cutlery and bowls are not subject to the same forces as the body in the water. They extend it into space and play upon it. The diagonal line of the three bowls seems to propel outwards, while the parallel lines of the cutlery press down, classic photo montage style. The works in the series transform images of worldly fashionable women with spatial vectors called from modern sculpture. The figures mesh with their environments are punctured by objects of domestic ritual and are suspended in pose, in step or flow. These works are about bodies in space and in the world and in relation, still held in place but subject to flow. This figure that Marie Helvin might be the protagonist of the Luda song on the cusp of drowning for decades as Linda described her nightmares or balancing toward the ascent from the underground. As part of Linda's and we commissioned Linda to make some new works for the house, and these would be cuts in the static carrying first put in place by Jim and Helen Ede, who lived and founded Kettle's Yard before gifting it to the University of Cambridge. And Linda took this opportunity to return some of the multi-sensorial qualities of a home to what is now a museum, what is Kettle's Yard. She made an audio work, a new version of a giant gratitude, and we made Jimmy's recipe for for potpourri. The sense remains of pushing against the fixed tableau of the house to incite new sensorial associations and I think this was a kind of extension of her photo montage process. They refer to objection and cleanliness to femininity and desire and to liquidity and tension with solidity. And this theme in particular was also manifested in a series of glass vessels. Linda made with the with the glass worker Yocan Holtz, which you see on the screen here. These are chimescent forms apparently soft but petrified. They're named for alchemical objects here, Hel Liberada, some opaque and some sprouting thick bolts of wavy hair, some transparent and balanced in care for relation to their surroundings, as if poised to dispense some kind of fragrance. The sensorial interruptions Linda embedded in the house were a means of recalibrating the space, both the specific static feeling that follows decades of museum petrification, and generally the tenor of domesticity. This is a kind of accelerator to motion, which is, I think, a tendency, a drive, perhaps of Linda's recent work. We can see it in her interest in ballet dances or more recently football players, the echo with Merce Cunningham's leaps. In her tuning into the spirit of Ethel Colhoun, and I should say actually just here's a little preview of a of a Linda photo montage before it stuck down on the right hand side of the screen. Before we can also see this drive to motion right in her turning to the spirit of Ethel Colhoun and the autonomitism of her mantic stain technique, which Linda has applied to both printed matter and to actual bodies including her own that sort of still viscosity. In this automatism, Linda has also recently suspended her controlled cutting with scalpel by leaving that tool behind for a pair of dressmaker's shears. These unwieldy tools remove the possibility of precision so that Linda's cuts no longer conform to the edge of reform, but take on new sinuous shapes. These parts are built up on denser surfaces, no longer the found expanses of a single page or a patchwork landscape, but instead spiraling vortexes and vertiginous levels. These photo montages do not speak of disturbance or intervention or drugs to position, I think, but are a kind of condensation of things beyond codification, a transformation that sparks something new. This is most obvious in a new work, this work, which I'm going to show you a part of called and the space like a route, which transforms a super eight film made by the photographer and pornographer Harrison Marks who was featured in earlier works with a series of overlays and interventions images of and from Linda's goose ghost on onto the Marx's banal footage or appear in channels that bisect it. It is Linda's first digital animated moving image work with a cast of new characters and locales, the slow movements of the model protagonists of Marx's footage are divorced from any static relation to the voyeuristic camera. They become choreographic, a scene in which a woman in a bubble bath is, is transformed into something ritual like as her body is interspersed with color filter close ups of hands nails foliage faces and shoes, then juxtaposed with passages of liquid flow and freezing of the fixed enamels of the mantic stain process. This is a fugue like ascendancy away from the mundane pretense of this bathroom scene. And with this work made with the iPhone camera used like a plan shut the balance slips, the control slips and something else opens up in Linda's work beyond the nightmare to something like paradise. Thank you so much, Amy that was a really fabulous presentation and so much there in Linda's work and great to see what, what sort of occurring in her practice right up to the present day. So please think of your questions and we'll have questions together after Alice's paper. So I'm now going to introduce next speaker Alice career who's an art historian, her research examines late 20th century British art, the specific focus on artists of African Caribbean and South Asian heritage. She is currently research curator at touchstones Rochdale, and it is organizing a fantastic looking conference entitled the radical decades art activism and regional galleries in the 1980 Britain, which will take place there in January 2022. She has previously worked to take Britain, the government art collection and Sussex and Saltwood universities. In 2017, she was a mid career fellow at the Paul Mellon Center, where she initiated her ongoing research project, articulating British Asian art histories. She is currently working on a monograph provisionally titled South Asian women artists in Britain, and I really can't wait to read that you need to quickly please. And her articles have appeared in art history, British art studies, Journal of British Visual Culture and the car Journal of contemporary African art, and she's also the chair of trustees of the journal, the text. Welcome to welcome her to present her paper on Shaila Kamari Berman, punk Punjabi protest. Thanks Alice. Thanks. Thanks Catherine. Hello everyone. Let's see. Right. It's fairly astonishing to me that in the time since I wrote my abstract for this conference paper in 2019, Shaila Berman's work has reached an incredible number of people. I don't think any of us. Why. I don't think any of us truly anticipated the overwhelmingly positive public and critical response to her take written winter commission, which was on display earlier last year and earlier this year. And so it continues. This autumn Shaila's neons and collages have been reinstalled and supplemented with new work at Covent Garden. And this installation is on until Sunday so you've got a couple of days to see it. Now throughout her career her works on paper photo silk screen prints and multimedia works have utilized archival family photographs images and master magazines and books, and the material culture of everyday life, and often embellished with jewels, bindi and other decorative elements. Her recent commissions have repeated and reused images motifs and textual phrases found in earlier works, including, for example, her father's ice cream gun, which you can see in the bottom print which is then repeated on the steps of take Britain. Berman's brightly colored often kitsch aesthetic which combines if Indian reference with a sensibility that embraces northern working class culture relies her nuanced and active participation in racial gender and class struggle. If we accept that the material form of collage is steeped in a history of descent, interrogation and destabilization, then it's possible to argue that the form of Berman's engagement with the strategies of collage montage. In addition to her subject matter is a manifestation of her challenge to bourgeois ideals, elitist conceptions of art, and her anti hierarchical approach to art making. Berman has cited Kurt Schwitters as an early influence, and Linda need has posited her work as a reworking of quote, the data data is concept of the found object seen through the filter of 1970s art school punk. Following the decades of into following decades of international neglect black and Asian artists active in Britain during the 1980s the current currently receiving increased attention. On the surface of things her take into commission perhaps shows Berman as a beneficiary of those are historical evaluations. However, the point I want to make in this. So the point I wanted to make in this paper back in 2019 was and I think still stands critical engagement with Berman's work in the field of black British art has been limited to her work in the 1980s. So the critical engagement of any sort in broader art historical studies remains negligible. But despite her persistent use of collage montage and printing techniques that overlay found images, she's curiously absent from accessible publications on collage. If anyone knows of any I'd be really happy to hear about them. There's also a particular silence around her work and using bright vibrant colors from the 1990s and 2000s which I'll discuss a bit later. The state of affairs I think is remarkable given that cobbler Mercer has identified collage as a significant trend in black artist practice across the work of Rashida Reen and Eddie chambers and others. He's noted that a cotton mix aesthetic, whereby artworks comprising handmade and collated images texts and objects were selected manipulated and positioned in proximity. In order to express something of the lived diasporic experience. Indeed, Mercer has argued that the formal dynamics of collage are especially relevant to the hyphenated character of diaspora identities. Today I'm going to introduce two broad categories of Berman's engagement with collage, which I also defined quite broadly. In order to demonstrate her clear understanding of this mode of collating manipulating and juxtaposing images as radical subversive and expressive of a culture that is counter to the mainstream. I will suggest that through her use of collage Berman address the most addresses, the multiplicity of South Asian identities within a British context, proposing that these identities resist homogeneity and stasis. And I'll conclude with some thoughts regarding the critical silences around her work. Berman was one of the first black artists black women artists in the country to produce political work. And one of her most significant works from the 80s was the diptych convenience not love 1987 six to seven, which utilizes the image of Margaret Thatcher and the British to present a scathing indictment of British immigration policy in the post 1945 era, highlighting hypocrisy of successive British governments and provides a commentary on the institutionalized racism that impacted on the everyday lives of ordinary working class people such as Berman and her family. The left hand panel comprises three areas, moving from left to right, a jostling column of police and male figures in circle a photocopy of the South African athlete, Zola bud. So the right of these is a fit to these figures is a old now new style British passport in the windows of the passport is a script written by the artist father, which reads, you allow us to come here on false promises. We come here full of hope and destiny. You have no mercy. We will struggle and survive. Long live, long live, long live. Overlapping the passport and encroaching onto the adjacent field of gold is barbed wire, which leads us to the figure of Margaret Thatcher dressed in John Ball standing in front of the Union flag. A vivid green speech bubble expands from her mouth and the words in Gothic script reads that if there's any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile. The words were spoken by that during a television interview in 1978 and refer to the fears of ordinary white British people that their country might be swamped with foreigners should immigration levels remain the same. In the interview that you would go on to suggest that immigration from Commonwealth from the Commonwealth, and particular from Pakistan was unsustainable. The Berman's use of Thatcher can be placed within a wider narrative of satirical photo montage from the 80s. But what's important here is the isolation of the Prime Minister on the Golden Grand. As Dawn Addis has proposed in constructing a collage, the isolation of an object can be as important as its incongruous juxtapositions. By looking towards her right that she seems to be speaking to and about the people who populate Berman's right hand panel where family photographs manipulated found images hand drawn cartoon strip imagery circulate around a row of passports from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. When the work was first shown at Cooper Gallery in Barnsley in 1988, you can see that the work was shown in the reverse order, but you can also perhaps see that the assemblage on the, what is now the left, the right hand panel sorry, was a bit sparser and also doesn't have the Sri Lankan passport, which was added to later date so you might want to think about how Berman continues to reformulate and manipulate her collages. And here is an example of how Shaila has intervened with her source material. In the distance, this panel appears as a manifestation of the swarms of Asian people, chaotically positioned who threatened to spill over into the sparsely populated gold and pleasant land that thatcher so fiercely protects. The visual excess mimics thatcher's swamping metaphor or simultaneously critiquing her isolationism. In a closer examination, we can see that Berman's collaged images are not co as chaotically positioned but are in fact I think quite orderly images overlap and frequently they're given their own space and leave the eye around the central row of passports in syncopated rhythms. The larger images anchoring the smaller ones. The less as even leave low max observed in her discussion of montage, no matter how tightly controlled, something will always exceed something will always spill over break out to disrupt and displace. And this will bring as much fear is joy, as much pleasure as pain. I suggest here that Berman's use of collage to activate this tension uses this uses collage to activate this tension and anticipation of pretend the potential spillage to consider all of effect in this work. The presentation of collage also articulates the anti essentialist understanding of South Asian identity. Indeed, the presence of the four passports, where in the presence of the full passports, there is a resistance to the notion that people from diverse cultures from a vast geographical area can be reduced to a single nomenclature. In their quotidian planet, Berman's assemblages of images demonstrates a reflexive awareness of history representation and the importance of images in shaping social attitudes towards race and gender. So throughout her career, Berman has had has had a clear ambition to draw attention to the complexity and multifaceted nature of female British identity, but female British Asian identities. In the left hand corner of the panel, she includes an image of women crouched despondently, citing this image as an example of the stereotype that cast South Asian women as meek and passive victims. Berman challenges its veracity in its antagonistic proximity to other images of Berman and her family of women on picket lines with placards, unequivocally stating, we will not be slaves. She harnesses the operation of collage in order to cut, break, open up and expand the range of visual reference about and available to women of South Asian heritage. In her choice and juxtaposition of images that challenge reductive stereotypes, Berman also constructed a matrilineal history of resilient and powerful women, which includes the Rani of Jansai, who in 1857, was the Indian rebellion against the British in India, with participants in the industrial action at the Gromwick Film Processing Laboratory in London in 1976 to seven. As such she creates a dialogic space for rethinking South Asian female identities. And it's my contention here that Berman's point is underscored by her mode of working, where as Lomax asserted, the politics of montage concerns the way in which we negotiate heterogeneity and multiplicity. Now Berman's highly nuanced engagements with the vicissitudes of South Asian womenhood as a vinced inconvenience not love is reiterated in her pop photo montage self portraits from the 1990s. The series of works collectively titled auto portraits utilize multiple repeated and resized photographs presented in a hyper vibrant color palette. In 28 positions and 35 years, Berman offers 28 psychedelic self portraits presented in a grid images have been manipulated. In the past, Berman has been marked repeated inflict locked stripes, swelling spirals dots dashes and linear rays rendered in an array of yellow pink green, blue, variously overlap the photographic images, and collectively create a frenetic composition, which demands the viewers attention, but resists a settled viewing experience. It's interesting that David Miller was talking about collage and the Beatles in his opening talk. And I wondered whether there is reference to a sort of a Liverpool Ian Beatles visual culture in Shaila's work. But of course this work and this Richard Avedon and poster clearly also refers to the Beatles psychedelic trip to India. And with this, I'd like to return to my earlier question about how do we account for the critical silences around Berman's work from the 1990s and 2000s. It's not insignificant that the first of her works to enter the take collection were gritty and somber etchings and photographs made in the early 1980s that addressed issues. The anti apartheid struggle anti and anti nuclear protest, which could be more easily accommodated within narratives of protest art at the time. And so if your land though has suggested that Berman's work quote resists interpretation, but I don't think that this is entirely right. Instead of being resistant to critical interpretation, I would like to propose that these vibrant collages and sculptures fall foul of a number of intersecting biases within our history, including, but not limited to chromophobia racism and misogyny. Now David bachelor has discussed, as he David bachelor has discussed, there is a pervasive chromophobia within Western aesthetics, and it's my contention that Berman's work particularly that those works from this period that you can see on screen, have been dismissed as too bright, too frenetic, and simply too much. Berman has asserted that across Western art quote color has been systematically marginalized reviled diminished and down degraded bright color he explains has become regarded as other, usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive the infantile, but vulgar, the queer, or the pathological. Perhaps been too easy to regard Berman's use of so called feminine normal Western color in these hierarchical elitist and dismissive terms. We can expand upon bachelor's proposition of color as synonymous with primitive or oriental through path omitted important work on the reception of Indian art in Britain. In the landmark book much maligned monsters, a history of European reactions to Indian art. Mitter demonstrated that quote colonial art historians, almost without exception, were disturbed by the rich polychrome surface decoration of South Indian temples, which they described as tasteless, overwrite and decadent. I'm going to explain that quote far from being natural these stylistic categories were essentially neoclassical criticisms of non classical art, which failed to. So the criticism was that these were non classical artworks, and they failed to replicate what Vinckelman saw as the noble simplicity and quite grandeur of Greek art. What does this mean. So what does it mean to collage the temple of British art with its neoclassical columns and refined grandeur with bright neon and ornate stylings of a Scouse Punjabi punk feminist. The collage was in question with the joyous bright sparkly and flamboyant placing Hindu icons female Bollywood actors and decorative pattern works across the facade of the gallery. It was also an act of the disruption, which amongst other things demanded a reconsideration of how the gallery acts as gatekeeper as an arbiter of good taste, and how and we might well wonder if and when her psychedelic work will crush the threshold or even move beyond the anti room into the main gallery. So to conclude, as a subversive challenge to colonialism and the legacies of colonialism which underpin narratives of British art narratives which failed to make space for artists working with with South Asian visual culture. I'm highly right that the grand public face of the national collection was glitter bombed with South Asian excess that both unsettled aesthetic convention and national parameters. Through her mashup, the mixing and manipulation of found made collated visual resources. Berman unapologetically challenges ethno national exclusions and ruptures European aesthetic niceties. Her mission was an evolution of her early engagement with collage and her experiments with color during the 1990s. Conjoining the spectacular of pop with a diasporic hybridity combining the simulacral and referential. Berman demonstrates that serious themes can be addressed in forms that initially seem incongruous. They should be properly regarded as knowingly nuanced and playful engagements with the complexity and multicultural nature of contemporary Britain. Thank you. Thank you so much Alice that was a really fantastic presentation and really gave an insight into Berman's practice. Again, right up to the present. I think what sort of joins both of these presentations is trying to think about two artists whose practice has kind of spread across a number of decades and putting them alongside each other kind of really draws out their differences as well. And that's something might explore in the questions as thinking about the contrast between all the eyes and Berman's self portraits and all the kind of sort of blindness or kind of closed eyes or absent faces in linders and how they kind of differently access histories of collage both very politically but sort of in I would say into quite different traditions. I would encourage people to type any questions they have into the Q&A box. We have got 15 minutes for questions now. I think that Amna Malik has already posted some questions. Great to have you here Amna and thank you for your questions. So what I'll do is I'll turn to her questions and I'll read them out she's got one question for Amy and then one question for Alice. And this question to Amy is, can you say something more about Linda's 2015 optimism titled collage and collage as a process of punk possibilities with a tongue twister. Yeah, yeah, so those are the super automatism series I think which are usually or their combinations of either ballet dancers or sort of these health magazine figures figures taken from health magazines, which have the the mantic stain technique overlaid on the surface. So those I think well it's interesting because we in the exhibition we didn't really call these works photo montages right because they're not there. There's a page of magazine with enamel and that they were one of those things that kind of crept into these, you know, unsettling the taxonomies mode that we were trying to kind of do. Under this kind of under the cover of the like hyper organization of this exhibition which was somebody described to me as very academically curated which I thought was a bit critical. So what do they have to do with punk. I don't know really I mean I think punk is a kind of difficult word in that it means so many different things to so many people and also like the same thing to others. I think, to me those works speak more to surrealism or to like spiritualism things that have long been interested when there's from the 70s you know to the present and a much, much more important in a way than some of those kind of punk associations as they manifested in music culture in the in the mid 70s, but I think you probably could read them as punk small P in lots of ways in terms of thinking about, you know, going against the grain of kind of established knowledge and epistemology. Thank you. And now there's a question for Alice, again from Amna Malik. Alice, could you say something about the sense of excess in Shilah's work and Orientalism, and I think you started to address this at the end in your really interesting discussion of primophobia. But I don't know if you'd like to elaborate on that at all. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for your question. I'm going to say this is really new, and it's only something I've been thinking about recently in preparation for this today, and it's. Just thinking about part of what part of this was writing about in terms of European receptions of Indian art as excessive as seeing Indian temples as excessive and over stylized. And one of the words that was used that myth identifies. One of the words that was used was describe these temples and individual culture as decadent, and pejoratively, and I think we can perhaps see that in the relation between art history and the rise and fall of, of decoration and ornament, and how there is a moment of Victorian moment where the decorative is highly praised and valued at a moment of high colonialism. And then, and then we get the stripping back of, of, of ornament and decoration in minimalism and I think there is something about that rise and fall in our history that I want to explore in relation to Shaila's work and way in which she is currently using neon, that is different to the history of the use of neon in contemporary art. So how is Shaila's work in neon different to Bruce Nauman's, for example, I think there's lots of things to unpick and I'm still really at the beginning of that. Thank you Alice. And, and I don't know if you want to come in with any comments if you want, if you want to, I think that is a possibility. But in the meantime, I'm going to go to a question from Victoria Horn, and she says fantastic papers, thank you. Yes, both of your papers address collage in an expanded sense beyond the page. Could you explain how you have chosen to find collage. And this is something I think is so active in both of their practices that we kind of know them most for their kind of their paper based collage works but what both your presentation showed us was how they then take that sensibility into all different kinds of practices so I don't know which one of you would like to go first on that. I can go Amy if you want. So, Shaila's work, if you look at the expanded her expanded body of work. She repeats and reuses and reformulates the same motifs again and again so in in her current Covent Garden installation she has the tiger the tiger was in the, in the take Britain commission the tiger features on top of her dad's ice cream van there. So these motifs repeat. And if we're thinking about collage and in an expanded sense of the, the, the reiteration of motifs in different ways and in different places in order to unpick what that motif might be. I think we have to look at color understands collage beyond the, the piece of paper. I mean, it's, it's the way my understanding of how Shaila works is that she has these ideas and the circulating in her head and she has this memory bank of images that she will call draw upon and call her eyes, according to the situation or the thing that she's working on. So, to say that collage is this one technique of cutting and pasting on paper I think is sort of antithetical to her way of working. Thank you. Amy, do you want to respond in terms of Linda's practice. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question because it is a word that sometimes gets thrown around. And in Linda's case maybe the way I would think about it is that actually printed matter and so photo montage right specifically rather than collage was really important in helping to, helping her to define a practice in the 70s when she was drawing from films and magazines or kind of starting to use printed materials in relation to other papers. So paper and the specificity of photo montage and collage to that material I think is important to Linda's work, but I also think there's an over emphasis on the idea of the cuts and I'll fully open up to that, you know, you know, I definitely sort of started off that project of thinking about Linda's work through intervention and cutting and incision. But, you know, more and more, and really led by Linda I think what's important is the sticking and the glue and this kind of materiality that could move beyond just the paper just the image just the flat surface and I think the glue is a nice way to think about how that's already inherent in those modes and Linda's work, you know, by its existence kind of goes into all of these different expanded terrains. Thank you. I think a history of collage that focuses on glue could be really interesting and maybe joins up with the idea of the glitter bomb. And I've got these two models, this sort of water like trying to sort of return to the water in Linda and then this sort of glitter bomb in Shilah's work and like these two different models of kind of reconfiguring sort of available material. Anyway, I'm going to return to the questions. Thank you for those responses. I've got a question from Nicholas Brown again for Alice. Thanks Alice, that was a brilliant presentation. It's a really good point about the critical erasure of the later works of many of the 1980s BM artists. I feel some of Berman's 1990s works such as the auto portraits have been exhibited in a number of shows over the last decade, but that these shows haven't been reviewed to his knowledge in any mainstream British art press. Do you have any further thoughts on possible reasons for this in attention. Thanks Nicholas. Yeah, it's a really important question and one that I've been grappling with myself in as much as you know in identifying the fact that the works from the 1990s and early 2000s haven't been discussed broadly. I have to see myself as being complicit in that in in as much as my first engagement academically with Shilah's work was with the works from the 1980s. I have to ask myself, well, why was it that I felt more comfortable working on those clearly political works rather than the bright pop pink stuff. And even when we know that those works have been widely reproduced there on this on the front cover. I was just looking at one this morning and now I can't see it. And so, and why don't I think these works have been looked at I think, I think there is a real problem with the ways in which art history historicizes artists into a cultural art historical moment of the eight of 80s and very hard to look at an sense of an artist's work across decades unless you're doing a big monographic retrospective. And I said I think, I think there's a hesitancy in with the 1990s work that at that moment. There was a resistance to overtly feminist works. There was a resistance to overtly girly works I mean I think Shilah's talked about her workers wanting as being girly and liking pink and fluffy stuff. And unashamedly and why not. But if you think about the 90s we have a lad culture we have. We have the ladette, and that kind of framing of gender politics. It fits within that frame of gender politics in the 90s. So I think that's one reason and and as I said, I'm just beginning to think about sort of an art historical, a broader historical approach to artists who are using South Asian visual culture in their work and a and a historical resistance to that type of work that doesn't conform to clean lines and balanced forms and and that's not to say that Shilah's work isn't balanced, but it's, it's all over. But it's again I find it fascinating that that that Berman's collages aren't aren't talked about in relation to Hannah Hox all over college colleges but yeah I don't know if that answers the question, Nicholas, but I think so thank you Alice and we're running out of time so I'm going to end on one last question, which has sort of epic implications so I'm going to ask it and I'll turn to Amy first and but maybe both of you can keep your comments brief so Helen leg asks if the speakers might speak to the class and regional status of the artist and whether this has impacted on the reception of their work. Yes, I would say substantially and there I mean there are lots of different directions one could take a response to this question and I think maybe the one that's most generous would be that there are things in in Linda's like that I think aren't really legible. If you don't think about the region, the region in that particular moment by the region I mean the north of England and Linda is has experience of Liverpool and Manchester and and lots of other places in the northwest. And I think if you don't have a sense of those places and the kind of cities and seaside towns then you maybe lose something in translation and there's also a thing that we talked about a lot and have discussed with lots of other people is this idea of what Linda calls glamour in her work and to pick up on some of what she's been saying about girliness you know this idea of wanting to like harness some of the magic right of dressing up or performing or transforming oneself and femininity maybe also. And I think that's something that, you know, is is takes a particular shape in the Northwest, and it's very interesting and interestingly manifested in Linda's work. That sounds like a wonderful extra paper Alice do you want to answer that question very briefly or do you want to. I'm just going to say what Amy said. And also, I always love the, the kind of the idea of glamour as being a spell, you know, because that's like one of them and they're sort of feminist writing on that and so both artists I think kind of create spells in their colleges. Thank you so much to both Alice and Amy and to all the people who've put forward questions. I also believe that Charlotte Berman and Linda sterling are in the audience so I just like to thank them both for their amazing work. I'm sure on behalf of everyone here, and I'll hand over to Elena to say about what happens next. Thank you so much everyone we take a very brief break maximum five minutes so we are back around 12 past one. See you very soon. Welcome back everyone for another panel and questions indeed the last of the last one of our week of discussions we are running slightly late so hopefully you can stay with us a bit longer if we need to run a bit for a multi panel discussion. And it is now my pleasure to introduce the chair of our second panel, Elizabeth rebels lecturer in contemporary art at the University of Bristol. Elizabeth is currently undertaking a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship for a project entitled making waves. Black artist and black art in Britain from 1963 to 1982. And among the recent publications are collage and recollection three back three black British artists which was published in was appearing in 2019. And also is co editor with Dorothy price of after the black arts movement framing the critical debate from 2020 so over to you, Elizabeth. Thank you, Elena. Good afternoon everybody. And thank you for all the to all the organizers and to you at home for joining us. So it's my great pleasure to chair this afternoon session and to introduce our speakers will continue to unravel the themes on the politics of collage and punk practices that were opened up so brilliantly by Allison Amy in the previous panel. The speaker will be Allison Thompson, who will draw our focus to the class aesthetics and the work of artists on your voice. Allison is an art historian and curator based in Barbados. She teaches in the vision of fine arts at the Barbados Community College, and as co director with you in Atkinson a punch creative arena and initiative for creative action. She has a wide range of cultural organizations including Barbados National Art Gallery board, the black diaspora visual arts project icon Barbados, and as a president of a ICA Southern Caribbean. She's the co author of art and Barbados what kind of mirror image, and is co editor of curating in the Caribbean and the forthcoming collection liberation begins in the imagination writings on British Caribbean art. And then turn to Chandra Frank who will lead us in looking and thinking through and around the fragmentations and glimmers with an archival experimentations with collage and key works by Martina Ateel and Rohanna Simone. She is a feminist researcher whose work lays at the intersections of archives, waterways, gender sexuality and race for curatorial practice explores the politics of care experimental forms of narration and the colonial grammar embedded within display and exhibition arrangements. She is a PhD from the department of media communications and cultural studies with an emphasis on queer and feminist studies from Goldsmiths University of London. She's published in peer reviewed journals and exhibition catalogs, including feminist review the small acts the LOS a catalog, the places here publication and the collection tongues. She recently co edited a special issue on archives for feminist review. The publication and current book project look at the everyday experiences of the transnational feminist and queer black migrant and refugee movement in the Netherlands during the 1980s, and the role of the archive therein. She's currently post doctoral fellow even at the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati. Thank you very much and Allison over to you. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Lizzie. Share my screen. There we go. All right. I'd like to thank the organizers, the conveners and the presenters who have all contributed to making this such a rich event. I feel very fortunate that I'm presenting on the last day and have the benefit of some really fascinating and diverse presentations that have preceded me. I particularly want to thank Elena Crippa for some of the suggestions that she made early on in conceiving this paper and of course on your voice for a whole range of reasons but in this context for the images of her recent installation in Manchester that she shared with me. The title of my presentation today is Come Together Collaged Aesthetics in the Work of Sonia Boyce. One of the most important recurring themes in the career of artist Sonia Boyce, which now spans almost four decades, is her fascination with bringing seemingly disparate elements together to see what new meanings might be generated. And Tarzan Durambo, English born native, considers her relationship to the constructed self-image and her roots in reconstruction from 1987. This marks an important transition in her early work from her large pastel drawings of domestic interiors to a more confrontational and radicalized commentary that relies on the colossal assemblage of diverse images and materials, and troubling relationships and juxtapositions aimed at interrogating the ways in which images as well as identities are constructed. Boyce's work the following decades focused increasingly on collaboration and performance, but I will argue her early interest in collage has informed much of this work, which can be regarded as a kind of social collage. This is a significant not only in placing performers and participants in context, which are strange or unusual for them, and in the way in which they are often asked to collaborate, but also the ways in which the materials or documents of the performance are then assembled as installations. A good example of this is Six Acts from 2018, a six channel video mounted on an intricately designed wallpaper background commissioned by the Manchester Art Gallery as part of an ongoing series of invited interventions. Six Acts was presented as part of Boyce's 2018 retrospective exhibition that focused on her performative collaborations. The approach adopted by the intervention is one the artists has utilized before, engaging with communities, inviting others to perform for her in spontaneous, improvisatory, and largely unpredictable ways with complete openness to unexpected outcomes as a way to mitigate how we negotiate the dynamics of power structures and difference. The reaction to this work however was surprising in fact shocking for the artist, the curator and the gallery, and has provided rich terrain to think through the contested relationships between institutions and the individual, particularly given the events of the last couple of years. This was a faceted performance event as well as a subsequent compiling and layering of imagery in the final installation, reflected collage aesthetic which is often informed by Boyce's fascination with the work of the data artists. Like them, she recognizes the way that collage, whether two dimensional expanded into three dimensional installations or collaborative and spontaneous performance has been used to challenge established and institutionalized power structures. It disrupts traditional forms and familiar narratives, thereby opening up new readings and alternative ways forward. These social collages can also be linked to feminist queer and diasporic aesthetics. What Stuart Hall has called the condensation of a series of overlapping interlocking, but non corresponding histories. Born in 1962 to parents who migrated from Barbados and Guyana as part of the Windrush generation. Sonya Boyce OBE is described as a British Afro Caribbean artist, who gained prominence as part of the black arts movement in the UK in the early and mid 1980s with a series of large pastel drawings in which she represented herself in domestic interiors. She is in a very position to from 1985 is one such example. While these works reference experiences of growing up in a Caribbean household within the diaspora. They focus on the tensions of power dynamics in the intersections of gender sexuality race and class themes that have remained central to her practice. She represented twice in two contrasting or juxtaposed postures. The figure on the left is a more contained is in a more contained position with eyes closed, hands joined in prayer suggesting her faithful devotion to the church reinforced by the cross hanging on the wall above. The figure on the right wearing a red head wrap which voice associated with the rest of far eye movement is placed in a more dynamic active pose or hand raised as a gesture of resistance. The figure reads, they say keep politics out of religion and religion out of politics large look my trials now, but when were they ever separate large give me strength. The personal is political is a feminist dictum that resonated with voice at this time. While these early scenes were typically located in a domestic interior. The subjective experience spoke to the larger complexities within society. Here the resistance of a younger generation born in the UK to the traditional values of their immigrant parents values entrenched in in institutions such as the Christian church, which here becomes synonymous with European imperialism. A message reiterated in the title inscribed above the figures missionary position, followed by the words position changing. Voice typically devote significant attention to the decor, particularly the proliferation of patterns seen in the details of the wallpaper and carpet that create a flattened collage like backdrop as well as other carefully displayed ornaments recording the domestic setting of her family home and by extension, those of West Indian homes more generally, which would later become the subject of Michael McMillan's front room project. Judah teal and her brilliant presentation yesterday described the influence of these works by voice on her early work of the 80s and in fact, Sonya collaborated with the teal and the set of dreaming rivers. Voices said, my use of pattern owes a lot to my mother's house your eyes can't stop blinking for all the pattern in the house. When you go into the living room there are patterns everywhere on the carpet on the curtains on the wallpaper on the ceiling. They have their own coordination. I realized I was including my mother's influence or rather a West Indian sense of decoration. The patterns aren't simply there to decorate, but they're there to give clues to the picture. This becomes explicit in the four panel work lay back keep quiet and think of what made Britain so great. Here boys has appropriated and altered a wallpaper pattern that was originally designed as a tribute to the 50th year of Queen Victoria's reign. Windows which open into scenes of Britain's colonial exploits are transformed into crosses. She also incorporates the Victorian wallpaper patterns of William Morris. Changing the red rose of the Englishness to black. In the fourth panel boys appears staring directly at the viewer as she often does requiring more from us than just easy passive spectatorship. Jolene Tower dross writes that the equivocal the equivocal nature of the rose, whose fragility and beauty is combined with the sharpness and intractability of its thorns becomes a metaphor for the ambivalence. Not only a Britishness but also a blackness and femininity. She ain't holding them up she's holding on from 1986 the wallpaper background the black rose pattern the ornamental birds, all seen in earlier works reappear here, as does the doubling of the self portrait. Voice reappearing as a younger version of herself and the family portrait she balances above her head photographs become increasingly important points of reference which incorporates into the image. Not only the source material but also as physical material itself to be painted over photocopied and pasted voice later explained, it was the beginning of the end of drawing for me. After completing she ain't holding them up she's holding on. I knew there weren't, I knew there were a number of things about the way I work that needed to change. There was no way of working of creating work that spoke to the political issues she wanted to address, one that more directly responded to her desire to deconstruct the prevailing languages and traditions of modernism. Echoing Paul Gilroy's argument on the centrality of the black Atlantic diasporic experience to the project of modernism boy said, one of the key things that I felt when I was at college was that modernism though opposed as a universal language curtailed the idea of me being a modernist in the virtue of my being black and female. The challenge she recounts was to find a visual language to adequately describe the diasporic experience. In a recent essay on two early collages by Rashida Rean and Eddie Chambers from the 1970s, Sonya argues for the links between the materiality of collage and its ability to speak politically, and she quotes Massimiliano Johnny. In its origin collage has appeared as an art of crisis that has entertained a deep relationship with trauma and violation. There is something basic and collage something almost guttural and visceral that immediately connects it with rupture and intervention. It's this sense of urgency that ricochets all through the 20th century with collage and its symbolic collisions resurfacing almost systematically at every new resurgence of collective panic and social change. This transition in her use of mixed media. Particularly photographs is evident in works such as cricket days domino nights young arrivals new home homeless the streets are paid with gold in this green pleasant land from 1986. Interior from 1988 talking presence, 88 from someone else's fear fantasy to metamorphosis. Our draw says remarked on voices affinity for long often convoluted and ironic or mocking titles that play with the idea of multiple and overlapping meanings and polyphonic voices from Tarzan to Rambo English born native considers her relationship to the constructed self image and her roots and reconstruction is constructed self image incorporating photo booth snapshots juxtaposed with racist images from comic books and magazines and transferred images of printed textiles and plants. The work points to the complicity of colonial ethnographic photography minstrel read Hollywood films and children's books in the continued exoticization of blackness in British and American popular culture, and the often uncritical way in which they are consumed by audiences, both black and white. I put this up to emphasize really you know that often the surprising scale of a number of these collages, these works. It's significant also to point out that missionary position to and from Tarzan to Rambo were acquired by Tate in 1987 when voice was only 25 years old. Even more remarkable this was only the fifth time the institution had acquired the work of a female artist, and the very first from a black woman. I say this in relation to voice is growing interest in museums, they're collecting practices, and their traditions of display. PEEP is a 1992 intervention at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, working with the museum's collection of African and Oceanic sculptures and making use of the dramatic lighting employed in museum displays. Voice traced the shadows cast by the objects onto opaque tracing paper. She then cut out the shakes and used the paper to line the glass cases temporarily obscuring or interrupting the view of the sculpture inside. Voice's intervention focuses the viewer's attention on museological practices of display, as well as the audience's voyeuristic desire to look again a theme should be returned to notably in six acts. The two screen video in video entitled crop over was another collaboration with museums here here would house and leads and the Barbados Museum and Historical Society in Barbados. It was produced in 2007 to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade. Here would house remains the property of the less sell family, who acquired their fortune in Barbados and Jamaica in the 17th and 18th century through the buying and trading of plantations and slaves. Unlike pre lentin carnivals in Trinidad and martinique and much of the Caribbean crop over is a harvest festival, marking the end of the sugar cane season in early August and as such has direct ties to the plantation system of slave labor and the transatlantic trade that fueled the British Empire. Voice's film seeks to excavate these origins from the contemporary tourist friendly street party that is marketed and celebrated today. She makes great use of juxtaposition juxtapositions here, allowing the popular folk characters to transgress carefully demarcated boundaries that sought to contain the short lived bacchanalia of mockery cross dressing and power inversions. The carnival ask would seem to share much with the aesthetic of collage. It's playful and irreverent masking the flaunting of traditions and hierarchies, the repurposing of materials. As a tool of arguably incomparable social critique and cohesion, the loss of which has been so acutely felt with its recent cancellations across the globe. Six acts. Revives much of the spirit of carnival ask with its ability to expose and mock the refined cultural practices of the elite. It was commissioned by the Manchester art gallery as part of its ongoing program the gallery takeover and name which seems to invite the subversive practices of carnival, which asks contemporary artists to respond to the permanent displays. The takeover began with a series of conversations with which voice began with the museum staff and volunteers about the permanent collection and how it's displayed and interpreted voice and a group of gallery staff came specifically interested in gallery 10 titled the pursuit of beauty, where a number of mafia like works were displayed. There was a mark preponderance of naked girls and women, either in the guise of the femme fatale or assuming poses of passivity, particularly concerning where reports at gallery 10 was popular with young girls who enjoyed taking selfies in front of the paintings and older men who came to watch them. Voice was also drawn to a portrait of a black man by James Northcott titled off fellow the more of Venice. We learned that this was actually a portrait of the renowned Shakespearean actor Ivor Aldrich, and that this portrait was the first work acquired by the gallery in 1882. Voice noted, it was this work that sparked the conversation that was to unfold. For me, this is a very lush painting, Ira Aldrich in all his theatricality looks like a dandy. Incidentally, Shakespeare is often associated with the term drag dress resembling a girl, non binary gender representation was on the agenda. The takeover aspect of the project which took the form of an evening performance in January 2018 when gallery 10 was temporarily renamed whose power on display. Sonya invited five drag performance artists to respond to various works in the gallery. The artist's working method, while she selected the performers and set the parameters in which the event would occur. At a certain point she relinquished control, becoming a witness herself to the unfolding events. In discussion with the museum staff, it was decided that the sixth act would be the temporary removal of waterhouses painting high list and the nymphs. The work was replaced with a notice explaining that a temporary space had been left to prompt conversations about how we display and interpret artworks in Manchester's public collection. Members of the public were then invited to react by adding comments on Post-it notes which were collaged onto the surrounding wall. This final action generated an overwhelming reaction, some of it positive, positive, much of it negative, not only on the Post-it notes but on the museum's social media and an exhibition reviews. The gallery takeover was filmed and photographed. Voice then used this material to create a six screen video. The monitor is mounted over voice's signature wallpaper. Here a collage of images of the performers framed by swags of leaves and apples, very much in the tradition of the early Victorian designs. It's interesting to look back three years later with the intervening controversy over the taking down of statues and the debates over exclusionary and racist practices within the museum profession. Felipe Espinosa-Garita and Ana Cristina Mendez write museums and their painstakingly curated construction of history are increasingly being scrutinized for their heteronormative, androcentric and decisively white biases, often through museum interventions. In an examination of Voice's six acts, these authors discussed the Victorian representational paradigms. It's excluding iconographies which become sites to negotiate not only hospitality but hostility in the museum space. According to Derrida, and it was interesting that Judah Attila also made this reference yesterday in her presentation. By revisiting and rearranging Meg's permanent collection and inter- sorry, by revisiting and rearranging Meg's permanent collection and interrelatedly the Victorian cultural legacies of art curation, the authors write. Six acts makes visible and deconstruct Britain's institutionalized, gendered and racialized discourses of conditional and sometimes withheld museum hospitality. At the same time, it inscribes itself into them as an artifact working towards a more inclusive and self-reflexive neo-Victorian approach to museum hospitality. During the process of removing the Waterhouse painting, Clara Gannaway, the gallery's curator said, for me personally there's a sense of embarrassment that we haven't dealt with it sooner. We've collectively forgotten to look at this space and think about it properly. While the takeover interventions have traditionally been intended to be temporary, the Manchester Art Gallery was able to acquire six acts as part of its permanent collection and it is now located in gallery 10. The power of collage and the collage aesthetic is not only in what it constructs but in what it opens up and pulls apart and the space it makes for other ways of experiencing and expressing and knowing. Thank you. Hello, everybody. Sorry about that. My, um, international. Lovely. Thank you so much, Alison. I'm Shandra, over to you. Thank you so much for the previous presentations. It's been really interesting to listen in and to engage. So I wanted to speak today about ideas related to archives, fragmentation, diaspora, and ideas of movement. And I wanted to do it slightly different in that I wanted to, sorry, I wanted to use a 2017 conversation that I have had with Rahana Zaman, who's a London based artist. And her practice is concerned with the effect of multiple social dynamics on how individuals and groups relate. Her narrative based pieces, often that pan and neurotic are frequently generated through conversation and collaboration with others. And so Rahana had invited me to be in conversation in 2017 after a screening of around as I was video tell me the story of all these things. And dreaming rivers by Judah, too. And I hope by now, Julia till doesn't need introduction. I'm excited to, to think about both of these works. So here by a still of Rahana Zaman's work. So in tell me the story of all these things Rahana Zaman presents a conversation and cooking demonstration with her two sisters. One sister speaks about what it means to navigate the trains of womanhood partnership religion and sexuality. And the other sister remains more on the margins. These encounters are contrasted with screenshots from the e learning to prevent which is a training program and introduction to the prevent duty aimed to and I quote, safeguard vulnerable from being racialized in relationship to terrorism and a quote and an animated amorphous figure that submerges within a desert like landscape. In our conversations and reflections on Zaman's work and a sales dreaming rivers. We weren't so much looking for an overlap or similarity. Rather we started the conversation by contemplating narrative structures and creating creative practices using to explore migratory experiences. A till dreaming rivers which I know has been referenced yesterday and I'm just including a screenshot of an essay that I wrote for a wonderful catalog the places here, which is actually edited by Nick icons and Elizabeth vocals. And so in dreaming rivers. The narrative centers on broader themes of migration specifically between solution in the United Kingdom. The story of the main character misty we've together narratives on diaspora intimacy and kinship. Watching the phone a good 30 years later brings about questions and how we engage stories on movement migration and ongoing violence of the British Empire. In writing about the work, I wanted to think with and write to the phone rather than writing about the phone. And in a similar way I use the conversation with Rihanna, which started in 2017 and our multiple dialect since then as a collaborative entry point for today's discussion. In thinking about collage archives and in particular stories on migration diaspora gender and race. I've written about the importance of fragmentation. And so what I've been interested in is opening up a larger conversation on collage politics in which we also consider how stories and archival materials might be used. Fragments and scatters in general are generative because they direct us towards other forms of reading and sensing the archive using fragments and scatters usually give us a different temporal account of how stories of migration and diaspora might evolve. An intimate listening to materials is not about giving voice to those who are forgotten within the archive, but rather seeks to understand how the materials of black women and women of color might orientate us. This intimate listening practice generates an approach in which we do not only pay attention to materiality, but also to intangible performative gestures such as rituals and behaviors that scholars like Jose Munoz and Diane Taylor describe in their work. Collage in this sense allows us to think about other forms of legibility. I think here also about how we might navigate the absence or presence of stories generated by black and brown women within the archive. There's a need here to consider how we might go beyond ideas of loss, presence and absence. In other words, I'm interested in how we can use these two moving image examples to ask larger questions about the intersection between collage techniques, archives and diaspora. Fragments and scatters are a generative tool of knowledge production to move against the need to offer coherent and linear narratives of migration and belonging. I just think of other ways to approach and write about artworks and film that draw or incorporate a multitude of collage techniques, and this is a reference to the earlier mentioned amorphous figure that appears in Tell Me a Story of All These Things. What does it mean to listen to archival fragments or to allow fragments to orientate us? There's an important multi-sensory experience in this approach. We tend to orientate towards the materials and stories as much as they orientate us. In this sense, fragments also have a cartographic quality. The very active relating to materials opens up questions about the forms of possible relations. This is evidently true for artistic practice, but I also offer this as a way to break open how we write about our race and representation. In Tell Me the Story of These Things, we see a play with dislocation and intimacy. For instance, we get to see a closed shot of hands grinding ginger, the cutting of onions and stirring and marinating spices. I think here of the cultural and artistic inheritance that comes with exploring and showing the multiple modalities through which we get to engage with the intersections between food, diaspora, culinary, and gender. I also want to mention the multimedia art project of Recipes of Resistance here, which is conceptualized by Raju Raj and other artists from the South Asian diaspora in the UK. In my initial conversation with Rihanna in 2017, we spoke about Rihanna's use of fragmentation in the work In Relationship to Dictate a 1982 book by Korean-American artist Theresa Chah, which brings together notes, thoughts, drawings, scribbles, and language. Ideas of fragmentation in this specific work do not just inform the use of narrative, but also the use of camera, light, and contrasting imagery. These textures enrich how we come to learn and sense different migratory journeys. In a similar sense, Ateez Dreaming Rivers continues to bring up ideas on how we come to know or experience the archive, especially when it comes to thinking about Black British narratives on screen, there's an important pool to go beyond ideas of representation. Dreaming Rivers coming forward out of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective was part of the mid-1980s collective film practice formed by filmmakers of African, African, Caribbean, and South Asian descent. I'm interested in how the film orientates us towards broader questions on how belonging, mourning, and loss are narrated. Multiple uses of collage then also ask deeper questions about movement. In one of Zaman's latest work, Your Aesthetic Self, Rahana is in conversation with her brother, Saeed. This companion piece to tell me the story of all these things against stretching explorations of place, diaspora, and belonging. With the focus on her brother this time, we're asked to think about religion, desire, and the place of Salvation, diaspora, within the British landscape. Rahana converses with her brother while he drives. He speaks about his engagement with the philosophy and practice of Tantra. The car scenes are alternated with archival materials from Eagle Nest Dagger in the hands of Valley in Pakistan. This footage presents a long-standing history of pre-Islamic ritual and communes. The Valley is also a well-known tourist attraction and appeals to white Western hikers who partake in the witnessing of these rituals. Some of this footage is also available on YouTube and it's really interesting to look at. The white tourist gaze in the footage then also poses a question on how to balance these overlapping narratives that touch on South Asian belonging and Orientalism, usually intersecting with Tantra narratives. Finally, the car scenes, the archival footage of the Hunza Valley, are alternated with footage of Rahana, Zaman, and Priya Jaye gardening. There's an underlying question here about the British landscape and who it belongs to. And there's an indirect reference in this part of the footage to Ingrid Pollard's 1988 pastoral interlude. I'm interested in these multiple uses of movement and migration as form of collage. I don't think here about collage simply as migration or migrating as a form of collage, but rather how using these different techniques create new understandings of time and temporality. In our experience of these works and even in writing and speaking about them, there's a potential to be differently in time. In this sense I think about the intergenerational potential of reading multiple works in conversation with each other. Instead of thinking about movement and migration as a linear experience, we can then see how these works stole and dragged time. They are in progress narratives or narratives that necessarily move forward towards a settled idea of belonging. So I want to end here and hopefully pick up some of these larger ideas and questions during the Q&A. I hope I kept to the time. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Chandra. That was so interesting. And I think everybody will agree there are so many amazing intersections sort of woven through all these papers. So Alison, I'm going to invite you to pop your video back on if that's all right. So that we can kick off with some questions. So again, just like in the last session, feel free to pop any questions that you might have into the Q&A and I can read them out. And yeah, off we go. So I'm going to go ahead though while everybody's I'm sure furiously typing away at home. I'm going to go ahead and take my chair's prerogative. I'm quite happy about. So one of the things I was hoping that you might pick up more, maybe talk a little bit more about is the ways in which both of these practices do sort of maneuver as you were just talking about Chandra, you know, also came up in your talk, Alison, with the generational, again, within this really sort of expanded field, if you like, of what collage is, right? So there's a deal like you said, Alison, of the social collage in Sonia's sort of more recent works. So yeah, I was going to be able to talk a little bit more about. Yeah, that sense of generation and history on the one hand and then the way that it isn't sort of woven through this bigger question of absences and presences within collage, the things where things come from. Sorry, I just want to start. It's a big one. Sorry. I think, you know, the this intergenerational interaction for me really came through so strongly yesterday in the film that we watched with Judah Teal. And, you know, I, I thought it was so ironic when I was thinking about all of the controversy that came up when Sonia removed the painting because you know the other thing that she's been so involved with for the last couple of years is bam, the artisan modernism, which is about going into storage and finding all of those works particularly by artists of color that that have been collected but not displayed. And so I think there, you know, there is a real disconnect for the generations, because the institutions are still not responding in terms of making the work accessible in the way that it needs to be. I think in the presentations earlier this morning, even in terms of the critical writing and the dialogue around the work. So it was fascinating in the film to see these younger practitioners. Literally being confronted with the materiality of the work of the generation before and acknowledging that this is almost sacred. It's really something that they can deal with, and yet how liberating it, it was so I think it's, you know, clearly, really important and clearly something that we need to, to develop in a more meaningful and accessible way. Brilliant. Thank you. No, I was just going to fully agree. And I think, like, especially for, I mean, my generation, but also generations like after me, I think there's been this really interesting engagement with the archive and specifically kind of I'm thinking about, you know, black British feminism, these legacies and kind of like, you know, our practices but thinking about that kind of return to the archive, but then all the complexities that come with that, right. So I think that's also specifically, I guess, in relationship to any kind of, you know, use of archives, whether that's for like artistic practice or other like projects is always that kind of grappling with what is there and what isn't there. But then also, I think what I'm really interested in is like how do we also move away from thinking about like absence and presence as these very fixed kind of like junctures or entry points. Which is difficult because I think they're, you know, like, especially engaging with cultural production from the 1980s, it's like, you know, it's obviously it's incredible to see that as really generative is great to teach with that kind of material. But there are also other silences and gaps that that hopefully they're there, you know, different approaches to to addressing that which I think why collage like kind of politics are so interesting to play with those ideas of legibility and what becomes legible and in kind of younger generations use of of archival like collage and this is not in reference to a UK artist but a black American artist that I really like a lot of fields who works with found images of black and black queer presence kind of uses like lines and borders and different kind of things in her multimedia artworks to to play with those ideas of legibility and it's interesting to see how younger generations are also kind of thinking through ideas of collage. Brilliant. Thank you. I'm going to go now to a question in the Q&A from Rosemary Katwell who asks the subtext of some of the work seems to be about capitalism and the pursuit of wealth. How far is this about economics and I think, Alison, maybe you want to start with that one. You sort of my mind straight away went to, you know, sort of crop over and colonialism. Yeah, I mean, you know, so much of this work is is is kind of exposing systems of power and capitalism obviously lies at the base of that. So, I mean, I don't know what else to say other than absolutely. This, this is, you know, a prevalence of text, you know, it's as you know money is what fuels the power. Shundra, did you have want to add anything. Very briefly, I think Alison already mentioned this around like the institutional politics. And, you know, the broader conversations that people are having in the art world, especially around being brought in as like black or brown curators or art practitioners to have these very conversations that are alluded to in the question and for them to kind of like step in and out of the institution so obviously this is a larger kind of conversation about how we navigate like institutional politics and coming into those spaces without, you know, necessarily working towards long term structural change. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think it was something that you touched on in your paper Alison as well about this idea of sort of drawing on Walter de Manuel writing around, you know, sort of, what does it mean to sort of de chain is sort of to take on these power systems by appropriating and de chaining and making new meanings and yeah and the power that collage has within that context. I mean, I think, you know, I'm not alone in being so excited about the upcoming documentary. And, and, you know, the way in which the organizers have decided to, you know, pretty much dismiss the traditional institutional infrastructures and really look at the social practices of, you know, art as a practice. And, you know, that that I think, you know, that's going to become increasingly important in terms of, you know, rethinking the landscape. Yeah, absolutely. And I, and again what I found so striking about today is how we we moved sort of from this, you know, this idea of cutting, you know, very quickly, where Amy introduces the idea of, you know, sort of cutting and pasting and the edge of glue and that sort of materiality to now moving into spaces where we can see Yeah, like you said, Shandra, the city of migration as, as collage and collage, you know, and so reframing these things in much, much broader sense. I'm going to turn to the question box. Where we have an anonymous question who thanks Allison for your paper. Sonya Boyce's work evolved from 2D to 3D and has incorporated time based media, durational performance and videos. Do you think her collage strategies have also changed as the time element becomes more prominent in the work. You know, obviously, you know, the work has changed quite, quite radically, but what was really striking for me, looking across sort of the decades of her work yet again, was how, you know, the core of her practice and the meaning of collage was there all along. And, and from an early age, she had a, you know, a kind of a sense of what it was that she wanted to do with with her work as a practitioner, and it has been a matter of kind of refining the language. And just becoming remarkably open in her practice in terms of this idea of setting a stage and allowing things to unfold and just having confidence in her collaborators in terms of what the outcome will be. But, but you know, sort of the underlying ethic of her work to me has been there from the beginning. Brilliant. Thank you. So what I think we'll do now is, unless anybody has any sort of burning last minute questions that you want might want to hear them quite quickly now is, are we going to turn everything, everybody back on it and sort of come back together for a multi panel discussion. So back over to you, Elena. Hi there. Thank you everyone for really wonderful papers today. And as you said, Elizabeth, I feel that it was a wonderful sense of this opening up of the very notions of collage from the gritty materiality of the cutting up and pasting and putting into collage intended as an aesthetic and meteorological approach that moves into much larger social space. I also feel there has been quite a lot said today about this sort of status of this artist within the Canon and myself being a curator at the state. I feel sort of urgent need to address this as a sort of questions that I just feel should not be avoided. And we're sort of inserting quite a few of the discussions I think we certainly an issue with institutions and I guess particularly the state as being the national collection but also there are other nationals not collecting or only collecting works that pertain to specific cultural movement in which notions of race and identity can be defined very squarely and ideally not assimilate with the main narrative. I think this is something that I certainly very much recognize myself in recognize the struggle of our incredibly difficult and slower process it is we are trying to learn very fast. We haven't changed how we operate and yet there is you know the machine is tends to continues I mean the main narrative of British art can only I feel be broken down very very slowly and I think what was also very interesting the discussions today there is also a resistance to do that. There is a resistance to the colorful to the sexual female body to the black body to the queer body and all of these I think it means that change happens very quickly and I you know I don't want to focus on the subject I just wanted to comment on it and give an opportunity for anyone just to expand on it if you wanted to. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's this frustration of the relationship between the institution as a machine and the individuals who make up the institution. And and how and you know how do they kind of you know generate that that that development that progress. I have a lot of thoughts running through my head as you were talking now and now but but you know, but but this this, this is the challenge. And, but I, you know, I think this this discussion about the avoidance of sort of you know bright colors I think as we kind of we're we have this natural hesitancy to resist change but as we start to understand why that is, as we start to kind of unpack our fear that we have about making the kind of progress that we need to make. Hopefully that's the impetus that we need to do it better. And I think is maybe a fear of the excessive something that has been running through today this fear of non contained the shapeless the colorful I feel there is lots of these that was running through a number of papers. And then can I just jump in just your thoughts made me think about, you know, these wider questions that we've been exploring across this week about where collage sits. You know what you said makes me think about where collage sits institutionally, and how it's collected, and how it's been collected historically, and whether it's, you know, traditionally gone into that print rooms it's seen it works on paper but of course a lot of the works and things that we've been talking about today and yesterday, you know, again don't respect those boundaries or the work the cross media and going into film and sound and, you know, to how this material is collected and and that still, you know, especially national collections, you know, bigger institutions, predominantly we still do see a lot of painting and sculpture, you know, in on permanent hangs and, and where you see material that doesn't quite fit or doesn't respect material boundaries because it's difficult to look after. I think, you know, curatorially it's difficult to store and manage and put on display sometimes so I think those questions about where, where some of this material is where it sits in the boundaries of the or the categories of the history of art and how it's collected and how it's exhibited. Your comments just really made me think about about that and perhaps why we don't see so much of it institutionally as well is a big question. Building building on that I had a question actually for that could be opened up maybe to all of our speakers today just about whether these practices that we've been talking about do generate these particularly kind of complex archives. And like you say Sarah it often doesn't go to the collection it goes to the archive these kind of ephemeral materials things that are difficult to attribute. I came across with Claire Zimmerman's example of Alison Smith's scrapbook yesterday you know such a difficult object and even to digitize some of these materials there's all these copyright issues because it's, it's leaving a very complex archival trace because it's already drawing on archival material from this kind of broader cultural archive of kind of shared materials and I think Chandra I thought your your terminology around fragments and scatters, like often this kind of scattering through the archive of the traces of this kind of college practice. But I was just just wondering whether any of our contributors today wanted maybe to comment on on their kind of encounter with these forms of collage in its more archival state. I would just say that I think I think it's very true that there's a lot of movement between the archive or the studio and the sort of finished work so to speak and I think it really is one of the very beneficial kind of like interesting like aspects of collage and photo montage practices that they can dislodge some of these like associations or kind of absolute boundaries and categories. And I think what was really interesting one point Linda and I were working on the exhibition we went to the Tate archive and look to the Italian collection and there was a collage photo book in the collection and we were sort of looking through it and taking pictures. And I gave all of these pictures to the designer you know to be like this is what we were thinking about the people were interested in. She just like took them to be Linda's work right you know and this kind of really interesting way and I, I just thought that was a sort of funny thing of, of, you know, these kind of loose boundaries that Linda sometimes talks about being guided by the hand of Ethel, like when she's talking about automatic practices and that was like a literal merging together that kind of past practice and present practice that might feel like. No, I didn't my work cannot be mistaken for anyone else's work you know and maybe collage opens up some of those things that even that are the most kind of challenging right for us as art historians or people curators working with art. And we should lean into it. And I think and me also in relation to that it feels the last four days we have seen so much discussion around our collage in a way is conducive to forms of exchange collaboration, gift and collaborative practices some of which of course we have also addressed today and yesterday between Attila and Sonya boys, and that sort of opening up to a share debate and I and I also feel there was something interesting today about the transition from self portraiture to social or collective portraiture which I think is very much part of a similar paradigm. I just say that what I found really interesting about today's paper was the element of collaboration and response in each of the writers in terms of the subject they're talking about and I don't know whether anybody wants to elaborate on that bit more I think Candra made that quite explicit in terms of like writing to a film rather than about a film and Amy's just brought up again like kind of the sort of intense collaboration with Linda, and that seemed to really impact on the kind of curatorial choices that we're talking about together. And I think everyone has mentioned exchanges with the artist. And just for me as a writer I'm kind of interested how that's then impacted on your writing about these artists who really play with form and whether that's kind of then sort of impacted on the kind of the form or the approach to their work. And I can just say very briefly because I really love this question because I think in all the years like the more that I think I write or I'm invited to write the more I think about form and experimentation and engagement. So it becomes this kind of yeah collaborative process but also dialogue but also exchange but also what I think is this really interesting different form of orientation so like kind of interpreting how these different artists orientate across to these broader histories, but then also my orientation to those stories which I think for me was one of the reasons why I was like I don't necessarily want to write about this. But since Rohana Zaman and I have been like in conversation since like 2017 and then I've written about like different like kind of film works or we've been in conversation different iterations is become interesting that now the collaboration in terms of writing and analyzing and speaking about it has absolutely taken on also different shapes of thinking about how we as women of color, navigate some of those conversations and also how we do go beyond that idea of representation. Like we do think about like the potential of writing and collaborating and collaborating as something that could also be a part of a liberation praxis or, you know, and I think that's also quite interesting because sometimes it's just about filling those gaps like oh here's another artwork by a black or brown artist and it's about representation and it's doing X, Y, Z and true writing. We also have this interesting kind of, I guess, possibility to do something different with how we're interpreting that work and thereby also hopefully gently shifting sometimes some of the dominant like narrative around that I really like that question. Thank you so much everyone I'm really sorry but I think we need to draw to a close as I know some of our speakers need to leave. I just want to thank you all again for your papers you're sharing all the contributions from the audience, and hopefully we'll see some of you again next week for our workshops. Thank you. Bye everybody.