 Good morning. My name is Anuradha Vikram. I'm a curator, critic, and educator based in Los Angeles, currently based at UCLA. And I have worked with Arts and Relatives in the past. I've also run several international residency programs. I can't exactly tell you what I'm doing here today. I do a lot of different things. But I was asked to read a little bit from my book, Decolonizing Culture, and I am going to do that. But I've been inspired by some of the conversations that I've been having with fellows since yesterday, and by what Janipa just said. So I'm going to read you a little bit from a speculative fiction novel that I published in July. And it's just a tiny snippet. This is five interconnected stories that I think attempt to speculate on our futures from an unfixed position, geographically, as well as conceptually. So while we're bringing up the slides, I'll just read a little bit. This is from a story called Catfish. And as the title suggests, the main character has been catfished online, which is to say that he's been scammed into sending a large amount of money to someone that he thinks is a real person. And in fact, not a real person, but a deep fake. And so he's just figured this out. That's the end. Something still not David. Prior to his confession, he had told no one about the encounter at the Consumer Electronics Showcase. It happened late, and David's company paid single room with no further communication, no witnesses. But Axel had taken a car service back to his hotel, David realized. The link pod hadn't made it to Vegas yet. A single receipt would have been enough to establish the connection in the right hands. But who's? David contacted Tim Jamaliyev. He needed to know who had scammed him. Only then could he exact requital and restore balance to his inner cosmos. Tim got back a couple of days later, but his search had come up and he handed. He spoke with all his suppliers and trading partners who serviced the area, sniffed around the Bit Farms in Abkhazia and the server plantations at Dothus Central European Industrial Zone. No one had been approached to supply the operation in Kiev. You're chasing ghosts, Tim admonished. Whoever's behind this, they were not in Central Europe. David was undeterred. He read through all his past correspondence with Axel. Through text apps, it was difficult to verify the recipient's location. Scraping videos from metadata might bear more fruit. Three sleepless nights later, he had an address in Modesto, about 80 miles southeast of Oakland, practically next door. So the scene that I'm trying to set in this piece is about how we don't even know how interconnected we are, that things are happening in our backyards that we think are coming from afar and things are happening in other places that are directly affecting our lives now and it's happening at a scale that we as human beings actually just cannot comprehend. Our brains cannot handle the amount of increased information, connectivity, the scope of the planet. You know, all of this is transformed in my lifetime and I'm not even 50 years old. So how can we adjust to the future that's happening beneath our feet right now? We're living in the future at this very moment and we're not prepared for it. So to take this to my previous work, in 2017, you go to the next slide, thank you. I published a book called Decolonizing Culture, essays on the intersection of art and politics. This is based on five years of columns, about 40 columns that I wrote for an online publication called Daily Serving, which is now no longer in existence and its archives have been scrubbed from the internet. So only these 17 essays survive in the form of a book. At the time I was really motivated by the movement for Black Lives and the issues that we were seeing in American museums specifically around how unprepared contemporary art institutions were to address Black audiences or diverse audiences from a culturally sensitive perspective and how virtue signaling would soon unravel into direct defense and inability to confront and accept and acknowledge that offense. I would write this book I think quite differently now. I also would not write this book right now because many other people are doing this work now, but in 13 to 17, not that many people were. So this was one of the first books that came out of this most recent movement to remove monuments and question funders and so on, and it was just a very tiny drop in a very big bucket. But based on an essay that I wrote in that book called Political Biennale, I'm going to talk a little bit about some artist projects that I think are relevant today. So this was a review of Okwe and Wizards 2015, Venice Biennale, and it was directly in response to an article by JJ Charlesworth where Charlesworth had alleged that political art was meaningless and that it was mere virtue signaling and that doing art that engages political immediate current event issues in a direct and representational way was not valid as a focus for art and not valid as a focus for an exhibition. So I pulled a couple of works that I talked about, and I'm just going to read a little bit from the book. So this is about the work of Glukia. The strongest works are those that negotiate the poles of aestheticism and political expression, such as the collection of anti-Putin protest garments assembled by Russian artist Glukia of the collective Kto Delat, which fluctuate between social operation and the sphere of protest and aesthetic function in the space of installation. This was also, can you go to the next slide? I'm sorry, there's actually an image. So as you can see, right, this is the arsonale, and these are t-shirts and clothes with protest slogans printed on them that are mounted against the wall on these wooden planks and just propped up against the wall. So you could theoretically pick them up and move with them. Of course, nobody does at the Venice Biennale. And then the next image. This is the work that J.J. Charlesworth was particularly offended by. It's a work by the Brazilian artist Vic Muniz based on the sinking of the Lampedusa, which was a migrant boat coming from North Africa that sank in the Adriatic, and many people died. So Muniz had made this paper boat to float in the Venice Canal that was meant to bring the attention of art-goers to this ongoing crisis, which is of course still ongoing. So for some, the only question to be answered by political art remains, does it change anything? This is not my chief concern as I staunchly support the right of art to serve no greater purpose than provoking discourse and thought within its viewership. The expectation that art with far fewer resources than government should accomplish a greater result or abandon social engagement altogether serves as a backhanded means of silencing artists whose work strays from upbeat market-friendly narratives. Let's go to the next one. So I had the privilege of working with a Ukrainian artist, Lada Nakonechma, several years ago. And I look at her practice as being representative of the kinds of practices that I want to see in response to conflict. This work was informed when we were working together by the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Obviously things have taken a much worse turn in the last year. And Lada is currently based, I believe, in Leipzig and is in exile with her child. And this has been the case for a couple of these artists. Women were allowed to leave, men were not. So often female artists left with their children and their partners remain. So Lada has founded or co-founded a number of artist unions. And I find this really interesting because there's a real spirit of collectivism that comes from the post-Soviet countries that I think is something that we, in the individualistic United States, could really learn something from. But I'm most interested in the fact that when governments are unreliable, which is actually all the time, we ought to and can create our own independent networks and organizations. So I'm particularly interested in artists creating institutions for their own support. And so in Lada's case, it's really the method fund that I want to talk about. So she co-created this fund. Another artist involved in this is Olga Kubli, if you want to go to the next slide. And so Olga was actually, I was introduced to Olga when she left Ukraine and came to the United States at the start of the war. It was temporarily in Los Angeles, I believe she's in New York now. Also a member of the method fund. And the method fund is an independent nonprofit organization aimed at supporting and developing contemporary art and culture in Ukraine by initiating scientific, educational and exhibition projects. I think it's particularly interesting that these artists chose to title their operation a fund. Which speaks to the fact that what we really need is resources. We don't actually need anything else. Let's go to the next one. I'm trying to keep it really brief. So then this is actually an exhibition that was at the Pinchuk Art Center in Kiev. And it's called Russian War Crimes. And it is literally that it is photographic documentation and other forms of evidence gathered to account for the crimes that Russian troops have committed in Ukraine since the start of the war. And this really struck me because in light of the current conflict in Palestine and Israel just the need to actually get people to believe that things are happening that we know are happening is so paramount. And, you know, young arts workers that I work with are asking me, how can I do more? How can I apply my skills and my knowledge and my training and my influence and my affluence to this cause? And I thought that this was a really interesting idea. It's not an art show, but it is in an art museum. So to conclude, I want to introduce the work of Khalil Raba, who's an artist who's currently based in Palestine. I was introduced to his work through his fellowship at the Veralis Center in New York. And he recently was the subject of a talk. He was supposed to attend the talk, but all the power had been cut in Gaza so he's not able to attend the talk. And the curators presented his work. And what really struck me about his work is twofold. The reason he's here is because I want to represent the current conflict. Well, obviously, the Ukraine conflict is also a current conflict, the most recent current conflict, but of course the oldest current conflict. And I also want to represent this idea of the Palestinian Museum of Natural History in humankind, which is now a 20-year operation. It's a semi-fictional institution, which makes sense because at its stance, Palestine is a semi-fictional country. How do we negotiate this identity? And how also would we negotiate it independent of the idea of a nation state as a repository for our identity and our influence? So the other question that I asked after looking at Khalil's work is it's extremely poetic. And it makes the point about oppression very elegantly. And it made me ask, you know, we have heard since the Holocaust, you know, the statement there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. And I really wonder about that, you know. Right now, what Palestinians are experiencing is a genocide. And yet not only can there be poetry, there must be poetry. So that's where I'm coming from. And that's it. Thank you.