 Well, I think I will make a start because we've got a lot to get through today and a really packed session ahead. Good afternoon everyone. I am Sarah Turner and I'm the Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Let me extend a very warm welcome to you all and thank you for logging on to this panel Pedagogy and Learning, which is part of the London Asia Art Worlds programme. Thank you particularly to our panellists who are going to hear more about shortly and it is great to see so many people logging on from around the world this afternoon or whatever time it may be where you are. The London Asia Art Worlds programme has been co-organised as a collaboration between myself, Hamad Nasa, who is Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and is also co-curator of the forthcoming British Art Show 9. And also with working with Professor Ming Tiampo, and she's Professor in the Department of Art History and Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Arts and Culture at Calta University in Ottawa, Canada. And Ming is also the second holder of the London Asia Research Award. Some of you might be regular attendees at Paul Mellon Centre events and for some of you this event might be your first interaction with the centre. The Paul Mellon Centre is a research institute and educational charity, which is part of Yale University. Physically we're located in Bedford Square, which is in Bloomsbury in central London. And you can visit our library and our archive in the building there. But we've also got an ever-growing digital presence and you can find out more about the work that the Paul Mellon Centre does through our website. And there you can also find details about our publications which are in both print and digital, our grants and fellowship schemes which support research exhibitions, collaborations and publications. And more about our research collections, our learning activities and future events. London Asia Art World is a five-week multi-part programme and we're in week three at the moment and it's taking place across the rest of June. And it will reflect on the ways in which the growing fields of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with and challenges histories of British art. The programme marks five years of the Paul Mellon Centre's London Asia project established in collaboration with Asia Art Archive. And the projects co-led by Hamad Nasa and myself. And that wider London Asia project is concerned with excavating the historical, as well as reflecting on the contemporary entanglements that link London and more widely Britain and Asia. And it does this by focusing on three research strands, exhibitions, institutions and art schools. London Asia project questions the boundaries of national and regional histories and explores new models of researching and writing about the transnational infrastructures and networks that have shaped the histories of art. Before hand over to Hamad to say a little bit more about our programme, let me just walk you quickly through the PMC's online housekeeping guidelines and tell you a little bit more about how this Zoom webinar will run. And you can see those guidelines there on the screen. So we'll start with a keynote paper that will last about 45 minutes followed by a Q&A. We'll also have a break of 15 minutes away from our screens to recharge glasses and just have a moment to draw a breath. You can also interact with us and we really encourage audience members to send questions, comments, tell us more about yourself. It's really important to us that these events are community building exercises of research. We really want to connect with you. So we hope that you'll use a Q&A and chat functions to communicate with us as the conveners and also with our panellists and interact with the amazing research that you're going to hear more about this afternoon. The session will be recorded and it will be available on our website after the event and closed captioning for this event is available and you can access that by clicking the CC button at the bottom of your screen to enable the captions. And the online event is being run by the Paul Mellon Centre's events manager, Shauna Blanchfield, and our events assistant, Danny Convy. And they're on hand to help you with any technical questions or any difficulties you might have throughout the afternoon. So again, just getting contact with us via the chat box and we will be happy to help. So thanks again for joining. It's a real pleasure to have so many people with us and now I'm going to hand over to Hamad to say a little bit more over to you, Hamad. Thank you, Sarah, and welcome everybody. The London Asia Art Worlds proposes new ways of imagining art history through and beyond national and regional boundaries. Bringing together researchers and artists from around the world, this series of gatherings offers a shared platform where empirical traces of London Asia art worlds are laid down. Collaborative methodologies are developed. Theoretical concepts are articulated and the seeds of community planted. In this way, London Asia Art Worlds engenders art histories that are both entangled and multi-part perspectival, proposing new models for writing art history through collaborative practice. Art histories in both Britain and Asia are thus disrupted and their complexities revealed through layered connections via infrastructure, such as exhibitions, art schools and institutions, as well as the worlds that they carry, friendships and other socialities, aesthetics, politics and philosophy. Offering relational stories that negotiate difficult colonial and entangled pasts, shared presence and possible collaborative futures, the papers, provocations and discussions of London Asia Art Worlds are an urgent reminder that the contours of nationhood are complex and of the importance of making worlds rather than closing them. Of course, it is not lost on us that this series of events is being co-organized, hosted and funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and then the pressures, challenges and questions such research puts on the framing of art practice and history through that lens of nation. And I'm sure I'm speaking for Sarah, as well as myself, in that we cannot think of a better companion to traverse these treacherous terrains of nation and in fashioning new worlds than our chair for today and our co-convener of London Asia Art Worlds, Ming Tiampo. Ming is a professor of art history and co-director of the Centre of Transnational Cultural Analysis at Calton University. She's interested in transcultural models and histories that provide new structures for understanding and reconfiguring the global. She's published on Japanese modernism, global modernisms and diaspora. And I'm sure many of you are familiar with her groundbreaking work with the book Gwtai Decentring Modernism and the award-winning Gwtai Splendid Playground, the exhibition that she co-curated at Guggenheim Museum in New York. Not content with one or two, Ming is currently working on three publication projects, Transnational Cities, which theorises the scale of the urban as a mode of reimagining transcultural intersections and the historical conditions of global modernism, intersecting modernisms, a collaborative source book on global modernisms and Jin Mi Yoon, an art Canada Institute book on the diasporic Korean Canadian artist. Ming is also an associate member of at ICI Berlin. She's a member of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre Transnational Advisory Board, a founding member of TRACE, the Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Cultural Exchange Network and a co-lead on its Worlding Public Cultures project. Her research for London Asia is centred on how the Slade School of Fine Art functioned as a crucible of encounter and a site for articulating global issues, a fitting topic from which to consider pedagogy and learning. Over to you, Ming. Thank you, Hamad, and thank you, Sarah. Thank you to the PMC and the entire team for putting together and creating this incredible London Asia Art World's conference. It has been a wonderful journey with you both, and I really am looking forward to where it leads us in the future. Our session today is on pedagogy and learning, and it features Nazish Attaula as our keynote speaker, Aziz Sohail, Charmaine Chau, and Shonan Kenji Praipitbankol. Today's session builds upon the previous sessions, which have investigated three different ways of tracing and imagining London Asia entanglements. Whereas the first session considered friendship as a methodology for understanding togetherness, the second considered the politics of solidarity. And the third, how the circulation of people and things such as publications act as mediators for those connectivities. This week's sessions consider two infrastructures of connectivity. Today, we will be looking at pedagogy and learning, and tomorrow at bureaucracy and agency. In the coming weeks, we will also do a deep dive into the question of visual translation in aesthetics and ways of knowing. The last two sessions, thinking through empire and thinking through Asia, we will be foregrounding questions of empire and world making from Asia. Between 1950 and 1960, the number of overseas students in Britain increased from 10,000 to 50,000, making education in general and art schools in particular a rich contrapuntal site for investigating entangled histories, which are inevitably and inextricably linked to histories of empire and decolonisation. Especially in that imperial and post-imperial context, in considering questions of pedagogy and learning, the risk is for London to be reinscribed as a centre, a school and a site of dissemination with hierarchies of student and teacher left intact. In the papers we are presenting today and in the larger project of investigating pedagogy and learning within the London Asia project, we seek to de-centre British art schools while investigating their infrastructural role as sites of encounter, catalyst, learning and access. We do this by engaging with how artists coming from Asia critically engaged with their educations that they received in the UK, adopting and appropriating artistic and pedagogical methods that they encountered there and assimilating them on their own terms. We do this by interpreting art schools in the UK as a portal for accessing the larger environment in London, be it the black arts movement or studio experiences. And we do this by examining the transnational and transregional encounters made possible by what Sarah Turner calls the centrifugal forces of money, politics and power. By examining pedagogy and learning, therefore, we seek to place the focus on actors as agents that are framed by institutions, enabling the construction of multi-perspectival or worlded global art histories, the art worlds of London Asia art worlds. Finally, by revealing the contrapuntal histories of art education in Britain, the long history of artists from Asia and beyond, who were part of the artistic landscape, the intention here is to begin to restore what Hamad Nasser calls the empire-shaped hole in British history and the British imagination. Within the London Asia project, we have been investigating the historical entanglements between London and Asia, and in particular between the National College of Arts Lahore and the Slade School of Fine Art through a series of seminars prior to this conference. Excitingly, these historical excavations have revitalized connections between the two institutions and have generated a new contemporary project forged out of friendships developed through the London Asia workshops and nurtured during the COVID-19 lockdown. Before I introduce our keynote speaker, Nazesh Ataula, who is a foundational part of this story, I would like to take a few minutes to give you a quick overview of the Printhouse project. In early 2021 at the height of the pandemic, the printmaking areas at the Slade and the National College of Arts Lahore invited students from across both schools to apply to take part in a unique lockdown print collaboration. Students and staff from both institutions and me got together in a series of Zoom conversations and the artists decided upon key themes that they wanted to explore. Artists were then paired up, one from each institution, and invited to respond to each other's work. The Printhouse pairs and later essayists, who are students from my seminar at Charleston University, then met up independently to share stories, work, and to get to know each other with the intention of creating an opportunity to form deeper connections, meaningful experiences, exchanges, and responses. The works and essays will be published as a limited edition artist book in London and Lahore and will also be available as a downloadable PDF. Above and beyond this very tangible outcome, however, the project aims are broader to create the opportunity for global exchange and shared experience at a time when borders have been closed and horizons have been shut down in the real world but have opened up online. The exchanges have been both cultural and personal, with participants working from home throughout most of the project with lockdowns imposed in both countries for the majority of the time. Here the entanglements between London and Asia are not just historical, but open up to new potential histories, nurtured presence, and speculative futures framed by an ethics of care and friendship. These are just wonderful, wonderful prints. And I look forward to having the PDF for all of you to engage with more fully. There will also be a launch probably in the fall of this year. And we would welcome you joining us for that as well. I think what I'm going to do actually at this point is I'm also going to put in the chat, the website for this project so that you can have a better look at the prints, should you wish. So, now on to the star of the show, our keynote lecturer, Nazesh Attaula. Professor Nazesh Attaula was one of the foundation stones in this relationship between the MCA and the Slade. Indeed, you saw one of her works in the slideshow paired with Leslie Sharp as one part of the print palace project. Nazesh is an artist, educator, curator, writer, social and human rights activist. She is a former principal of the National College of Arts Lahore, where she began teaching in the mid 1980s. During her extensive career, she made major contributions towards institution building at the MCA, including founding and developing its printmaking department. It's first studio master's program, it's library infrastructure and preservation and it's international exchange programs. Attaula has exhibited in Pakistan and abroad and has lectured widely, authored monographs, contributed to academic books and journals and curated exhibitions in Pakistan, Finland and the UK. She is a force of nature. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Institute of Education UCL London and is a graduate of the National College of Arts and Canary College for Women. She is a senior fellow in the School of Visual Art and Design at Beacon House National University in Lahore. She received a knight in the order of arts and literature from the Republic of France in 2010 and the MCA conferred her with its fellowship. She lives and works in Lahore, continues to teach, make connections between people and institutions and to inspire us all. Over to you Nazesh. Please join me in welcoming Nazesh Attaula. Hello everybody. It's really a great honour for me to be talking to you today and sharing my thoughts with you. This is an unusual way to actually address an audience, but I seem to think, I believe that over these months I have got to know some of you in person. And so I'm not really speaking to a wall, I'm speaking to friends. Many of wonderful students from the National College of Arts are present today and they will be listening in. They are part of this entire process. We have seen some of their works and it has been a very exciting experience for all of them. So without other introductory remarks, I'd like to actually start sharing with you my paper and some visuals that I think are relevant to what I'm going to be talking about. So here we go. The title of this paper is multi-layered histories, evolving pedagogies in Pakistan's pioneering art school, which is of course the National College of Arts and was the Mio School of Art. And that is really the history and the story that I will be telling. The history of the first purpose-built art school in Pakistan spans almost 150 years of tumultuous political, social, and technological change. Starting with its inception as the Mio School of Art in 1875 in the historic city of Lahore, which is Punjab's cultural capital. The revolution from a school mandated for the purpose of preserving the arts and crafts of the region to the pioneering National College of Arts, NCA in 1958 as the leading modern institution for art design and architecture in both East now Bangladesh and West Pakistan. This is one of the foremost examples of an institution where local and global pedagogies have found the space for contestation, merger, and divergence. The evolution of the institution's pedagogies have been influenced by colonial imperatives, post-colonial modernisation, the making of the nation state, and the realities of a globalised world. Four major schools of art were established in India by the British colonisers between 1850 and 1875 at Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, and finally the Mio School in Lahore. The founding principal of the Mio School was John Lockwood Hippling, who had worked at the JJ School in Bombay for several years before being appointed as the Mio School principal and the curator of the Lahore Museum. John Lockwood Hippling had also been at the Victoria and Albert Museum before he was posted out to Bombay. The objective for the school was twofold, to train craftsmen in the higher and more artistic branches of their crafts, especially in the principles of design, and secondly to exercise a general influence over the artistic industries of the province by acting as an aesthetic centre. Thus the organisation of the Mio School along the lines of a craft school was a conscious effort by Hippling to draw upon the original sources of the still surviving traditions and skills emphasising technical rather than theoretical instruction and not over emphasising the teaching of sculpture and painting. Even at the earliest planning stages, it was evident that Hippling held strong pedagogical opinions that were presented in detailed annual reports and are a historical source from where we derive information. He writes about his vision of what the school's layout and curriculum ought to constitute, and this formed the foundation for his approach towards teaching. He recommends that plans for the construction of a new museum should be commissioned alongside the building of an art school, replicating the South Kensington School of Design and Museum complex, because he strongly believed that from the art teacher's point of view, the connection of the school of art with the museum is most desirable. Right. Can you hear me now? I'm sorry there's. We can. Okay, good. So I'm sorry because I'm going to go back and forth between the slides and I tried to cluster them so that we don't get interrupted too often. So anyway, this is the first slide, which is of course a map of Pakistan. And you can see loho that red dot on the right, very close to India, the Indian borders loho. So now we come to, we come to just an overview of what the loho skyline looks like. And then we move on to this complex of the loho museum on the left. And the National College of Arts, the first port yard of the National College of Arts on the right. And to John Lockwood Kipling with his son Rudyard on the left and portrait, a portrait of Kipling by one of his students when she shared Mohammed, which is an oil on canvas that hangs in the principal's office. And they were, they were sent to the Calcutta International Exhibition in 1883. One is of a Muslim craftsman, and the other is possibly a Sikh who was working in the school. And to the Ram Singh fountain at NCA, Ram Singh is one of his exceptional students, and I'll be talking about him in a bit. And this is a fountain that was designed by him amongst many, many other things that he did. For example, he was he was a craftsman par excellence. He came from Amritsar. And this screen, this wooden screen that I've published earlier is many years ago, in fact, is in the principal's office. And one of the details of the screen is this wonderful peacock, which is in connections with Osborne House, and some work that Ram Singh did over there, and there to over the mantel, please, is a peacock. This is an over mantle, again carved by him, and a detail on the right hand side from this. And then I'm, I'm moving on to two paintings. One that is on the right is Abdulrahman Chokhai, a national, the one of the national artists, great modernist, early modernist. And on the left is the famous Abdulrahman Chokhai, from, from a page from 1980 of 1938, and she was actually living in the whore at the time. So by leaving these images with you. I just want you to get a sense of what we will be talking about. Now back to back to the screen. Um, the government did not intend to make the answer. Turn on your video, but the introduction of Western systems. No, I have got it on. I have it on. It was gone for a moment, but you're back on now. Thank you. I'm sorry is this shifting that sometimes is problematic. Anyway, back to my text. So, the government did not intend to make the art schools vehicles for westernization, but the introduction of Western systems push the schools into becoming powerful instruments of cultural transfers. Even though sensitive educators like Kipling worked very closely with Indian craftsmen. He did, however, try to incorporate those aspects of Indian tradition into his curriculum that were the most obviously easy to adopt in this respect his task was complex and challenging and it became evident. In the course of his tenure that a transformation in attitudes occurred as the schools image gained in stature and respectability, not only within official circles, but more importantly within the school itself. This resulted in the change in public taste for the subject store. Hence the two decades of his principle ship could easily be analyzed as first, the decade of establishing systems, and the second of practical work output, which included employment prospects for qualified students and works undertaken by them in India and abroad. On the one hand, he did not entirely agree with the objective of harnessing the activity in the school with the demands of the market. But on the other hand, he believed that work commissioned to the school should serve to essential purposes. First, useful practice and axiom of Victorian and hence colonial policy. And second, that it would arise the public of the aims of the school for it is by the public that we mainly hope to live. Partha Mr Mitter, the historian identifies major differences in the approach to teaching in these colonial schools of art from the traditional art education in India conducted under the apprenticeship system that preceded the art schools. Firstly, the former was a more structured approach, whereas the Indian system was based on a more informal relationship between the master and pupil. The second major difference he mentions is between European and Indian artistic processes. This fundamental divergence in approach can further be understood while studying most traditional painting from the east, be at the Indian miniature or Chinese and Japanese paintings. For example, understanding of space and perspective in the Indian miniature was at complete variance in the intention of the artist with the use of scientific perspective found in Renaissance art. Even the most enlightened observers of Indian art were incapable of comprehending this difference and chose to appreciate or dismiss Indian art based on their own understanding of the principles underlying good art, which were unquestionably guided by western rationality. This ambivalence is at the crux of the issue regarding the objectives of all the art schools. Initially, the most outstanding students from the industrial schools across the Punjab with little elementary education were drafted into the Mayo school. The first intake in 1875 comprised 88 pupils, three were Christian, 24 Hindus, 49 Muslims and 12 Sikhs. There was a sizable number of Muslims in the crafts. And Kepler's comment on the initial intake was that the sons of artisans show in many cases considerable attitude and great interest in their work. Whereas the boys of the Munchi or Naukri Peshaw, which is the white-collared class, set about what they do in a mechanical way and showed little interest unless there is a prospect of a scholarship. The most outstanding students in the initial intake were from traditional craft backgrounds. For example, Ram Singh, whose work we just saw of the School of Carpentry, came from a family of carpenters in Ambritsar. Mohammadine was the son of a ring-graver. Sher Mohammad was a Lohaar. Sher Mohammad is the person who made the portrait of Kepler that I told you. The boys from the white-collared class left the school soon after joining, as they did not have any particular vocation for the arts, reported Kepler and also stated that some boys who had joined the school treated it like a government office, from where they obtained the stipend but without aptitude for the work. It is a well-known fact that the Punjab had a highly evolved craft tradition, particularly in woodworking, and this also reinforced the rationale for the development and advancement of a craft-based curriculum. Kepler encouraged his students to draw from objects in the Lohaar Museum's collection that were visually more relevant to them. He believed that the indigenous styles of art were capable of indefinite development and that the first thing to study was the rational point of departure for a variety of design and improvement of techniques, he says, in his reports. In 1876, Kepler reported three classes of instruction. The junior class were elementary free hand drawing, the elements of geometry, and drawing from plants and objects was taught. The advanced boys copied the fresco decorations from the Wazir Khan mosque in Lohaar's wall city, and the senior class made studies of the design from objects in the museum, from photographs and from books and drawings. They also learned geometry and through foliage, as well as created original designs, by 18th wood modeling, carpentry, carpet design, wood engraving, photography and lithography. The nature of the school noted Kepler was less of a school in the strict sense of the word than an atelier. He worked along with his students in the workshops, directing and assisting them by example, somewhat like a traditional master in a carhana or workshop. In 1884, subjects were structured into courses officially notified in the first prospectus of the school. All students were required to undertake the elementary course. Blackboard demonstration of free hand drawing and outline from the flat, elementary geometry, outline from the round, rudiments of perspective, model drawing, light and shade from the round, plant drawing from major, and elementary studies of colour. This was followed by a more advanced and technical course based on the aptitude of the students. The main subjects in the advanced course were architectural drawing and designs suitable for mysteries or carpenters and craftsmen, advanced perspective, wood construction and ornamentation such as wood carving, cabinet work, etc. Modelling in clay and moulding in plaster, architectural details for terracotta, stone carving, etc. Modelling from nature, painting in oil, water colour and distemper, lithographic drawing, engraving on wood and metal, textile design for carpets, embroideries, etc. Under various titles, this curriculum continued until the beginning of the 20th century and beyond. Other subjects were added to the syllabus such as practical virtues, practical geometry, the textbook used at South Kensington and engineering drawing, estimating levelling construction and surveying. The engineering class from the Punjab University was transferred to the school. Following the demand for architectural draftsmen for the public works department, Kipling was concerned that some workmen who wanted to learn only the technical drawing of architecture which would enable them to find employment without understanding its principles. And this was the cause for setting up a proper course for real architecture drawing. Thus he organised an architecture class in which students were taken to the inner city and measured drawings to scale were made of selected buildings. These included drawings of doors, gateways and arcades. Commenting on the pedagogical value of this work, he wrote, I know of no practice so instructive as that of studying existing architecture and ornament than by carefully drawing it. For this purpose, he also enlarged and translated into the vernacular, the South Kensington series of perspective. The significant factor about the school syllabus is that it indicated a highly structured and comprehensive technical course of study that was project oriented. Several areas of the crafts were being taught simultaneously in one school under one roof, and this form of instruction was nowhere to be found in the local tradition, where individual workshops were always known for the practice of one single craft, which fulfilled a practical requirement in the society. The exhibition in the Punjab of Arts and Manufactures held in Lahore in 1881-82 marked a turning point in Kipling's struggle to make a positive breakthrough within the region's artisans. It was this exhibition that the influence of the Mio School of Art on industrial arts was publicly demonstrated. The furniture and wood carvings supplied by the school were pronounced far superior to any others that were exhibited with regard to soundness of construction, excellence of workmanship and the application of new methods. Many craftsmen from different parts of the province came to the exhibition and were duly impressed by the work. Although old and familiar lines would be observed as the foundation for the work, it was evident that a new design approach had been applied. In this regard, mention of his brilliant student by Ram Singh is crucial. The creative genius of Ram Singh, who died in 1915, flourished in an extraordinary manner in the partnership that was forged between him and his mentor Kipling. Ram Singh's distinctive skills, especially in design and wood carving, can be seen in several public buildings in Lahore, in Simla, and at Backshop Park and Osborne House in England. Kipling's years at the Mio School of Art were perhaps its most glorious. Following Kipling's retirement, several eminent artist educators were associated with the school in leadership roles until independence and partition of India in 1947. Each one built upon the legacy left by Kipling, although the annual reports were not as detailed and analytical as before. Notable among those who followed Kipling included the art historian Percy Brown, author of several books on Indian painting and architecture, Samindranath Gupta, who was a student of Abhanindranath Tagore of the School of Art in Calcutta, who collected a significant number of Pahari school miniature paintings from the Punjab Hill States that constitute a purpose of important works for the Lahore Museum. Lionel Heath, who introduced the drawings and miniature paintings of artists from the Mio School of Art at the 1924 Indian Art at the British Empire exhibition at Wembley London. Bhavesh Chandra Sanyal, or BC Sanyal, sculptor and painter, celebrated as one of the pioneers of Indian modernism who taught at the Mio School of Art for a few years and proceeded to set up his studio in Lahore's Regal Chalk, frequented amongst others by Amritha Shergill, the great modern artist. During the war years, the modern painters Ubeda Agha also learned to paint in his studio. The celebrated artist Abdul Rahman Chukhtai, admitted to the Mio School of Art as a student in 1911, later joined the school as the head instructor of chromolithography before proceeding to London to learn edging. Creating his own revivalist style that invoked the past glory of the mughals, Chukhtai's exquisitely coloured watercolours on paper in the Bengal school wash tradition blended with art nouveau motifs and stylized pencil drawing. If the Khat Daddy, the historian considers Chukhtai's nostalgia for the Muslim past as a kind of artistic modernity in modern South Asia, which was pursued by successive modernist artists after national independence. The post-colonial decade on both sides of the border between India and Pakistan was replete with multiple challenges of brutal displacement, loss over cultural identity and rural relocation in new and unfamiliar lands as a result of the massive transfer of population at independence. It's the largest ever exodus migration from one place to another in history. Most of Lahore's non-Muslim literati, including artists migrated to India, losing their deeply embedded roots. The Mayo School of Art, as well as the Punjab University's fine art department across the road from the Mayo School, lost valuable faculty, students and technicians in this exodus. But there was also hope and nationalistic further for the forging of a new order, a conviction that this was the dawn of a new era. In the first decade after independence, when the courses largely remained the same in the Mayo School of Art, new faculty was inducted that included Shakir Ali joining in 1952 as an instructor in painting. His was an inspirational presence with his work having an important influence on his students. Shakir had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and in Europe before he came to Lahore and attained recognition as a pioneering modern artist. In the early 50s, several artists poets and writers, including Shakir, formed the Lahore Art Circle, where the discourse centered around modernist concerns and engage with ideas of nationalism manifested in their literary and artistic endeavours. Institutions like the Mayo School were reimagined and reorganised as centres of excellence at a national level. The transition from a traditional craft school with limited scope into a modern art school gave birth to the National College of Arts in 1958. This was a momentous turning point in the government's modernization scheme for development. Mark Ritter Sponenberg, 1918-2012, an eminent scholar and sculptor from the United States was engaged to undertake this task. Sponenberg was a graduate of the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan and at Detroit, where he studied under a historian who had been at the Bauhaus. Therefore, Sponenberg was imbluwed with the Bauhausian philosophy of an integrated approach to teaching art, design and architecture that he adapted in developing the curriculum at the National College of Arts. Three departments, Art, Design and Architecture, was created in the NCA when the first intake of men and women with diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds were inducted from all areas of Pakistan. But a few students were also enrolled from East Pakistan, which was then East Pakistan. Diplomas in the three fields were to be granted in courses of four and five years of study. Sponenberg, in his annual report at the Convocation in 1959, shared his vision, stating that the aim is to provide a general as well as a sound technical education in the visual arts to develop men and women who will be creative and will have inquiring and analytical minds. This was to be achieved by giving emphasis to cultivating a reputable standard of taste to give the students an appreciation of indigenous traditions and an understanding of the forms and functions of all component parts of visual design. Students were to be mixed together in their training to give them the broadest possible outlook on the social and professional services of art. The first year of a fundamental program, the armature of our education philosophy, as he called it, placed equal emphasis on design, freehand drawing, mechanical drafting, sculpture, mathematics, English and art appreciation. Sharkir Ali and some of the male school Ustads or masters already on the faculty, but others were employed to teach the principles of modern design and Jamila Zeidi, an artist trained at the slave school who taught drawing. Teaching was augmented by visiting teachers under the full right program. Some of the graduates from this cohort were retained on the faculty while others joined the emerging protection set in advertising in architectural firms and data as designed producers in the same television becoming leaders in a variety of fields. However, as Fondrenberg's tale was abruptly curtailed in 90s to one for personal reasons, the mantle under whom the landscape researcher as the avant-garde of the landscape artist also a graduate of the slave and Colin David, a modern figurative painter, came over from the pen and vibrant environment. Architects and designers from the NCA became the preferred choice for employers and works of visual artists were exhibited in the commercial galleries in Karachi. Sharkir Ali retired in 1973 and died a couple of years later. His house designed by his students and colleagues led by the esteemed architect Nayir Ali Dada from NCA's first intake became a national museum where his works are housed. May we have the next slide please. Thanks. So, on the left is Sharkir Ali Museum made with these burnt bricks designed by Nayir Ali Dada and Sharkir Saab himself and several of his other students. And on the right is a portrait of Sharkir Ali by Colin David, which is an oil on canvas and also hangs in the principal's office. On the left is a still life, and on the right is a figure painting by Sharkir Ali, both are oil on canvas. And this gives you an idea of Sharkir Ali working with Cubist in his interest in Cubism, and that came with his experience of being in at the slave at a particular time in the 40s and 50s. And then this is a much later painting is on the right of the, he painted several figures in landscape. And this is one of those. Right. The painting on the right is of Mark Sponenberg. It's a portrait by Mohammed Asif, who very sadly died and this portrait, the photograph of which was taken by me in the 90s when I was in London, and Sponenberg happened to be visiting and he came to see me. I'm deeply honored. And this particular plaster electroplated by Sponenberg. All the archer is from an early work, early work of his that we found someone who joined the American Army, and right. So I'm going to No, okay, sorry, I need to go back, because this is I've jumped. Okay, now back to the I need to stop the share. Right. Okay. Through the 70s, the pedagogy largely built upon the foundations laid earlier, but younger faculty such as the rural o'clock 1941-1999, and Salima harsh been was born in 1942 became the leading teachers in the department of fine art. Both artists alumni of NCA had studied in the UK at the Royal College of Art and the and the bath Academy respectively. Their contribution is seminal to developing the pedagogy in the department of fine art, which paid the way for contemporary art practice. The curriculum for the fundamental fundamental year was renamed as the foundation year, in which has harshly taught drawing again to a mix of students who would join their respective departments at the end of the year. Not only was the curriculum in the fine art department revised by her multiple times to adapt to the demands of change over three decades, but her own roles as teacher principal and mentor to generate generations of students is fundamental to art education in Pakistan. In 1985, the college was awarded a degree awarding status and do further areas to the traditional painting and sculptures specializations that were there right from the start were added within the fine art department and those areas were miniature painting and printmaking. Now miniature painting was a creative force in the iconography of the art of the subcontinent until the breakdown of the patronage system under British rule. It dwindled into a decontextualized and therefore inherently weakened craft practice whose primary impetus became the preservation of a preclonial past. The paradigm shift in the ethos of the genre of miniature painting about the intent and the position of the artist occurred in the NCA in the mid 1980s, reaching its pinnacle in the 1990s. At the NCA miniature painting had been taught by traditional ustads as a minor subject since its inception in 1958. It was instituted as a major area of specialization largely due to the artist's own interest in analyzing the tradition through his own painting. Under his guidance, the fine art department developed a new specialization that combined a meticulous study of the traditional techniques, structure and methodologies inherent to the field with the freedom to develop a person vision. During the early years, this revivalist experiment was not very successful as the work continued to be restricted by traditional conventions. However, a breakthrough occurred in the early 1990s with Shazia Sikander's degree show in which he presented an unusually large, finely executed painting on a wustly that is the paper surface that the artists made themselves. Demonstrating the tools of her formal learning through a sensitive personal feminist narrative. Sikander's subsequent international rise to fail inspired lively activity within the department, making miniature painting the preferred field for students to pursue. A group of miniature painters, including the celebrated Imran Qureshi, made works that engage with political, personal and social themes. The diversity of imagery and approaches in the individual practices of miniature painters expedited the development and spread of the contemporary or neopainting movement, miniature painting movement, which simultaneously offered Pakistani artists an identifiable visual specificity as well as a space of infinite intellectual and visual freedom. Now, back to the screen sharing. So we now come to this group photo, which is outside the textile department in 1987. And there are many people who some of the, I mean Hamad certainly would recognize many of them. But, but, you know, at this particular person, if you can see is Professor Paasi Ardudi, who had studied the Central School of Kandisbonberg. Professor Iqbal has trained as an architect and art historian and came back to work at the school as its principal. He was from the first cohort of the National College. This is Sadi Mahashmi. And if you see my cursor, this is me. And various other people. Just an example of the kind of drawing courses that were being carried out. And, you know, so it was actually quite interesting. I mean, here's a foundation you're drawing a class, and they brought this horse into the courtyard outside in the parking lot or something. And all the students are sitting around on their desks, a familiar kind of a site. And then we move on to a painting by Sili Mahashmi, which is, which is, which is from the early 80s, a year of cries and whispers. I'm going to refer to this dreadful zeolhach, the data ship period, which in which the college suffered enormously. But anyway, this is from that time. And then, to two works by the Hurla Clark, a print on the right hand side, radio photo of objects unidentified, etching and aquitant from 1983. And on the left is the Hurla Clark's beautiful dance acrylic on canvas. So you see his two practices actually went side by side. This is the Shagya Sikandar scroll vegetable color that bright pigment watercolor and tea on handmade paper was the paper, 1989 to 1990. I think like about four feet in width. In Rhan Qureshi, moderate enlightenment. He really had this tongue-in-cheek way of showing these so-called conservative men who were also aspiring to be modern and so the kind of clothes that they wore, the shoes that they had, they even had girlfriends and they had all kinds of very funny things happening in this entire set of works. And this is a miniature painting. And Imran Qureshi, the kind of work that he's been doing recently, and this wonderful action painting of Imran Qureshi's that I thought I would share with you. Now, back to. Right. Okay. My own experience of the past 42 years as an art student and art educator in Pakistan to the National College of Arts in the late 70s. This was a period of the oppressive dictatorship of Seattle Huck. I mean, this is the kind of major events that took place during that decade. Ironically, it was also during the 80s that unprecedented art activity, burgeoned across the country, so that artists possibly work best when they are in difficult situations. I was just including myself when I went to pursue postgraduate education in the UK funded by British Council scholarships and returned to teach and to practice in Pakistan. A few galleries were established in Islamabad and Karachi that were dedicated to showing younger artists' works and women artists from recognition in what had up till then been a largely male dominated arena. The art schools in the UK, particularly with Bartodos Santos, head of postgraduate printmaking at the Sleith School of Fine Art, were also established during this period, largely due to our own personal contacts. His contribution to the development of printmaking specialization at NCA is fundamental for giving us the necessary direction to develop from learning the craft to evolving conceptually. That established printmaking as an effective means of expression in the landscape of visual art making. And I have to share one photograph because we were so incredibly young. Nazesh, you've muted yourself. Yeah, sorry, sorry, I know, I realized that you can't hear me. I said that you know I have to share this photograph with you because this is in 1986. I'm not saying that my colleague is on the left, the painter, very well known painter. Salimahashmi, a young Salimahashmi is in the center. And this is me on the right when you believe it. And this is the time when we actually worked on setting up the printmaking department. So back to stop share. I'm going to say, and I work with the class to establish a full-fledged printmaking specialization. When I was a student, the graphic studio comprised two litho presses. I'm trying to get you back on. Yeah, you stopped it. Okay. Okay. Here I am back again. So the graphic studio as it was known then comprised two litho presses and several lithography stones. There was no equipment for intaglio processes. The first challenge was to acquire equipment for which we solicited assistance from the British High Commission from USA and local institutions. We also assisted in setting up an archer in the college and sourced handmade paper intaglio in tools and somebody equipment for the new department, which we imported. One of the largest studios facing the central courtyard was then converted into the printmaking studio. Grant from the Covesty Foundation, a philanthropic philanthropic foundation, we built a mezzanine providing students with personal workspaces separate from the workshop on the ground floor where presses and printing areas bus with activity. Smaller adjacent spaces were utilized for the acid room and aquitant box, etc. A program of study for the second, third and final years was developed that included practice and surface intaglio and digital processes. Methodologies for photo etching were adapted and craftsmen from the local printing trade were engaged to assist in what became one of the most popular areas in the college. The years elective system enables students from other departments, communication design textiles and even the architecture department to take courses in printmaking. Some of these students chose to produce entire pieces for their degree show in printmaking. They were not fine artists, they were oftentimes designers and even architects, textile designers. Grant Santos and Peter Dagwish from the Slade School were invited to conduct workshops in etching and lithography. Visiting artists came from Canada, Australia, South America, Thailand and the USA and worked in the studio. The faculty was expanded of Shah Malik on his return from the Slade School of Fine Art and subsequently many printmakers, former students of NC, including our very own Lela Rehman, Artif Khan and Fatma Sayed joined us. Faculty and students working together in the studio making plates and printing exudes a form of creative energy that we have collectively experienced, encouraged and incorporated as part of pedagogy. Collaborations with art schools through box print portfolios have enriched the experience of sharing ideas and diversity. We have been instrumental in helping other institutions in setting up similar departments in art colleges across the country where our graduates are currently teaching. This journey could not have been accomplished without the collective efforts of committed artists, educators and academics who even through these trying times have connected with each other through online workshops and the print palace project between NCA and the Slade is a testament to what we can do together. Just a few more slides and then we can. This is a familiar face, Bartodos Santos, at his own press in the Slade, you know, we didn't have proper cameras in the 80s, you wouldn't believe this because we never had phones with cameras and some of us just didn't take pictures so it's really quite sad we don't have very good visual record. This is a two person exhibition of printmaking at one of the major galleries in Karachi called the Chalcandia Art Gallery in 1988. And it's a it's a photograph with my work is at the back, and there's myself and and we're saying, and the brochure on the right hand side. You know, and what told me that we were talking about it because I was looking for images, and he said that do you know that this is the first contemporary printmaking proper printmaking exhibition that was ever held in Pakistan. So, here is an image on the left hand side is our studio at a at the NCA with the old lithography presses, and on the right hand side is this lovely Munna bhai, who's now died, but he was from the city, he was a printer. And he worked in the city and he helped us in exposing place for fortune. And the plates are now he had his own kind of materials because we didn't have, you know, we have to improvise kept him pricing all the time. So he brought his own materials and we're not drying the plates in the sun outside the studio. So to conclude, the pedagogies appear to evolve through the nation building modernization and the contemporary global world. The principal influencers are the artists and practitioners who constitute the faculty, or those who led the institution. They're also the students, all remarkable students, bringing and the bringing in not only their own experience and interest, but also their understanding of the needs and demands of society. Thank you. Thank you, Nazesh, for that wonderful, wonderful talk that was so rich with historical traces and helping us to understand what the ways in which the pedagogies of the NCA were and how they evolved over time, thinking through also those relationships between NCA and London. That was really amazing. I'm just reading the comments here. You know, you've got some wonderful feedback already amazing, lovely to hear this. One thing I would like to ask you in order to start the questions going, although I'd like to also remind everyone who is with us right now to start putting your own questions in the chat. I would like to start by asking you a little bit about the printmaking department. You gave us such a rich history and, you know, you ended on the printmaking department, but I think you may have been a little bit modest in terms of, you know, downplaying a little bit the importance that that department has had in terms of building a experimental site at the NCA. I'm wondering if, you know, the NCA has become synonymous with the reinvention of miniature painting in the 90s as you already described. But if you could give us a little bit of the history of the printmaking department which is a little bit less well known, and to speak to us about how it became a site of inventiveness and collaboration. You know, I have tried to pull all this together and miniature painting and you can see that what happened with miniature painting was that of course it had this amazing audience this kind of global audience printmaking of was something that that was more localized. So it was within Pakistan that there was an audience for printmaking, but not necessarily for, for it to kind of step into the, what is it, the outer world, as it were, the artist, many of the artists who are printmakers are also painters. And somehow it was, for example, Anwar Said is better known as a painter than than as a printmaker. But on the other hand, I think what was happening within the institution. And I think that if the card daddy mentioned this that you know we were experimenting with, with photographic techniques. We were in, we were working with digital techniques at that time whatever they were. But you know we were, we were trying to use all the kind of techniques of the times that and because we had this kind of in the intersection of the departments coming in I tried to explain this that you know if you had somebody coming from what was known from the communication design department coming and working solidly within this particular area of the school. Because they were bringing their own understanding, and their own skills, and their own practices, right into printmaking so there is this kind of cross pollination in a way, or the exchange of ideas, and of techniques and of methodologies. And one thing that to remember which I think is except extraordinary for the national colleges that you see we kept these studios open till very late at night. There were no restrictions in those days that you could not that you had to shut the studio at six o'clock in the evening, it wasn't like that. Those of residents from the National College of Arts are located in a short 10 minute walk away. And actually, once the official timing of the school which is maybe four o'clock or something. Once that ends the real activity begins there are people who work in the studio, they take a break and go out. They have clubs they have all kinds of, you know, activities creative activities that they undertaken in they are really led by students. So there's a very vibrant student body, and somehow what was happening was that we had the students by looking at what was going on in the printmaking department because obviously it's time consuming. You can't shut shop and just go away, you know you have to come to some kind of bring it to some level of. Okay, well now it's safe to leave it and come back tomorrow. So you had students just kind of walking in, and getting so excited about the activity within the department that we found that the next day they'd come and they'd say madam, they come to me madam can we. Do you think it's okay if we came and made a plate and we said show come, please come. So it was that kind of energy you see so for about five years. This is what was going on, and this not just the energy but the work that was made, then was shown across Pakistan, other institutions in Pakistan began opening departments of printmaking. You know, in that sense, it really is a catalyst for this area which is again an experimental space outside the confines of maybe painting and certain and sculpture or the way that it was understood and produced, but interestingly enough, we had printmakers who were also you know painters who were using printmaker techniques in their own work, you see they were incorporating them. And so there was this kind of crossover of, you know, there weren't any separations there with these wonderful kind of crossovers that that occurred. And I think that that is what was what is the strength of the department. That sounds really in. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's so fascinating to me to see that the printmaking department became the site of intersections between people, and also between disciplines, and I'm wondering, to what extent maybe the, the fact that it didn't have the same epistemological weight as painting and sculpture that it wasn't sort of as described and sort of, sort of constrained by Western ideas of what those disciplines were. Is that something that contributed to this possibility of just bringing in new technologies and new ways of thinking. I think that there is, you know, we have, I have talked about that weight being lifted from miniature painting as well, the freeing of the artist, not being confined to actually form, you know, to any one kind of any set conventions. I think that it wasn't quite like that with the printmaking situation, obviously because the nature of what we do is different, irrespective of what we're doing. You know, the thing is that I think sometimes I think that just the experience of, of developing images in a variety of ways that were not quite part of their past experience of making art, that somehow this was a kind of a release. And in that sense, I think that there was, there was this space that became available. Also, the other thing is that you know the methodology of actually looking at people's work, the kind of group critiques that can take place. The working together in the studio that really makes a huge difference, because when you work collectively, and when you look at work collectively, you know, you're not having these in, you have individual tutorials, but it's very different to what happens when you walk through a studio where there are maybe seven or eight painters. And if you're a tutor, you will go up to each one individually. Usually that's what happens. But in this case, it is the methodology, even of teaching became was quite different. It evolved in its, it had its own thing. And then, and I think someone mentioned earlier that you know, one of the ways in which we were teaching was that we would, we had all brought back our personal box print portfolios that we had made it the slate, you see, and we use that as a tool for teaching. And so suddenly here was this exposure of people, you know, this is before the computer and the digital world and all that. So this was a suddenly this wonderful exposure to other people's work that were real and live it was not from a book. We were not looking at reproductions from books, because you never really get a sense, or what it feels like, or what the quality of the work is, and so on, unless you see it in, in, in real form. Of course, then, as we work together, that that, as I said, that that brought about its own form of energy as well. So it is an exceptional space. And it is across all kinds of institutions, printmaking itself today, I mean there are some people obviously a lot of it has gone into the digital realm, even I'm making some digital prints, although as a very traditional hand, you know, dirty hands kind of printmaker. But the thing is that it's, I think that that's very exciting. It's really, really exciting. Thank you so much. Now this we have a question from we have a couple of questions now coming into the Q&A box. And she writes, Nasish, thank you for this very rich talk. I think your comments on the atmosphere on campus are very important. My experience is at this is at the university and broader, which has all that energy. Can you help us to understand how this kind of social life is carried over into the broader art world in Lahore, and how it might contrast with other rich art communities like the community of poets for example. I'm thinking of issues of gender in particular. Well, I think that there always been a tradition of actually taking various forms of art, particularly through all traditions in other to other locations, not just. For example, there was always a tradition of there's a place called the Park Tea House, which is about a kilometer away from where the National College is located. And there was a tradition of artists and writers and poets sharing their work sitting around cups of tea, and having this, this kind of lively discussion. If you go into the wall city, which is not too far from us either. There was a tradition in a place called Huzuribag, where there were storytellers. There were these incredible storytellers, and there were the local poets, the local bards, and people just randomly in the evening in a very hot summer evening would gather around this garden, the wonderful Mughal Garden. And this is where they would sit and they would listen to stories and, you know, they would listen sometimes to some music and so on. It was not something that was confined. It was a study group, and there are lots of places where you can go to today. But these are the parts of the hall, very much the part of the hall. Sounds brilliant. Nasish, are you able to hear me? You seem to be frozen. I can hear you. Good. Okay, so we have one other question. We have another question for you. I think we have time for one more question. And this is from Shaheen Ahmed. Thank you, Nasish, for a fabulous sharing of your expertise. You mentioned a breakdown of students at the time of Kipling. What sort of demographic breakdown of students does the NCA have in recent times? Nasish has dropped off, Ming. Oh, dear. Okay. Well, I think in that case, it might make sense for us to take our break now, and then we can regroup in about 10 minutes at whatever the hour is, 35. How does that sound? That sounds good to me, Ming. Let's do that. So we have a 10-minute break, and then come back at 3.35 if you're in the UK, and Adel detract the hours wherever you're joining him from. But yeah, let's have a tea break and a comfort break now. Okay, sounds good. And we can thank Nasish when she's back. Yeah, definitely. Thanks. All right, take care. Thanks. Hi, Nasish. Hi, Nasish. We're just taking a break just now. I'm sorry, I just thought about... Yeah, you seem to be having some technical issues with your internet, but we're just going to take a 10-minute break. Okay, okay. And we can rejoin in 10 minutes. Okay, fine. Okay, Danny, I'm going to just leave it as it is right now because otherwise I may lose connection again as I did earlier. Okay, absolutely no problem. Yeah. Okay, like, can I just mute myself? Yeah, absolutely. If you just want to mute yourself, then we'll all be back on screen in around 10 minutes. Hello and welcome back, everyone. I hope that you have had a chance to get a cup of tea, to get some time away from the screen, and that you're feeling refreshed for the second half of our seminar today. Before we go on to our speakers for the second half, I just wanted to thank Nasish Atola for her wonderful talk and for the really rich layers that she was bringing out in the Q&A afterwards and for her generosity and answering your questions. Thank you, Nasish, for joining us and for that contribution. We have three exciting papers for you this afternoon, which investigate pedagogical crossings, refractions and translations between London, Karachi, Singapore and Bangkok. So our first talk is by Aziz Sohail, who is an art curator. He's a writer and a researcher. Whose current research is a meditation on the long duvet intersections of sexuality and colonialism with migration, law and identity through the work of practitioners. Oh no. I think we're having technical issues. We may have got in control again. We were just zoom bombed again by the unhistorian terror artist. And today, applying for foreign scholarships. Perhaps a glitch in the system. Aziz Sohail just completed his MFA in art in critical and curatorial studies at the University of California Irvine, and he will graduate tomorrow. So please join me in congratulating him for his graduation. He has participated in many curatorial residencies and workshops and has worked with organizations such as the British Council and the Lahore Biennale Foundation to build new cultural initiatives and spaces in Pakistan. He is a fellow at Cornell University in 2017. He began a long term project building an archive of cultural and visual production in Karachi from the 1990s through today, which led to an exhibition symposium at the Sharjah Art Foundation in 2019, and which contributed to today's paper. A change world London Karachi 1985 to 1999. Please join me in welcoming Aziz Sohail. Hi everyone. Just going to share my screen. Welcome to all of you from 730 in the morning in Los Angeles, I've been up since 430 in the morning, and I just wanted to thank everyone for being here I see many familiar names, including my mentor is one of my mentors is the card that he was actually shaped a lot of this research. I appreciate all of that support. I know all of you all are joining us from different parts of the world, but I also just want to quickly acknowledge that I am joining you from Los Angeles, which has been the historical home of the ahashimin and Tongwa people who in the face of ongoing colonialism, I still hold our stewards of this land, and I'm grateful for us for being sort of able to do the work that we do, and I also want to acknowledge that London of forces in the side of imperial power. And this is something that I always try to center in my research in general the ways that we manifest and work within and against empire. And this presentation today that I'm doing is part of an ongoing research curatorial archival on an artistic project even that has been mentioned I've been working on since 2017, and I, which I first began as a South Asia fellow at Cornell. In my research, I actually center Karachi as an important set of cultural discourse and perhaps try to disrupt the center. As Nazesh has said in some ways Lahore, or even London, let's say, that has shaped art movements within Pakistan. I'm interested in this discourse as someone who is from Karachi and who acts as an instigator, collective maker and thinker in conversation with many others in the city. Some of my main conversations with artists in the contemporary moment are Zara Malkani, Shahana Rajani, Karachi and their collective Karachi Lajamiya and exhausted geographies, as well as Fazel Rizvi and Omar Wissim and formally the tentative collective and I'm very grateful for these constellations for having been part of my thought making. I'm actually talking between two technological most today, which is my presentation and my iPad to the side so you'll see me moving around a bit and I apologize for that in advance. My research begins with when I first actually start thinking of this idea of Karachi pop, which is something is a name that I want to trouble. But when I actually first read Hamad Nazesh's piece in the in a 2013, he mentioned that there was three ideas behind this movement. The questioning of the relationship between high art and popular craft concept for which the Urdu language does not even have separate words. This interrogation constantly there's these stages of earlier aesthetic debates with the addition of a political dimension that privileged the urban and institute fantasies of an unspoiled rural environment. He also knows a rethinking of sites and models of display that treated art as a mode of inquiry and the city itself as a kind of museum. And finally an opposition response to the largely moribund, but persistent aesthetic of western it modernist painting propagated by the local gallery culture or form fully inadequate to reflect the explosive urban realities of Karachi. To this I've actually added two more concept of my own, which is new modes of learning and doing pedagogical ruptures from the past and teaching through knowing and living within the city and collaboration as a key mode of making a shift towards working in collective, making collaborative works or organizing exhibitions together in the image here you have sort of the kind of this early stuff, kind of what we call the first generation, which is Durya Kazi David Aylesworth, Elizabeth Dadi, Niza Khan and Samina Mansuri, and if the car daddy was not in the picture actually took the photograph so and and these early Professor, early students or early artists at that time emerging as they were, were also teaching idea of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, the Karachi School of Art, Karachi University and later where also some of them were also part of the founding of Bustle Artists Association. They also led to a new generation of practitioners, Homa Mulji, Asma Mwndravala, Bani Abibi, Ruhi Ahmed, Adila Suleman, Adhan Maddi and so on. So of course pedagogy, artist mentorship and teaching becomes a really important thread to continue this idea of learning. And so for me now what I want to do is I want to bring London into the mix and actually just take out one of the threads that's in my ongoing research. Again, not to center London for me it is important to assert Karachi as a site of this encounter and this conversation formation. But I also want to kind of think of the fact that you know I have Empire on my mind, and we can't actually separate Empire or the pedagogical exchange with Empire, which of course in our case was the UK at that time. And so, in terms of London there were three teams to lock it or do you have to be David Ailsworth, and neither can they, you know, they all speak about like the openness. So it's one of the things that has come up in my conversation my research with them is the openness of the British art school for all of them, even if it is quite Eurocentric and white and conservative. They all speak about this idea of being able to discover to find your own peers and synergies. And, you know, in some with it, all three of them, but especially Durya and Niza actually developed and formed these methodologies on their own terms while in university in the UK, and then kind of continue that in the pedagogy system, which they take to back and let's say in some ways to Karachi. Of course, the Pakistani education system has deep historical links to the British system. Now this has talked a lot about these British Council scholarship. Never actually none of the Karachi people actually ever got them. So, and here you actually have Niza Khan, who was addressed in in the late 80s. She speaks about dressed in being very Eurocentric and very class oriented, which of course, you know, in front of training, but she also spoke about working with or finding artists who came to their lecture or were sort of in London at the time, or sort of circulating. And so, I think there's like Mona Hathum, Jack Rangasami, Sotapa Bispas and Sarath Maharaj that really influenced ways in which she was able to then think of her own making and her own work. So, you know, this idea of the black art movement or sort of Stuart Hall hadn't really pervaded the rescue system, but Niza was able to kind of find this on her own terms. So she, you know, this idea of finding interlocutors from outside of the classroom, even as you're being rigorously and classically trained within the classroom, is an important, I think, team that comes in the research. Niza actually came back and actually helped out of the printmaking department at the new Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, and she also supported students in being able to chart their own path. At IVS, there were deep disagreements between the founders and this new generation of faculty, some of whom I was in the previous slide. There was a desire to have this authenticity in art-making and the school-form partnerships with the Baroda School in Gujarat, where painters such as Keiji Subramaniam station of craft. So these ruptures would allow one to think of pedagogical threads that would emanate from within the classroom, but perhaps not in the formal curriculum or sort of in the main city. And I also just want to kind of acknowledge at that time how Karachi is a kind of very rich cult city with full of inspiration with urban craft and sort of the pop imagery. And this is kind of one example of that. And this is really inspirational to many of the artists at that time who kind of use these materials and kind of these kind of ideas and they're making and in fact would sort of go to the jewelry shop and the metal shop that actually Niza even talks about actually setting up some of the printmaking kind of equipment. With some of these local craftsmen as well. Niza was later key to the founding of Bustle, which also centres the city as a site of discovery. And this is also very central link, central link to the UK, because Robert Loder, who was part of the Triangle Arts Network was actually supporting the founding of these various associations, including Hodge in New Delhi in 1997. And there was a lot of actually exchange that actually started between India and Pakistan, and also broader South Asia at that time. Dury Azazi was actually for me one of the most important artists in this story was at Kingston in late 1970s to 1982. And her Emma says the possibility of art in Pakistan was actually consisted of actually questioners that you would hand out to different communities in Karachi. And I just want to quote from that she says it is August 1980 I have completed two and a half years of my art education by this time next year, I will have completed my course and shall be returning home armed with a BA degree in sculpture. Feeling defensive or arrogant, disheartened or too confident. I anticipate the reaction. Some will be watching like spectators for me to show what I can do. Some will congratulate me with a smile while they calculate the riches of a father who could afford a foreign education for his child. Some will condemn me for wasting precious money and time, a subject that can only be self-indulgent. Some will say with love, how now that you have got it out of your system, why don't you get married and settle down. I know of a very nice boy. So the majority who are poor and occupied only with survival, it would only amount to the vagaries of the privilege and of no consequence to them. And she sort of says things like that the society wants what the artist has to offer. And then, and she kind of in this questionnaire, you know, she even says things like a truck or a rickshaw driver in Pakistan who have never read or write will also have his favorite verse written on the vehicle. And so she's really inspired by this idea of the truck trucks and truck out in Pakistan and this idea of the Western mode of learning and that, you know, that and she says that. And so what happens to Durya is that she's actually in UK during this black art movement and she's very much kind of inspired by these by these again again she sort of in this much more than a bureau centric system, but she's meeting folks like memu Jamal, who founded the retake with film and video collective. And she actually worked for them. And she also met Rashida Ryan, who of course at that time was sort of running black Phoenix and later her text. So even as she kind of studying sculpture and this kind of conservative kind of discourse, she's actually kind of going out and kind of trying to kind of create these links and think of the possibility of art making for for someone like her. She talks a lot about how sort of she realizes a normative discourse is this English discourse. And sort of what does it mean to actually think of it from a Pakistani perspective. And of course the black art movement is making her think about this idea of cultural identity, the politics of the West, and what does it mean to have a national identity in the 1990s is sort of, you know, sort of creating this thesis through quite a questionnaires going out to talk to people in Karachi. What are the things of art making in Pakistan or what would art making in Pakistan look like. And then later in 1999 doing this project very, very sweet Athena with David Ilworth, which kind of is also consists of a questionnaire asking people what is their ideal home and what are their dreams and what are the promises that they sort of what are their aspirations. So this idea of a questionnaire and kind of sourcing information and kind of engaging with the crowd or so kind of the audience is an important part of her practice. Also, she also is one of the founders of the artist newsletter. I also don't want to say that there's a direct link to sort of the, you know, Black Phoenix or her text, but you know she's definitely very much inspired by this idea of the magazine and its circulation. Important to note that her relative Nick has me was actually later publishing protect Asia out of Karachi as well. So, and then, as I said, this is a project art caravan in 1992 that she actually is one of the initiators of the Karachi pop kind of work that's put it that way, where she actually with her students at Karachi School of Art and of three things off the truck as a canvas for making. And kind of what what would it mean for it to kind of be like sort of used by the artist and this actually truck traveled across Pakistan. Of course it doesn't use it all some of the traditional truck kind of painting methodology but I'm kind of intrigued again in the way that that kind of the cultural object and becomes like this kind of collaborative kind of moving object as well. And of course it's also feeding into some orientalist depiction of what kind of people may imagine Pakistani art to be in the UK. This was actually part of the festival, a panel of this was shown at the festival fastest any music village festival in Bradford as well. And of course, Durya was actually regularly going back to the UK, she actually also showed that an example called tampered surfaces, which is the part of the was also a part of in 1995 1996 by a normal. And finally we have David Ailesworth, who was in the UK in 1982, and he was doing the Picker Fellowship at Kingston. And of course he was sort of in the late constructivist school of making and but under its work did undergo shifts and experimentation experimentation later in the 1990s, with all these artists that he was in conversation with. He himself says that you know Pakistan blew his original ideas out of the water, whatever ideas he had of enduring tradition and Britishness and British culture and making. And in 1997, he was actually part of kind of one of the interlaw feeders and kind of one of the main folks behind supporting a change world, which was an exhibition of emerging British culture which took place in both Karachi and then later in Lahore for Pakistan 50th anniversary exhibition. And it was, you know, like, who are sort of the household names, but at that time sort of artists like Anish Kapoor and Richard Long and and sort of Damien Hearst were a part of it and many of David's students at Indus actually helped produce and sort of and kind of put together this exhibition and here we actually have an install shot of this kind of happening in 1997 of Richard Long sculpture at the Hindu Gymkhana. So, I mean this idea that when Richard, when David and I saw also part of the idea that there was a lot of tension right amongst these founders. And so this idea that you kind of go out of the classroom and sort of the second generation of students, which included people like Homa Mogi, Asma Wendravala, Bani Abedi. They actually were the kind of founder their own studio in the city of Karachi and I'm kind of also interested in what does it mean to think of pedagogy from outside of the classroom. So some of the questions that I have and I'm about to end are what are the unexplored connections between the burgeoning and shifting discourses in London and the takeoff of contemporary art in Karachi and this 1980s, 1990s turning point. So Cold War kind of, you know, this kind of rupture between kind of the modern and the contemporary going on is Karachi particularly suited for the shift and what role does London have or it doesn't. How do we still centre Karachi but understand these constellations? Where does pedagogy both inside the institution and outside come in? How does it work and unfold? And kind of how does it continue and manifest in our conversations today? A key thread is the underexplored connections between the Black Arts movement in Karachi, as I mentioned to Ria Khazi, but also the fact that Rashid Arayn is from Karachi and was continually coming back and forth at that time. How are these afterdives of empire and how are they disruptive and resistant to the shadow of empire on all of us? Does Karachi being outside the periphery, for example, if students not getting better sounds of scholarships or getting the type of actual top-down support that Lahore was used to allow for a more wayward, stranger, organic, generative process rather than state-led, determined top-down. How do we imagine ideas of alternative non-institutional pedagogy for these artists, both in UK and in Karachi, and the way they instilled and carried that forward, for example, through WESO or founding their own spaces? How does it fit into the intellectual infrastructure concept, first articulated by Karen Ditsavitz in an essay from 2017, infrastructure reform, and can we add words like pedagogy reform and kind of wayward pedagogy to those ideas? I want to end by noting how these connections and exchanges continue. These are just two images. One is from yesterday, the one on the right, actually part of a project that I'm leading on queer and feminist pedagogies in Karachi, again from outside of the classroom. But these are both snapshots by Zara Malkani, who with Shahana Rajani co-founded Karachi La Jamia, which the three means Karachi art anti-university in 2015, as well as a publishing practice exhaustive geographies. Zara actually went to Goldsmiths for her MA in Art Theory in early 2010, and she actually did quote Iris Rogoff's concept of exhaustive geographies as an inspiration and kind of a jumping off point for this idea. So I just want to kind of think of the fact that London of course is part of this exchange still for all of us, but how do we then kind of again come back to Karachi and the communities that we are a part of actually create these nourishing ways of working together and making together. Thank you for listening. I'm going to end here. Thank you so much Aziz for that incredibly rich presentation, and I look forward to seeing how this threads through with some of the other talks so that we can have a good conversation afterwards. Our next speaker is Charmaine Toe, and she received her PhD from the University of Melbourne and is a curator at the National Gallery of Singapore. Her research primarily looks at modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia with a focus on photography. Recent exhibitions include Chwa Su Bin, Truths and Legends, Awakenings, Art in Society in Asia. Previously, Charmaine was the program director at Objective Centre for Photography and Film. She also co-curated the 2013 Singapore Biennial. Please join me in welcoming Charmaine Toe to present her paper, First Move, Tang Da Wu in London. Thank you, Mayne, for that kind introduction. Just want to check that the chess screens are working all right. Everything's working well. Great. So tonight I'm actually just going to speak about one specific artist, Tang Da Wu, a Singaporean artist. Do you see him there in that photo, which is of his graduation show at Birmingham in 1974? He's the guy sort of holding the bottle in his hand. It's a seminal artist in contemporary art in Singapore. He's credited for influencing a generation of artists, particularly through the artist's village, which was an artist-run space he set up in his own home in 1988 after his return from the UK. He's a prolific artist who continues to make new work to this day, ranging from painting and sculpture to installation and performance. In addition to many exhibitions in Singapore, Tang was one of four artists who represented Singapore at the Venice Biennial in 2007. He also showed at the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial in 1999, the Guangju Biennale in 2000 and documented 13 in 2012. He was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Art Culture Prize in 1999. So I say all that because I'm very aware that actually today's audience might not be familiar with Tang's practice. And that's why I also, just before I get into the paper, wanted to show everyone just kind of images of some of his more well-known works. So these are just some performances he did in the late 80s after he came back to Singapore, stopped that tank, opened the gate and dancing UV, stopped that tank and opened the gate was directly kind of referencing the Tiananmen incident that had just taken place and dancing UV dealing with environmental issues. These are also some of, I think, quite well exhibited works also made after he came back to Singapore. So these works that I'm showing you are the works that kind of are quite well known and kind of well researched and associated with Tang. So often a lot of the discussion has circulated around the work that he made after he came back from the UK. And this work was made in 1995. I'll talk a bit about this one just to give you an impression of the kind of work that he was doing. Money to the Arts was a performance that he conducted in 1995 when he attended an art exhibition opening, went up to the president of Singapore, asked for permission to put on the jacket that had the words, don't give money to the artist back, and then handed the president a note, a handwritten note of the words, I am an artist, I am important. So I hope this gives you a kind of a brief impression of the artist. But let me go into his experience in the UK. So he spent almost two decades there, much of the 70s and the 80s. He first arrived in 1971 when he was 28 and spent four years at Birmingham Polytechnic for his undergraduate degree, followed by a year at Saint Martins for advanced studies in sculpture and finally two years at Goldsmiths in the mid 1980s for his MFA. During that decade and a half, he also attended multiple workshops and shop courses, including at the Slade, where he picked up filmmaking in the 1970s, Haunty College, where he developed work for a show at Acme Gallery, Hackney College for metalwork and the cast to use their foundry. Despite this extensive time that he spent in the UK, there has been surprisingly little scholarship about it. Most researchers and curators have almost exclusively focused on his activities post 1988. And even then they have emphasised the activities at the artist's village and his performance practice with very little attention paid to his paintings and drawings. Yet the period was a defining one where he established much of his core ideals on art as an open-ended and participatory practice and the role of the artist in provoking questions rather than providing answers. Part of the reason I think he searched on Tang had been rather uneven is his personal reluctance to speak at length about his own work. He is notoriously elusive and generally does not like explaining his work as he wants the audience to make sense of it themselves. So he feels that the audience contributes as much to the work in their reading of it as he does in the making. So he sees his role as a facilitator, which actually influences a lot of the way he conducts education after he came back to Singapore. Today, because the audience I think is not so familiar with the artist, I have chosen to take quite a straightforward historical and biographical approach to highlight certain aspects of Tang's time in Birmingham and London. It draws from a two-year long research project that has included numerous interviews with the artist and recently unearthed archival material. So Tang already had plans to study art overseas when he was in secondary school. He selected the UK over America and Paris after conversations with older artants in Singapore and some research at the British Council. And the reason he selected the UK was this perception that art schools in the UK were more open, which actually has a nice parallel to what I just mentioned in his paper. Tang subsequently applied to Birmingham polytechnic that's late and in Martin's, but the latter two rejected him, which is how he ended up involving him. His arrival in the UK marked a significant shift in his art practice. This was immediate and pronounced. Not only was there a shift in medium from painting to sculpture, Tang started incorporating elements of performance, collaboration and installation in his work very quickly and sometimes simultaneously. 1972, the year just after he arrived, was a very prolific and creative year, and I want to suggest that it wasn't only the result of the formal art education that he was finally receiving in Birmingham. It was the change in the environment. It was a new city and a new culture. It was also the simple fact that he had space, space to make work and space to display work. Well, he did have his own studio in Singapore. Exhibition opportunities were much harder to come by. And he said that he was showing work every month in the gallery space available to students in Birmingham. He also had access to tools and workshops like the Foundry and it clearly stimulated him and his art practice exploded. So what you're seeing on screen is touch space. It was part of his first series of sculptures which consisted of polystyrene cut and painted to look like stones and bricks. During this period, Tang was very interested in the relationship between perception and reality. The likeness of the polystyrene contradicted its stone and brick-like appearance and allowed time to conceive several different incongru scenarios. Touch space was exhibited at the Dudley Museum and Art Gallery's West Midlands Sculpture Show in 1972. It comprises amount of polystyrene spheres, which you can see in both pictures, painted to look like stones and stacked on a sheet of glass which itself was raised off the ground by some bricks. And that's the art of sketch you see on the left. Floating bricks featured polystyrene bricks rather than stones. So this took several forms. In one version he placed a brick wall on an undergrowth of thin branches such that the wall seemed to be floating in space. In another version he placed individual bricks on sticks in a field of daffodils. That one, I don't have the picture, I'm still looking for it but it was from a conversation with the artist. He even performed with the bricks. In possibly his first public performance he walked around town, the small brick wall balanced on his head. And you can see also he was carrying that larger version walking around and taking photos. So he was performing for the photos. And finally, him and his friends tossed these polystyrene bricks into the age best in reservoir where they subsequently floated rather than sank in a kind of happening. So touch space and floating bricks are very significant because they point towards tanks later developments in installation performance, even though he was a sculpture student. It is clear his approach to sculpture was never as a static object but one in relation to space, the audience and everyday life. And in fact for him art never occupied medium specific categories. Another work or this is the Floating Bricks. But another work I want to highlight is Untitled, which was a series of public interventions he conducted using a street side parking lot. So with the help of friends he placed large objects such as a cupboard and a sofa in a parking lot for fixed periods of time while making sure he paid for the space through its parking meter. This was also 1932 and interesting he did not run a file of local authorities for this work. So unlike floating bricks which until I get some form of creation in the form in the act of shaping and painting of polystyrene, Untitled used found objects. More than just questioning form and the status of the art object, the work also challenged the use of public space and sought to test its legal boundaries. And this was to become very important in relation to his work in Singapore in the late 80s and into the 90s. After graduating from Birmingham in 74, Tang moved to London. Prior he had discovered the work of Welsh sculptor Barry Flanagan, who had also gone to Birmingham and subsequently taught at St Martin's and the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Well perhaps most known for his bronze sculptures, Flanagan's work in the 60s was very playful and daring and used non-traditional materials including found and everyday objects. Flanagan's influence on Tang can in fact be clearly seen in some of the works that I've just shown you. And Tang wrote to St Martin's asking to study under Flanagan and succeeded. However his deal with Flanagan was spent largely outside the classroom. Tang has told me in our conversations he didn't actually speak all that much about art but in fact just about life in general. So rather than teach, Flanagan played the role of a mentor, encouraging Tang and his art making. So I want to stress that the impact of Tang's time in the UK went beyond the classroom. Access to education in the UK included access to new ideas and cultures and experiences. He has also specifically mentioned the influence of Situationist International, which was at its tail end when he arrived at the UK, the PUT movement later on in London and he has described both movements as creative and constructive and having an influence on his thinking. The SI, PUNK and Flanagan have never been discussed with respect to Tang's work but I think that they were all crucial ingredients in its formative years. The spirit of SI and PUNK informed his politics while Flanagan gave him an appreciation of the process and material. Flanagan's influence was particularly apparent in the work Tang made for a solo exhibition at Acme Gallery in 1978. Black powder falling through muslin was a process based work. Every day he would go into the gallery to make a new drawing, use black graphite powder to draw shapes or lines on the top layer of the muslin and then the powder fell through the five layers of cloth and the drawing would go fainter and fainter or even change shape completely. And as an SI, when I was writing this paper, I thought that this is actually quite a nice analogy for pedagogy that we are discussing during the session. However, it was the work he made the following year, Gully Curtains, that I think best encapsulates the way these different influences manifested in his work. So Tang visited Singapore in 1979 and discovered a changed landscape. Land everywhere was being cleared and new buildings constructed. So observing the resulting soil erosion, Tang placed seven pieces of cloth in a ravine that had formed due to the rain. Muddy water stained the bottom of the cloth and Tang used black ink to trace the depth of the gully. The pieces of cloth were then displayed in the same order that they had lain creating an imaginary gully truespace. This was part of the series of works that he made in 1979 that he has described as a collaboration between artists and environment. These works were exhibited at the National Museum Art Gallery in 1980, actually right in the middle of the permanent collection space. And for various reasons, the exhibition was closed up three days and he moved the show to an alternative venue here at the Sintu Jitpo Convention Centre. I won't explain why because I don't really have the time but instead I just want to point out how groundbreaking this exhibition was in the single context at that time. Audiences had never seen artwork in this form before. Art was still largely taught to be painting a sculpture and Tang almost single-handedly dragged the development of art and singapore towards conceptual and process-based work during this visit, which lasted less than a year. In 1980, he returned to London and applied to do his MFA in Wolfsmanness when he formally studied performance from 1983 to 1985. The MA was conducted seminar style so much of it was discussion and critique and the professors then were Nick Deville and John Thompson. Well, he presented performance art at various points prior to entering Wolfsmanness. After Wolfsmanness, I think that his performance pieces took on a more theatrical element and stronger narrative. So previously they tended to be more abstract or took the form of actions for happenings and I'm going to apologise that I'm not going to elaborate on that point because I want to spend the last few minutes on my presentation talking about his studio experience in London. So in London, Tang rented a space in an old brush factory on Bonner Road in Bethnal Green to Aglee, a charity in London which provides affordable artist studio spaces. And in this particular space, there were about 20 young artists in an open studio event which was held every six months. So Tang has described that studio experience as a space where artists could interact, critique and collaborate with each other organically. And this brings to mind what we have already discussed in the first two papers as well. Being in the same building allowed artists to bump into each other in foyers and corridors as they passed through, they could see each other's work and have conversations about it. And this studio experience in Bethnal Green was actually the model for the artist's village in Singapore in 1988. At the start, Tang simply offered free studio space at his rented farm. He had seen the value of a space where different artists could meet informally and exchange ideas and wanted to replicate that environment. He did not formally teach anyone, but he was a central figure and held critique sessions during which everyone could share their opinions. By late 1988, he realized that many of the artists had created enough work for a show and thus he decided to organize his own open studio, which was also when the space got its name. So that's when the term artist village was coined when they had their first show. The open studio show was not the only one which drew inspiration from London. At the end of 1989, Tang organized the time show, a 24-hour performance art event that took place from 9am of 31st December to 9am of 1st January. And this was actually his version of World Works, organized by the Britsman Artists Collective in 1985, which featured 10 artists working in public spaces for 10 days. These artists included Mona Hatoum and Rashida Reen, and he was there and it made a lasting impression on Tang. So in conclusion, I've just shared a few brief aspects of Tang's experience in the UK, but it should be clear how important those years were in influencing not only his own art practice, but the way he subsequently taught and shared his knowledge with others after he came back to Singapore. Formal classroom instruction was only one part of his transfer knowledge. Just as important was the informal exchange of ideas, access to studios and exhibitions, both in the UK and in Singapore. And I just want to end by saying that my research project on Tang isn't complete. I was meant to go to London and Birmingham last year to access some local archives, but that wasn't possible, obviously. So if anyone in the audience actually knows about like, for example, Bouddali Museum and what both the archives in Birmingham and local, I guess, newspapers, please contact me directly. I'll be very grateful. Thank you. Thank you so much, Charmaine. And I love your question at the very end of your talk there. I mean, I think that the wonderful thing about London Asia is the fact that it's allowing these connectivities to take place. So I do hope that somebody responds to your question and that you have a new interlocutor in your future. Thank you again for that wonderful paper and for bringing out some of the threads, actually, that are coming through already between all of the papers. I look forward to exploring that further. Our last paper here today, before the conversation, is by Chanon Kenji Pachmankol, and he is an art historian, writer and curator at the Singapore Art Museum. He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and previously held fellowships at Tate Britain and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. His research investigates in the broadest possible sense, unorthodox formations of psychosocial and intellectual attachments to art. A line of inquiry that spans art history, anthropology, media theory and religious studies. His writing has appeared in Art Forum, Aperture and British Art Studies with the essay David Medalla, Dreams of Sculpture, forthcoming in Oxford Art Journal. Please join me in welcoming Kenji and his paper, Human Person Friend, Subjects of Contemporative Religion in Post-war Thai Art. Thank you so much, Ming. I hope everyone can see my shared screen and also a big thanks to Hamatsara and everyone who are behind the scenes organizing this wonderful series of events. Maybe just to signpost quickly that this paper is in some ways trying to make two kind of interventions. The first is I guess in the context of national Thai art history and asking how is it that adopting a transnational perspective as we have been throughout this conference would allow us to kind of read against the grain of those nationalist mythologies. But on the other hand, in the context of transnational studies, perhaps to question the narrative of liberalization that takes place in the sense that oftentimes we assume that artists who go to the West end up becoming more liberal or transformed through that experience. But what if studying in the quote unquote West makes artists more conservative? So that's kind of what I'll be exploring. So history of post-war Thai art may well be written with its first chapter set in London. In 1948, the Royal Thai Embassy in London opened what was touted as the first Chinese art exhibition ever held in England. It was a small show comprising a few Buddha statuits on loan from public and private collections shown alongside reproductions of newly completed contemporary artworks by artists from Silipakon, Thailand's newly established fine arts university. Presiding over the affair was sin piracy, an Italian turned Thai citizen who was increasingly assuming a leading role in cultural diplomatic efforts to rehabilitate Thailand standing on the world stage, after the Thai state had collaborated with Japanese during the war. The message to be broadcasted concerned the gentleness of Thai art, what a journalist described as quote, the exceptional spiritual qualities which reflected the gentle nature and outlook of the people, end quote. A vision of post-war Buddhist humanism was born in this milieu geared as it were towards an international and interfaith audience. To accompany the exhibition, Sin published an article in the Middle Way, the Journal of the Buddhist Society in London, where he recounts an anecdote of a German lady who during World War II sought solace in contemplating what he described as a fine head of Buddha of the Sukkotai period. Because the lady was not Buddhist, he continues, we surely cannot speak about idolatry. It was one of the innumerable cases of pure spirituality, providing that art by interpreting a philosophic or religious idea is the source of emotions apt to heal our moral and even physical pains, end quote. Sin makes sure to separate art from everyday Buddhism that he saw as contaminated by superstitious beliefs and animistic practices. Buddhist spirituality in Sin's elevated sense could serve as the universal common denominator between disparate peoples and religions, a bomb to heal the fishers of war. As the story usually goes, what follows is the propagation of this idea of Buddhist spirituality, which takes root at Silicon Valley University in the 1950s with Sin as its director. The Sukkotai period Buddha, admired for its elongated bodily proportions and soft sinuous lines, formed the basis of an idealist tradition of sculpture and painting that emerged under Sin's watch. The style that would later come to be known as neo-traditional Thai art likewise garnered support with Sin's desire to preserve what he thought of as the high art of temple muralism and Sukkotai sculpture. But what if our narrative did not return so quickly to Thailand? What if we linger for a while in London? After all, Sin was but an actor in a network of cosmopolitan intelligencia, all invested in building new ground for foreign relations. As I'll suggest, this network may reveal something about the complex mediations of the idea of Buddhist spirituality, how this concept was caught up in a zone of translation. In 1949, Sin's top protege, Kean Ymsiri, arrived in London to study sculpture at the Chelsea College of Art. Writings on Kean usually celebrate his studying under the tutelage of Henry Moore, even though Moore in fact had stopped teaching there a decade earlier. Indeed, no archival evidence exists in the Chelsea College's archives or the Tate archives to substantiate an account of Kean's activities. The only thing about this period that could be factually confirmed so far by myself is that Kean's trajectory as a civil servant had been laid out before his departure to London. He was to return to teach at Silipakon and to serve in a new role as a translator and right-hand man for Sin. Perhaps it cuts against the grain of hagiography to put this so bluntly, but the impetus for many paternalistic figures to send their children to art schools in the metropole is as much about the art as it is about accruing valuable linguistic capital. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Kean's British education was not some connection to illustrious artists, but the more simple fact that he was given the opportunity to learn English and to learn it well. For in a classic postcolonial twist, it is the native intelligentsia like Kean who then deploys linguistic capacity in unexpected ways. His translations of Sin's writings from the 1950s reveal that Kean had its own ideas and agendas he wanted to communicate. If, for instance, Sin wrote that the viewer of the Buddha image should feel moved, in Kean's rendition it inspires worship, or gert famus karabusha. If for Sin, religious objects serve to support the believer's feelings, for Kean, its mission becomes to support the Buddha's faith, or som sen satha. In other words, Kean's translations elided the capacious sense of humanistic universality that Sin ascribed to spirituality. Kean instead opted, I'm sorry, Kean instead opted to render a defensive Buddhist nationalism, one wary of corrupting foreign influences. So rather than imagine Sin as a grand ideologue, it may be more accurate to consider Kean's transformative role in promulgating his teacher's ideas. The point here is not to brand Sin as a nationalist in Kean and internationalist, but rather that it is through education that Kean could then conceive the interval between these two perspectives. It may be tempting to simply say that this is a story about London as a place where a ground for comparison could be imagined, or a story about English, the lingua fraca of mediation. But such well worn tropes risk smoothing over the very real difficulties of navigating difference. Neither Sin or Kean could fully claim fluency. The English language writings of both are riddled with grammatical errors, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility. Miscommunication and creative mistranslation were the norm between teacher and student, and perhaps a fact of daily experience for the young Kean when he lived in London as well. Beneath the veneer of national monolingualism rests the necessarily messy and imperfect traffic of translation for which visual art in this case serves as a lubricant. All this is to say, post war Buddhist spirituality may not be so straightforward in assertion of universalism as it first appears. No one was more keenly aware of this than Sulak Sivarak, who in 1955 enrolled at St David's College or today the University of Wales at Lanter to read literature and history. Before he became known as one of Thailand's most outspoken public intellectuals, Sulak was a budding journalist covering politics and art in the UK as a foreign correspondent for newspapers in Bangkok. When he was not out attending events and visiting exhibitions, he recalls pouring over Descartes, Venosa and Locke, but also quote reading all the English books on Buddhism I could find. Sulak had always been interested in the study of comparative religion, recalling that the book that accompanied him through all his time in England was Latikong Piyan or The Beliefs of Friends, a book that was published in 1949 by Pea Numan Rashtun, a book that not only introduces Buddhism in a relationship to other systems of belief, but it was also intent on clarifying Buddhism's relative primacy, even superiority among world religions. Sulak's approach to comparative religion, though worldly, was inflected by what might be called a Buddhist apologetics. It is strange to read his cultural criticism from the 1950s, for he ultimately took little pleasure in the Italian scooters, American haircuts or Caribbean music that was then taken London by a storm, but he certainly had a lot to comment about how the lure of such pleasures sat uneasily with a quote Buddhist way of life. These anxieties found an intertext in Sulak's academic articles on the threat of Christian missionary activity in 19th century. Christianity under Sulak's pen became a strangely capacious signifier for all Western things that were not Buddhist and not Thai quote, we can enter into relations with Christians and entertain the highest level of friendship, he writes, but be wary of negative criticism. If unlike Ian Sulak was a student who saw himself as being tapped into the pulse of cultural life in London, his worldly curiosities were at the same time shot through with suspicious regard towards the beliefs of friends. To follow the trail of Sulak's interest in comparative religion opens a new angle onto discussions of Thai art of the 1950s, which has long fixated on stylistic homogeneity under the influence of ideologs like sin. It has gone unnoticed, for instance, that national art exhibitions of the decade were markedly populated by entries with Christian subjects, the mother and child, the descent from the cross, biblical narratives with all shades of sorrow, suffering, agony and ecstasy that created fertile ground for explorations in figuration. Such figures as Mary and Christ allow artists to pursue the question of embodiment and bodily suffering in ways that would be deemed indecent, if applied to the image of the Buddha. In other words, Christian iconography held the space for the kind of fleshy eros and eroticism that sin tried to exercise from his idealized conception of Buddhist art. That Christian art should come to be aligned with the lure of Western popular culture is not so obvious at first glance, but this association was made clear through resurgent missionary activity in Thailand in the 1950s. By the late 1950s, the authoritarian Thai state had branded many Christian student associations as hotbeds. Fy hoffwch, mae hwnnw'n amddian ar y hollyn nhw. Mae bron maen nhw wedi'u amddiannau i'u cefnodiol ar gyfer hynna ei festos. Mae hygrifenni ar hyn ar ychwaneg. Mae'r ddig iddyn nhw'n du pof ridesydd sy'n ddim yn gwoodd ynghylch yn dweud. Mae yna yn sgwrdd i'r ddechrau ar gyfer hynny a dddefnyddio sy'n sefydliad. Mae'r ddig fearsydd yn ddeg yng nghydfyn â'r ddig yn mynd. Felly, mae hyn yn ddefnyddio sydd yn ddeg ar gyfer hynny, ac roedd yn dysgol. A'r cyfnodau cyfnodd ymgyrch yn rhoi, mae'r cyfnodd gyda'r gwylltau'r frysgolol ac yn siarad, sy'n gwylltau'r cyfnodd, mae'r cyfnodd cyfnodd a'ch cyfnodd, ym gyfnodd, ymlaen, a'i cyfnodd, ysgolio'i cyfnodd a'r cyfnodd. Mae'r cyfnodd ymlaen i ddweud o cyfnodd cyfnodd yn ymgyrch yn ymwynghwt gan y Poblig yn ysgol, yn 1959, ymdud y gwrth gweithio'r gwirionedd yn ymgyrchfawr i'r ddau ymdud yma yn y cyflawn cyflawn gyda'r gwirionedd yma yw'r amser sy'n cynnwys ymddiad gyda'r cyllid yn fawr i'r ffathol yn ymddiad cyflawn cyffredsanol. Mae'r syniad yn ymddiad yma yn Ysgol wedi'u ddau sydd i'r ffrindwyr ymddiad ar gyfer yr argynnu cynghwyb yn amser a'r cyflawn cyflawn cyflawn cyflawn cyffredsanol ar gyfer cymaint y Llywodraeth i'r Llywodraeth Cymru. Y dywedodd, Dymrung Wong Opparat yn ym 1964, when people of the east look at religious art at the West, they often don't like it. Some even think of such art as pornographic. When people of the West look at religious art at the East, they often don't like it. Some people even think of such art as ignorant and primitive. But a person who has a universal mind will look at art and not think of it as being of the east or west. A study of philosophy and religion's abstractions provides the pathway to understanding. D'Mrong had just returned from his studies at the Slade School in London a year prior, during which he recounts attending mass for the first time, having his first experience breaking bread at Sibad. Such experiences provided the backdrop for D'Mrong's turn to abstract painting. And for his argument that abstraction yn mynd i'r llwyddon ddysgu, roedd eich bod ymlaen o'r llwyave yn ôl iawn, rhan o bach o barthau, o'r llwyddon i llwyddon gwyllwyr eich hampwar y mae'r hyn o fewn i Llywodraeth. Mae Rwm Sawn Ard sydd o'r llwyddon o'r drun50 o'r llwyddon i'r mwyfyrd oherwydd eich cyfnod yn teulu. Mae hyn rhyngwg yn 1965 datblygu that mae'n rhaid o bobl wneud sydd fit y bach o ffyrdd ond sy'n gwych gyfnod i'r llwyddon. It is as if we despise what makes a person a person. What is humanity in art?" As I near the end of my time, perhaps I could draw the thread of argument that's been implicit so far, which is that Sin, Chyns, and Sulach's influential theorizations of Buddhism ultimately had a chilling effect on how artists approached body politics and representation of the body. These ideologs' concerns with Buddhism's decorous moralism reached for a highly abstracted sense of humanity and friendship, concepts that were kept well insulated from the body's fleshy materiality and intimate relationality. The tension between such perspectives reached a breaking point in an episode of Vandalism in 1971, where schoolboys broke into an exhibition at the Christian Student Association in Bangkok to cut and tear apart these paintings by Tawan Dashani. In these works, Buddhist mythology and architecture are made to collude with notions of bodily hybridity. Tawan's chimeric figures pictures internally pluralized cells that fully admit to sexual desire. The Vandals, however, saw these images as an affront to Buddhism, an affront that deserved violence in kind. What emerged in newspaper commentaries on this episode was a common theme, that the Christian Student Association had allowed the display of Tawan's work marks, quote, a failure of friendship. The moral obligation of Christian friends, such critics implied, was to help protect public interest. Christians could only be good friends if they did not violate the integrity of the Buddhist body politic. Gokrit Brahmot and Oxford educated polymath in later Prime Minister of Thailand was one of the most high profile commentators of this event. His response in Bangkok Post defended Tawan's free and impassioned expression as an attitude that a Western trained artist like Tawan was in some ways expected to bring back to Thailand. Yet Gokrit's text takes a curious turn towards the end as he launches into a discussion of BR Mbedkar, the Indian reformist politician who Gokrit had met in London. Mbedkar is famous for radically reinterpreting Buddhism as a rejection of the caste system and for promoting conversion to Buddhism as an exit from a politic superiority. Mbedkar's Dalit Buddhism was one that fully admitted to the frailty of the body to corporate reality. What Gokrit implied was that Thai artists who had studied in Europe like Tawan have successfully brought back a more liberalized and individualistic art, at least in visual terms. But what Gokrit lamented and longed for was that they should have brought back a better Buddhism, a more egalitarian Buddhism. This leads me to a point I'd like to end on, which is that the learning of artistic technique or the acquaintance with artists abroad, while important, may not always be what is most interesting about an artist's foreign soldier, at least in this frame of art and intellectual history. Research on transnational art education and pedagogy stands then to be supplemented by such histories of how worldliness and relationality comes to be constructed. For it is through such mediation that a foreign art education is then refracted, metabolized, and ultimately becomes transformative. Thank you. Thank you so much for that wonderful paper, Kenji. I'm just trying to start my video here. Can I just invite everybody who was on this panel and Donzish and the co-conveners to join us in a conversation, please. Please turn on your cameras. And thank you again, Kenji, for that incredibly stimulating paper and for taking us through to these questions of translation, which I think will be very important in thinking through our relationship to approaches to and sort of methodological engagements with this question of pedagogy and learning. Nozish, would you like to turn on your camera again? Well, maybe when she has a chance. Yeah, she can do so. I thought I might. Oh, before I start with asking a first question, I'd just like to invite all of you to contribute to the discussion by adding some questions in the Q&A, which I'm now looking at, and there's already two excellent questions. Okay. Well, maybe I'll just take my prerogative as the chair to ask a question anyways, because I'm quite curious. There's so many really exciting linkages between all of your papers. And in particular, so I'm just going to read out a few phrases that I wrote down from each of you, Aziz, your question about how can we still centre Karachi, but understand these constellations. I think that that's a key question that we're all grappling with. How do we think about art education and London as a kind of thread that brings different histories together, while being aware of the imperial histories, and also addressing the fact that there are so many other factors in play. Charmaine, your comment about Tandawu, black powder falling through Muslim as a metaphor for pedagogy. For me that was so poetic and beautiful, but also such a wonderful way of understanding or grappling with this question of how do we talk about pedagogy and how do we talk about pedagogy in terms within the framework of these imperial histories. And Kenji, the way that you brought together the necessarily messy and imperfect traffic of translation, and this question of abstraction as the language of visual translation is something that I found very interesting. And Nazish, as well, thinking about pedagogy under Kipling as being somewhere between an atelier at a school, sort of really for me also thought about these questions of translation. So my big question to all of you is how do we talk about pedagogy, when pedagogy is really one thread among many, both geographically and also, you know, in the sense of, you know, an artist's entire life in a place. And then also how do we talk about London without centering it. So I don't know who would like to take the questions first, but I will put those out there for you. Aziz, would you like to maybe take your own question about how do we talk about London without centering it? Sure. I think the way I've tried to do that, and actually that has is perhaps thinking of also myself, just like as someone who studied down in the US and like if, you know, London has now been displayed by the kind of the fact the US is now much more dominant anglophone power in the world, right, and the Fulbright program, for example, which has been much more recent. I think it's more like sort of right the relations that you build and what do you learn and then sort of how do you go back and kind of like, and I think I kind of like want to honour the fact that a lot of these artists. And we see this, I think also with what Naziz is talking about is they really could have grounded themselves in the local milieu and kind of had these local relations and constellations that they were working with right so there were seeds that could have been potentially planted the better thing on their own terms they kind of as also Kenji ended, right, they retracted it back on their own terms in the local scene. They were inspired by artists who were kind of circulating from other kind of melews and I think, for example, Dury also talks about this if they can also talk about this. The fact that they kind of encountered someone like Lalaro in Lahore at that time who also, you know, was sort of very much part of the feminist movement and kind of working with the minimalist practice. Lalaro is actually, you know, is also circulating alongside these folks so I think I think it kind of London kind of let's say it's the seed or if it's the plant moment but it also isn't at the same time right because it kind of also disrupts what you're thinking so I think that's an important way to kind of think of that. I don't know if that's a good answer but I just, it's something that I think we can continue to grapple with as well but I also also want to kind of acknowledge that artists are cosmopolitan. Again, like, I don't like to use this word because it's so global north and you know what is global south cosmopolitanism really and like not trying to say it in a neoliberal capitalist way. And they do have this kind of transient nomadic itinerant peripatatic kind of way of working and I think that of course is something that the rise of borders and nation states has continued to the trouble to continue to find those ways to kind of link across borders and and moments and I think that was something really important to acknowledge. Absolutely, I think that's a really wonderful answer and thank you for getting us started there. I noticed that nauseous has her hand up. Would you like to take the floor. I think I need to just respond a bit to Aziz because you know I was. I think when he's talking about this kind of north south in our case Karachi and Lahore, and this to create a kind of a binary in some way or the other. I think is in. I don't entirely agree with him. I mean, for example, the British Council scholarship, actually in 1986 or something like that they stopped giving the British Council scholarships to for art. They gave them for other subjects they kind of shifted their own policy. It's more for human rights and law and etc etc and not for us. In fact, we were arguing this out with them. Very much because we and then they had the sudden thing of people cannot go and study for a full fledged program because it costs a lot of money to send them because usually in art schools is for two years that you go into an MFA and you don't anyway. I don't want to get into this kind of level of a kind of arguing, but what I'm saying is that you know Karachi is such an extremely dynamic and forceful place. The art school in the art that there are major their three art schools in Karachi Karachi University Karachi School of Art and the industry school. So, I mean if you think about their individual kind of trajectories of how they've grown and the struggle that has taken place to really put them, you know, right on the map as it were, and industry gets a lot of attention the other two schools don't. Although Durya is working at the Karachi University and has has produced some really marvelous artists. She founded that art school. She founded that department, but you know look at the struggle that she's gone through. I mean I've gone and visited Karachi University and it's really a sad state of affairs. But the thing is that in this valley gets the attention in this valley is from where a very major movement began, which is the Karachi pop. And it was a kind of synergy of these seven eight people who were together under in one institution, putting giving that kind of energy, and all of them actually had a connection to Britain. That's the interesting thing with the exception of Samina Mansooni. And for that matter even if the car and, you know, and Elizabeth, but Niza and, you know, Durya and David and various other people, they all kind of came together, and what really emerged from that school is actually parallel in a way to what was happening with the miniature painting in Lahore. So all of this, I think that, you know, we have to look at it together. I don't know, Aziz, maybe we should have this discussion somewhere else. That's exciting. We should certainly pursue this at some point, I think, and really it gets to this kind of multi-sided analysis that becomes important. Especially, you know, I remember Charmaine was talking about how formal classroom instruction was only one part of the transfer of knowledge. Charmaine, I don't know if you would like to say a few words about how we situate pedagogy in that kind of complex system. Yeah, I mean, so that's why I say that this research project isn't complete, simply because I don't want to treat London as kind of a source, like we keep seeing it as a source of all this knowledge and transfers that's coming back to our individual countries. And that's why I mean, in my case, Dawu had so many exhibitions and performances in the UK in London and in Birmingham. By all that, I can't find the material of all that at the moment, which is why the second part of the research is really to find out what sort of impact he had there. And I can't imagine, it can't be nothing, like what impact did the acne show have in London, what impact did performances he did at various kind of community centres have in London. And I think that needs to be told to balance out this story that I'm trying to put together about that tooth decade. They had an animation, something like that, I guess, kind of addresses this idea of London as a kind of imperial centre, especially in Singapore as well, as it is done. And with pedagogy, for Dawu's case, I think it's really interesting because he personally sees all his art as pedagogy. His practice is so centred on the idea of pedagogy. So in the 90s, he started making workshops as artwork, and he did that for about a decade. And so I think as an artist that we can draw on and tease out maybe certain aspects of what pedagogy means through his practice. For example, in the Tapioca Friendship project where he artwork becomes the workshop and what you create during the workshop then goes on. So that's actually something that I'm thinking about as well. That's super interesting, and I think that there are lots of relationships with what Aziz was talking about with respect to alternative pedagogies in his talk. I wonder if maybe we can sort of put a pin in that and talk about that a little bit later in terms of what artists are doing when they return and maybe to think a little bit about alternative pedagogies at that point. I just wanted to give Kenji a chance to respond to this question of how do we de-centre London, how do we talk about pedagogies? And in doing that, I might even ask you to comment a little bit on what kinds of parallels and connections you see in having listened to all of your colleagues over the past 45 minutes or hour and a half or so. That might help us to bring things together, but also understand how do we de-centre London? We talk about other places. Let's talk about other places. No, thank you, Ming. I think I see a lot of connections already threading through and maybe something that I kind of picked up is, I think many, both Charmaine and Aziz, you show kind of these archival documents from the artist themselves or whether it's photos that they took or kind of notes that they took. And it's interesting for me digging into those kinds of archives in Thailand with the artist's states because it's so multilingual. You go in and then suddenly you realize that this artist is writing in Thai, in Chinese, in French, in English, and kind of all broken. You try to read all of them. It doesn't seem like they're really fluent in any or all. And I think that's maybe part of how we think about de-centring London is just this sheer traffic of people who are speaking at each other, not necessarily always getting through to each other, but maybe that mistranslation ends up being productive. Someone goes there and gets something quite unexpected out of it. So maybe I'll just leave that open as kind of a provocation as well. And I think that it's been slightly difficult for me to grapple with Bangkok and London because there's such a big kind of mythology of what London is in the Thai elite imagination, which is a place where Prime Ministers go to get educated. So you can see that the cast of characters that I show were very much like elite, like men of a certain standing. So that's something that I am also trying to figure out how to de-center or dislocate that story. If I could just add one thing in there is that perhaps we also need to sort of move away from thinking about London as one thing. So it's interesting to look at the references that both Aziz and Charmaine wrote up. So in the practices of the Black Arts group and particularly the roadworks. Now one of the things to think about is how do roadworks feature in histories of British art and where do they feature. And actually think about the street as a place where artists who don't find that space kind of take it on. Both as studio, as exhibition space, but also as a space where they then sort of can talk and teach. So the street becomes all of these things. And perhaps there are different London's happening. So there is a London which Mona Hatoum and Rashid Ar-Ain are taking over or Tangdavu. And I'm thinking also about people like Hassan Sharif. So who didn't go to the storied schools, who were in Bayamshol rather than Central St Markins or Horsleyd or what have you. And how those practices have inspired people who then sort of go to Karachi or Singapore or Bangkok. And also create networks which are not those that are being served by the sort of the central infrastructure of galleries and institutions in those places. Thank you for that, Hamad. Now I'm just looking at the Q&A and we have five questions here. So I'm thinking that maybe we need to sort of spend some time with our audience members here. I'm just going to get a read out a couple of comments first. So Iftikar Dadi is writing in with a couple of informational points. Durya Kazi was not associated with the Indus Valley School except briefly and I was never associated with it. Actually Iftikar, if you'd like to turn on your microphone, would you like to just make these comments yourself? Is that possible? There we go. Hello, can you hear me? Yes. I mean, this is an interesting discussion. I just wanted to mention, you know, which is Naji's comments that definitely Indus is an important art school that started I think in 1989 and remains an important art school. But what happened in terms of the engagement with popular culture in Karachi, it wasn't, I mean it was, there were some people from Indus, but it was bigger than that. People were not associated with Indus in fact, including myself for Durya actually taught there for very, very short time, you know, so Elizabeth also taught there for a very, very short time. So it's not, so you know, an Indus was, I get some issues which Aziz mentioned having to do with, you know, kind of questions of authenticity and so on that were being that basically the principle at that time was pushing, you know, okay, and that was not really open to kind of no engagement with popular culture. The other, and part of this London thing is that London actually didn't, what I'm trying to say is that London actually didn't make a big contribution to what happened in Karachi, you know, because the things that were relevant in terms of post-colonial developments actually never were brought to in a kind of a systematic way to Karachi because people read, I mean Durya had some exposure to Black British, you know, I was reading some third text and public culture and things like that. But you couldn't really, there was no space for debate and that British Council show that happened in 1997 was basically this colonial show, you know, that's my understanding, it was basically a kind of a colonial show so there wasn't really so it was the work of individual artists trying to, you know, kind of articulate a position and articulate a trajectory but it wasn't really done through either, I mean institutions didn't play a big role and London didn't play a big role in it so. That's really very interesting. I'm wondering if maybe we should also take John Tain's comment into bringing it into this conversation now and he's saying perhaps one way not to centre London is to simply not let it be the centre. Actually John, if you would want to, there you are. Good. Would you like to make your comment yourself. Yeah, can you hear me. Yeah, so I think it was really interesting. First of all, thank you everyone for for your presentations is a very rich set of talks, and I think that in each of your own ways, you know, you did kind of turn, I guess, the kind of the equation so it's more about the Asia side of things in some ways. And, you know, I was kind of really struck by the way that Kenji, I think, took a different set of artists so you know usually we look at artists who are working towards progressive goals, and in this case, I think he was a very useful reminder that, you know, going abroad is not necessarily just about opening up possibilities, but can also be about closing them. And so I was actually curious to hear from the other panelists about this idea of, you know, the pedagogy as a process that allows for the accumulation of capital that can be used for, you know, different ends and not just entirely it's not always the cosmopolitan results that you know we kind of stereotypically expect right. There are, it's a kind of a useful reminder, I guess, and just curious to hear what others have to say about that. Maybe I'll just go first. So in those case, actually, even though kind of the scholarship indicate came back to Singapore in 88, and if you kind of don't know him, you think that he kind of stayed in Singapore since 88 and he was made all these shows. So he actually spends half his time in London still. So he hasn't been able to go back because of COVID, but in normal circumstances he commutes back and forth and he actually hasn't, like a council flat still in London where he stays. He uses the British Medical Services. So, I mean, that's not art, but there is this entire back and forth life that is meeting between Singapore and London. And while the pedagogical aspects, I guess mainly conducted in Singapore when he teaches at NIE, which is a teacher's college, and he occasionally still teaches, I think, shorter courses as well in formal educational institutes here. I guess it's about looking, I think, for me beyond his art practice, where we start to see this kind of less, or maybe where we start to see sort of more open and complicated relationships in the figure of one particular artist that's kind of struggling these two cities. Sarah? To come in, I don't want to disrupt if there's any responses from the speakers because it's a slightly different point just to bringing that sort of bubbling up from the papers and then the conversation that's happening around them. And, you know, just really to think about how we research pedagogies. I think it's such an interesting question and an issue and problem for just thinking methodologically across this session, and across, you know, the whole the whole programme as well that you how do you actually research practices and methods. You know, I think, as I wrote down a phrase that you had used about pedagogy outside of the classroom, you know when it can't be contained within the formal spaces of teaching. You know, it's quite interesting to think about, you know, where are we looking for pedagogy? Is it in artworks? Is there something that we can actually do some kind of visual analysis around pedagogy? Or is that, you know, a futile task which you'll be just, you know, searching for traces on the surface and, you know, fabricating things really from that? Or, you know, you've all talked about archives and things that are not in archives as well. And, you know, so much things about human interaction, conversation, the stolen glances across a studio shared space. You know, I think things like that, the informalities, the textures of human lives and relationships within classrooms, art schools and campus situations in corridors. You know, the proximity of bodies. I think, you know, it's just really asking, you're putting questions out there about how we do this kind of research and what traces pedagogy leave. So I'm just really fascinated by these ideas that the papers have all sparked. Thank you so much for that comment, Sarah. I'd love to hear more from our speakers. Aziz has his hand up, so hopefully he'll address that question. Yeah, I mean, this is all great. And I mean, I, there's a lot to say, and I think also to like, engage with the current, some of the things you brought up and also exactly trouble some of these things. But, you know, I mean, sorry, I bring queerness into everything, but whatever, but I'm going to just do this. But, you know, I also think a lot about how Jose Esteban Muno talks about, like, and I know that it's not like that these folks are thinking about that. But Jose Esteban Muno talks about ephemera as evidence to think of like queer, you know, kind of constellations and sort of the things that are that are not translatable or kind of written down in the record and sort of finding those gaps in the record and sort of that's my work with kind of the queer archive. But I, you know, I mean, of course, the other kind of concept is also Fred Motons under, and Stefano Harney's under comments. And sort of the kind of work that gets kind of takes this under the institution, right. And I'm not saying that in the 80s and the 90s, of course, these artists are these thinkers are productively thinking about that consciously. But I know for a fact that at least now a lot of us who are sort of the systems are like sort of grappling with these theories, because there was the words weren't there but I do think of a lot of these as the under comments, and as it's sort of like ephemera, kind of that, and basically what you were saying, Sarah, you know, kind of those circulations and I think in that way. That is a form of the centering London as well right as I said right that what are the under comments of London right what are the spaces that kind of like the radical work is actually taking place that of course. I mean this is the 1980s it's Margaret Thatcher I mean it's you know it's neoliberal capitalism right all of that I mean there's a lot that's actually quite horrible. And I think in that way, also thinking about class is really important in all of our work right like, like the fact that like literally in this valley attracts a particular class of students because it's a private university. Same with who actually gets to go to the UK, but then the fact that garage university that Durya does found in 1998 as a public university and it is a completely different class of students economically and of course by this time like from the 80s to 90s also because of the explosion neoliberal capital Pakistan class based dynamics are shifting right as well. So and I think these are all things that like, you know, we don't center in our analysis but I think I really important to also like consider a lot more to think of then how London gets decentered and then we kind of come to things with our own terms with kind of again you know resources that have been given to us and as I think john said this kind of accumulation of capital and capital of course again defined in all sorts of ways. Thank you for that disease. I am quite aware of the time we've now gone over by about 15, what actually 18 minutes. And I still have three more questions in our Q&A box, which I'll just read to you all very quickly so that you can get a sense of what some of the directions of inquiry are. I think it might perhaps suggest that instead of answering all of these questions in this formal setting that we would invite you all to join us in a conversation after this panel. There is a zoom after party that you can join us for. It sounds much more glamorous than it is, but where we can continue these conversations and so I'll just go through this very quickly. Ewa Benchefa is asking Kenji a question that he's typing an answer to right now. Excellent. Really asking about the connections between Bedkar and Cwcrit and trying to understand what those connections are. Ewa Benchefa, she says, thank you to all of you. It has a question mostly for Aziz about the pedagogical resonances of the British Black Arts Movement via Rashida Irene. Ewa Benchefa is also typing an answer. Excellent. You're excellent interlocutors. And Faisa Gauri asks, at what point do you feel like you have reached a decolonised practice? What are good indicators of this? And then finally, Iftikar has also written in to say, yes Karachi University Department is not founded until a decade after the Indus Valley School. So, with all of that, I think this is not a goodbye but a see you in the next room perhaps for some of you. I'd really like to ask all of you to join me in thanking all of our speakers for their brilliant papers. Nazish for her wonderful keynote speech. Aziz and Kenji and Charmaine for their wonderful papers. All of you for your stimulating questions and thank you Hamad and Sarah for joining the conversation and also of course to Danny and Shona for all of the hard work that you've done to bring this all together. And also Shona, thank you so much for gaining control again from our Zoom bomber. All right, see you in a bit. I think that there should be a link in the chat here for the Zoom after party and you can join us there. Okay. See you. Goodbye. And hopefully you'll join us tomorrow for bureaucracy and agency. Bye.