Well, maybe we'll make a start now. Well, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Hamad Nasser, and I'm a curator, strategic advisor, and senior research fellow here at the Paul Mellon Center. Let me extend all of you a very warm welcome. Today, I'm pleased to welcome you to Aesthetics and Ways of Knowing. This is the fourth week of our London Asia Art World's program. And I want to start by a big thank you to our panel and to all of you for joining us today. Now, the London Asia Art World's program has been co-organized as a collaboration between myself, Sarah Victoria Turner, who's the deputy director for research here at the Paul Mellon Center, and Professor Ming Tiampo, who is professor in the Department of Art History and Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carlton University in Ottawa, Canada. Ming is also the second holder of the London Asia Research Award. Now, some of you may be regular attendees at the PMC events, and for some, this event might be your first interaction with the center. The PMC is a research institute and an educational charity, and it's part of Yale University. Physically, we are based in Bedford Square here in central London, where you can visit our library and archives, but we have an ever-growing digital presence, and you can find out more about our program on our website, along with details about our research collections, publications, both print and digital, our grants and fellowship schemes, learning activities, and our future events. London Asia Art World's is a five-week multi-part program that's been taking place over May and June of 2021 and reflects on ways in which the growing field of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with and challenges the established histories of British art. This event marks five years of the Paul Mellon Center's London Asia project, established in collaboration with Hong Kong's Asia Art Archive, and which is co-led by Sarah and myself. The wider project is concerned with excavating the historical, as well as reflecting on the contemporary entanglements that link London and more widely Britain and Asia. Now it does this by focusing on three research strands, exhibitions, institutions, and art schools. The London Asia project questions the boundaries of national and regional histories and explores new models of researching and writing about the transnational infrastructures and networks that have shaped the histories of art. Now, before I pass over the baton to Ming, let me walk you through the PMC's online housekeeping guidelines and tell you more about how this Zoom webinar will run. Now I know most of us have probably had more housekeeping guidelines over Zoom than we can stomach, but bear with us. So firstly, just the structure. There will be a keynote paper for about 45 minutes followed by a Q&A, there'll be a short break, and then three further 15-minute papers with a larger sort of plenary Q&A session. But you do not have to wait until the sort of formal Q&A sessions. Please, as we go along, do add any questions into the Q&A function in Zoom. It'll be great if we have these questions available to the chair and the panel as we are progressing. The online event is being run by the PMC's event manager, Sean O'Blanchfield, and event assistant, Danny Convey. And there will be on hand to answer any questions you have throughout this afternoon. And I want to sort of start with just thanking them for the brilliant job they've been doing so far. And long may that continue. With that, I'm going to pass over to Ming. Thank you very much, Hamad, and welcome to all of you. I'm just going to share my screen. Excuse me for a second, it's not working. I'm very sorry, here it is. Of course, it worked five minutes ago, so apologies. One of the challenges of a project such as London Asia Art Worlds, which seeks to write forgotten histories, seek new research, and make methodological interventions, is that the sands of colonial difference and racialized neglect have obligated even the most basic information about many artists, their exhibitions, and their histories. The surfacing and reconnecting of these traces is of the utmost importance and is a first step towards constituting this transnational space as a field of inquiry. As this project moves forward past the conference, we are hoping to keep you all involved and to ask for your collaboration in nurturing these ongoing research directions as a collective enterprise. To begin with, we are asking for your contributions in identifying artists from Asia who spent time in the UK and artists of the Asian diaspora born in the UK, the art schools that they went to, and the exhibitions in which they showed. The intention is twofold. Firstly, to crowdsource and create a database of artists that can serve our community of researchers, you, us starting points for further research. Secondly, to visualize the entangled cartographies of this field emerging between the UK and Asia between 1850 and 2000, between empire and decolonization. So what I'm showing you here is a visualization of some data that I put in with my research on the Slade School of Fine Art. So you can see that the data is very skewed right now around the Slade School of Fine Art, but this is really to show you what is possible. This next slide shows exhibitions grouped by year, again, using data that I have inputted. So there's an interesting kind of cluster in the 80s and 90s, but I believe that that's probably because of data bias and that we really do need a larger data set. And what I'm showing you here is the series of networks that we can visualize by looking at the exhibitions that artists showed in. What we're hoping is that we can experiment with data visualization techniques that enable us to creatively rethink how art history is written so that we can see new patterns, new geographies and frameworks. So for example, something that really surprised us was to see here when we looked at the density of UK exhibitions by region that not all of the exhibitions were in London, something which becomes even more evident when you look at the sites on the map where exhibitions took place. What happens when critical mass data methodologies are used in place of the historical filters that have been shaped by colonial, racist and sexist attitudes? What happens when we surface the histories of artists who are working together alongside their white male pleat peers, winning awards, exhibiting, getting commissions and building careers who have now been obscured by the structural biases of art history? This is now a call to action, an invitation for you, your networks and your students to join us in creating a data set that will help us to visualize these new cartographies. We plan to follow this call up with workshops and editathons, with those of you who take us up on our invitation and of course you will be credited on the project when it goes live. We are asking that you go onto the London Asia Art World's websites page for the data project, and the link will be in the chat momentarily. There, you will find two links, we can see at the bottom here, one for entering in data about exhibitions and the other for entering in information about artists. So those links link to these Google forms, which you can then fill out. It should be fairly straightforward. And of course, if your information is partial, please don't worry about that, as all contributions are appreciated and welcome. And here's the Google form for artist data. So we look forward to continuing this conversation with you and to working together. And now back to Sarah. Thanks so much, Meng.  And we really have enjoyed in the previous panels all the information or the ideas that have come through the chat and the Q&A to really feel that these sessions are a way of connecting with a community of researchers, artists, curators, and just interested members of the public. So again, thanks so much for joining you. As Meng has outlined, our hope is that the London Asia Art World's project will offer relational stories that negotiate difficult colonial and entangled past, shared presence, and also possible collaborative futures. And the papers, provocations, and discussions that are part of this program are an urgent reminder that the contours of nationhood are complex and of the importance of making worlds rather than of closing them. And of course, it's not lost on us that this series is organized and hosted and funded by the place which I work, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the pressures, the challenges, and the questions that such research as done by the members in the communities that are part of London Asia puts on the framing of art practice and history through nation. And this session on aesthetics and ways of knowing acknowledges the multiple frameworks of seeing, making, knowing, and telling that's fostered in different global sites and the ways in which the possibilities and problems that arise when these art practices are viewed and interpreted as intertwined. Our chair for this session, Dorothy Price, is someone whose work exemplifies how we can productively complicate the standard narratives of art history by thinking across different spaces, sites, practices, and time periods in order not to just trouble the past but so that we might plot pathways that move us onwards. As she recently wrote in an editorial of the journal Art History of which is the editor, art history today has an urgent need to seek strategies for sustainable, embedded, inclusive, decolonial, and anti-racist futures if it is to continue to thrive. Dorothy Price is professor of art history at the University of Bristol. And she was a founding member and inaugural director of the Center for Black Humanities at the University of Bristol. And she has widely published in the fields of black British art history and German modernism. She's currently working with the artist Sonja Boyce, R-A-O-B-E, on a special issue of art history devoted to black artists and modernism with Imogen Hart, who's at Berkeley. And on a special issue entitled British Art and the Global. Together with the British painter, Shantel Joff, she's recently co-produced Personal Feeling is the Main Thing, an exhibition and book about Joff's work in dialogue with the German artist Paula Madison Becker. And she's also recently written about the work of the sculptor Veronica Ryan for her exhibition at Spike Island, which I really encourage everyone to go and see if they can get to Bristol. And she's, Dorothy is also working with the Royal Academy and the Kunstmuseum, Den Haag for a fourth exhibition of Expressionist Women. So it's my great pleasure to hand over to Professor Dorothy Price as our chair for the aesthetics and ways of knowing session. Dot over to you. You, thank you, Sarah. Your introduction reminds me that I need to update my profile. But yes, I'm really delighted to be here. I have followed whenever I can the sessions for this really fantastic set of thinking around the entanglements between London Asia art worlds. And it's really kind of heartening to kind of hear the research that everyone has been undertaking with these kind of transnational purviews in mind as a way of sort of exploding the sort of dominance of Western modernist nationalist traditions of thinking about art and history. So I'm really pleased to be here. This particular session, the aesthetics and ways of knowing panel acknowledges that the multiple frameworks of seeing, making, knowing and telling fostered in different global sites pose particular problems of interpretation when viewed as intertwined. And so this section in particular examines strategies of translation and also incommensurability as well. You know, there's not always a sort of neat solution to these entanglements and entwining. And I think we're gonna hear about some of that today this afternoon. Our first paper is a recorded presentation from Professor Shigemi Inaga. He has to unfortunately present a recorded version of his paper because there are various university emergencies he has to contend with as a result of the coronavirus in his home institution. But he will be joining us, I think, I hope for the discussion of his paper afterwards. So Shigemi Inaga is Dean in the Department of Global Studies at the Faculty of Global Culture in Kyoto, Saika University. And he's former professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto and former Dean, Graduate University of Advanced Studies in Hyama, Sokandai. He majored in French 19th century art history as well as comparative literature and culture. And since his PhD in Paris in 1988, he's developed his field of research into cultural anthropology and intercultural ethics. His books include in search of haptic plastics published in 2016, images on the edge in 2014, The Orient of the Painting in 1999, Le Crepuscule de la Penture in 1997. And I imagine lots of other papers as well. He's also edited in English, Crossing Cultural Borders Beyond Reciprocal Anthropology in 1999 and a book called Traditional Japanese Arts and Crafts in the 21st Century, as well as questioning Oriental Aesthetics and Thinking 2010. So I can't imagine a better placed keynote speaker for this session today. And he's also curated exhibitions, produced, co-edited volumes and organized international symposiums, including Cradle of Time, Passage of Souls at the Maison de la Couture in Japan. And the title of his paper today is If You're Fluent in English, put on a Japanese kimono abroad, but if your English is awful, better be dressed in Western attire and he'll talk more about that in his presentation. And there's a link somewhere, there should be a link in the chat if you can't. So the screen is about to be shared with the presentation of his talk, the recorded presentation of his talk, but if you can't, for whatever reason, because of your internet connection, follow the sort of live recording if you like on here, there is a link that's just been put into his chat, a YouTube link where you can also watch it. And then we'll read it in here, probably at about sort of one o'clock, 1.50, one o'clock, I think, for the discussion questions. Okay, so over to the PMC. Well, reconvene at 1.30 if you watch on YouTube. And I think Sean or Danny are going to, yeah, perfect. So the title of my talk is, if you're a friend in English, but on Japanese monobroad, but if your English is awful, better be dressed in Western attire. And this is a word by Tenshin Okakura Kakuzo at the beginning of the 20th century. So I begin my talk by the quote. So if you're a friend in English, but on Japanese monobroad, but if your English is awful, better be dressed in Western attire. Such was the advice Okakura Kakuzo famous for his typical tea, gave to his compatriots as an Asian culture choreographer at the beginning of the 20th century. The word was written if not governed under the British rule. Kimono clothes he is wearing was for ethnic aesthetics, just as English represented the dominant working language, almost synonymous to the universal tool for the appropriate way of knowing. So, ladies and gentlemen, my initial question here to you is to ask whether this statement is still relevant or not in a city of London today, 110 years later. In a case of the city of Kyoto where I am now, I'd rather say the opposite. If you're not good at Japanese, please do not hesitate to put on a kimono dress to exhibit your costume play exodus, then you will be respect free treated by the Kyoto native people as a respectable foreign guest. In fact, the PTO in wearing the kimono costume is quite divergent in Kyoto and whether you are behaving yourself as a foreign guest or as a native Japanese. For the foreign guest, the Japanese dress code is not strictly applied and you can feel free from any rules. But for the latter case for the Japanese, if you're a Japanese citizen, a slight violation or ignorance may be indexed as impolite and you may be shame free ostracized from the community of Japanese people. By the way, the president of our university, Kyoto Seika University, he is the unique black African university president in Japan, is highly respected as his handling of the Kansai local dialect language is perfect. So Black Lives Matter indeed. And you can also guess why I am not dressed in a Japanese fashion today in front of you. The second person to be singled out in the Japanese interstitial traveling to London is Natsumi Soseki who stayed in London from 900 to 903 for almost three years. He is now well known as a Japanese overest and the correction of his short stories, The Tower of London is constantly on sale at a souvenir shop on a spot. And let us examine how Soseki perceived the difference in his dedicated sensibilities between the West and the East. The sixth night episode from his short story, The Night of Dreams, 908 will provide us with a good specimen. The also talks of the 13th century sculptor Unkei among his masterpieces, it is a well-known pieces are a pair of huge guardian gods, Nyo, at the entrance gate of the Todai Temple in Nara which is more than eight meter high and which was the walls being compared with David by Michelangelo in front of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The story goes as follows. Upon learning that Unkei is carving an image of the two guardians for the main gate of the Gokokuji Temple in Tokyo, the narrator rushed to the place. He finds there a sculptor Unkei at work, utterly indifferent to spectators. I quote, Unkei has just carved out an inch high, I will clean across the fort. Then without the movement hesitation, turning the blade straight down, he stuck it slant-wise from above.  His style of carving was indeed unceremonious but showed no least uncertainty. It's amazing how he can at wear create eyebrows and a nose when he wears his scissor. In such a cozy manner said I as though to myself, for I was most terribly impressed. The young man aside and their opponent remarked, oh you just don't understand he isn't making eyebrows and noses with his scissors. And what he is rarely doing is excavating with the help of a mullet and a scissor, those nose and eyebrows shapes and that lie buried in the wood. He cannot go wrong. It's just like digging stones up from the soil. We can easily surmise that a Japanese writer was inspired by the famous story of Michelangelo, what a painter or John Arlington are talking about that story. I skipped the quote. Those two books are found also in socialist hoarding even nowadays. And we also know that such ideas came from Michelangelo's own pieces of sonnet he dedicated to Victoria Corona. And George Vasari also appropriated the anecdote in his La Vita. Yet, there remains a subtle but decisive gap between the Western initial idea and its Japanese interpretation. In the Western view, it is Carpenter's mental power of conception that digs an ideal human figure out of the marble. But a Japanese writer denies such a rescued has been already buried in the material from the outset. What is perceived as a metaphor or a fancy by Western art critics does not appear at any as anything but a sheer material reality for our Oriental interpreter because stones have been already there in the soil and a task of the sculptor was not no more than removing the layers of sand sedimentations. So the Japanese sculptor in Society Dream doesn't project his mental conception on the wood log to boast his own artistic invention and his talent of creativity. So long as he is obedient to the nature, he cannot go wrong, as he said in the narrating. Yet, digging stones up from the soil simply cannot entitle the digger to the grade of first-rate master artist in Western terminology. So the narrator in Society Story who was an Westernized homecomer from London makes the following confession, I quote once again here. I had never before heard such an analysis of sculptor's art. It made me begin to think that if it were true, there never might be a sculptor. And I suddenly felt that I myself would like to carve a guardian god. So I left hope watching Inkay and Harry that was. And I skip a little bit and to the end of the quotation. So what he did, I dug through every log in the wood pile one after another but nay one contained a guardian god. And finally it dawned on me that guardian gods were not after all buried in trees of this present age. And thus I came to understand why Inkay is living to this day end of the story. The ending of the story looks enigmatic as it's often a case with dreams. And how can we interpret this story and understand Society's lesson? Why should the guardian gods have disappeared from modern wood? And I will come back to this question at the end of my lecture today. Now after this disintroduction leads us to the first topic. The museum has an exhibition space but special emphasis on visuality and visual perception. As a result, we are no longer allowed to have a synthetic experience of synesthesia that previous art lovers could enjoy in their private spaces. Especially the gaze is intensified to compensate for the lack of tactile experience. And I, as you can see here in this example, and let me put more emphasis on the invisible side of the culture which is hidden behind the visual culture today. And just take the case of the ceremony to tea ceremony as I have already mentioned, tea bowl should be appreciated and here is also a case with a china style tea ceremony. And here is also one of the illustrations. Just take the case of tea ceremony, tea bowl should be appreciated and not only by visual observation from distance. You first have to feel the warmth and liquid within the bowl and smell the tea before and then tasting the bitter grain liquid by touching the fringe of the bowl with your own lips. In the case of tea ceremony, the drinking of the tea is but a small part of the entire process of appreciating art which invites you into the inner space of the house. Storing into the garden, admiring the flower arrangement, judging the artwork choices in the alcove, Tokonoma for decoration, the sound of boring water, the smell of the tatami mats, tatami mats, the sound of wind outside the tearoom and even the rhythmical hopping cations of the bars on the roof. All have to visitors in a deep and attune his or her aesthetic sensibility as such to prepare themselves for the approaching ceremony. You may be astonished to notice that in a calm of the tea house, your senses are intensified to such an extraordinary degree of hyper sensitivity that even a tiny metal pin dropped in a corridor outside the tearoom makes an astoundingly loud sound in your ears. These teaballs and other similar utensils must feel sorry for themselves once they are put behind a glass of the museum display cases. How unhappy they must be deprived of the chances to be touched and cherished by tea masters. We now understand what kind of purity we are committing in museum management. Emmanuel Kant was entirely wrong when he declared that the aesthetic value reside in lack of practical use. And contrary to his assumption, this interstitleness, interstitiality here means the death of aesthetic values. Being deprived of the ability to conduct the practical use does not necessarily guarantee treasured object, a higher status in artistic appreciation, and far from it, conservation in the museum and enshrinement behind that glass showcase may be a death sentence for here to forward cherish the object. For the sake of conservation, the objects are taken into custody. Their safety is secured at the price of tactile experience. Losing the chance of direct contact, they are doomed to lie lifelessly in a cemetery which we are evidently and proudly call the museums. This is how Okakura Kakuzo also known as Tenshi and the famous author of the book of tea I have already introduced, and the first curator of Asian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts perceived Western modernity. And modernity here means the forced integration of non-Western items into Western museology and the reclassification of the Western cultures using a template of Western aesthetic categories. In the heyday in Paris, Okakura uttered a warning again as the hasty standardization of artistic values. The current era of globalization may also mean the unification of international measurement and enforcement of a hegemonic global standard. And Okakura cherished in this context a tiny cup of tea and in which he was seeing the hope of a cup of humanity. And how can we treat this cup of humanity properly? And this is the question I wish to share with you today. Now, another merit in the ceremony is the practice of touching, the feeling of connectedness, connectedness in a very wide sense. We can use the bowls and utensils which our ancestors used even several hundred years ago. And even in the modern days, the same behavior is repeated by the current practitioners. We can share the same type of experience that the tea masters and even the founding fathers of tea preachers would have had several centuries before us. Five years, 10 years ago, in 2010, there was a marvelous exhibition at the Kyoto National Museum which was held. The World of Buddhist Kesei, Kesei are garments worn by Buddhists placed in the Japanese subtitle, Koromotsu Dae Koromotsu Nagu, with a poetic reasoning of ko and zu as actually used as the main title in English, Transmitting Robes, Linking Minds. However, linking the minds of generations by transmitting robes is not a custom limited only to Buddhist practice. In the Western world, half-woven bridal lace vault, for example, is transmitted from grandmother to mother and from mother to daughter for wedding. Generation after generation, textiles used for the practical and special purpose of found woven pieces are painstakingly prepared and manufactured with care. The amount of earnest labor as well as the precious time spent on this task are accommodated, concentrated and literally woven into the textile, making it a privilege for that of devotion. The one that is worthy of transmission from ancestors to posterity. And to some extent, this veneration of transmitted treasure resembles the treatment of sacred relics and Christianity, especially in the Catholic Church. Yet one basic difference remains. In the case of Christianity, if I'm not seriously mistaken, it is quite rare for believers to directly touch relics. Of course, there are special occasions, but so long as they are enshrined in a glass case while we're holding in veneration, it's simply impossible to touch them. In a Buddhist practice of transmitting kesea garments from master to disciples, touching and wearing historical relics constitute one of the essential factors guaranteeing the link between generations. Some fragments of the Asian garment of priests that are known to have been recycled into clothes used to wrap tea caddies or tea bowls. Wrapping the precious objects by the ancient clothes transmitted from the ancestors also has meaning. The clothes are named shihuku, as you see here, which also coincidentally is a homonymous for beatitude. Darafumi, a Japanese actress who played the role of initiator to the tea ceremony, even developed the idea of ayino shifuku, a close died by Indigo, Indigo as I in Japanese, which evokes the beatitude of love. Love is also I in Japanese language. The careful preparation of the garment for the tea set is no less important than the ceremony itself and much more time consuming. The manual stretching labor is painful at first, but it's really absorbing. To take time in Japanese demo kakeru, contain the words for hand tea and interval mark, both spatial and temporal, implying the importance of the repetitive manual operation conducted with meticulous attention and care. Wrapped by hand in garment with the historical value of the tea walls, you will feel the beatitude of love. The same is true for the wooden box. You can see several of these dressed up way of the tea walls. The same is true for the wooden box, which contains a bowl. Being the aridness of the destiny of the bowl, it protects the box accounts for the actual historical background, as well as the vicissitudes it has experienced during the history. All the half broken boxes are often as precious as the things they contain. The handwritten inscription on the box is the calligraphic record of the master's hand and it also serves as a certificate of authenticity. And I'm coming back to this story later. And Victoria and I are about to resume and forgive me for mentioning its by name, as were as many old Western museums have ever worked. Boxes were often thrown away and loads of garments were stripped off and from the tea set and classified as separated as textiles without specifying the usage. And caddies were put into the lacquer collection together with other lacquers used for different pop seeds. The tea boys were forced to undress and reveal their naked skin to the curious observer who peep into the glass showcase without being able to touch them. The original integrity here I'm showing of the object is dismantled and closed once for all. Now forced sacrifice for the benefit of rational classification and for the profit of the contextualized visual security. And here is a way how people prepare the wrapping and here is the contrast of the way how the object are displayed in a current input of Victoria and British Albert Museum. Though it may sound like a caricature this is a reality of modernism in museum displays. And it is often said and that wrapping is only done for practical reason to facilitate a transportation of all objects. Once transportation is completed it is not to remove the wrapping to throw it away and take the object out. The term exhibition in English or outstaring in German. And literally there is this fact that wrapping set cannot constitute the innocence of work of fine wood and it doesn't become the object of our appreciation. So here it is a purpose and not worthy of preservation so I'm forced. And yet here again I have one intuitive question for this self-evident practice in modernist museology which I may call the ideology of exhibitions to borrow the French connotation of the term. As Jacques Derrita has finally analyzed Ergon and our talk with him is not self-standing without its garment and the support of the parallel one is exhibiting the naked work to the curious gaze the best and the brightest method of exhibiting it in the museum is uncensored the nudism, the best policy. Is the voluntary nudity or the forced nakedness to reuse Kenneth Clark's famous terminology of an exhibit, the only and the ultimate purpose of display in a museum. Sikine Hideo here I'm showing his piece the artist internationally renowned for his anthropology arts and 68 on your left exhibited several years ago at the Kyoto University Museum a vase like stone object, which we did inscription which is in the translation is almost impossible because of its multiple word phrase. Here, and there is the inscription if you're wondering what this is you are already trapped in my humble thinking vessel or conniving indeed this vase like object is not a vase if you try to see what is it contains you are already duped the container is made of solid black andesite granite. It's utter appearance makes it seem like a hollow vessel that in an eight actually is a solid block of a stone. If the viewer mistakenly thinks there is an empty cavity inside then it is true it truly is the almost water trick of the conniving artist. This fake container cannot contain anything except that the deception which and the viewers are the predestined victims. This is by itself an ironic message to the exhibition that is and what on earth can the exhibition contain in the space of an exhibition hall. This outspoken manifest of rejecting the idea of containing as by self contained in a glass case at the exhibition. And after the show at the moment of removal a proficient photographer purposely put sheets of shadow screens close not sure entry on this glass case. It so happened that the conniving trick part was half concealed from viewers. I still remember the thrill when I absentmindedly glance at this veiled object half hidden under the shadow of the black seat that object was rarely leaving. It is true that the very intent to give an illusion that the hidden object has some secret mystery or magical power and has to be easily revealed to people without initiation. Yet I wonder if it is very and simply an illusion I should also admit that a similar somewhat mystical effect could not be obtained or it not for the removal of textiles as a solid iron coffin cannot contain any mystery if not a secret. The location of this exhibition was also not random. Kyoto University Museum here you have a cinema. Kyoto University Museum is a kind of mouse audience of objects of both natural and human. In the main entrance we see in the natural history section a fossilized head of an extinct species of elephant and an ancient sarcophagus at the entrance of the human history section. This reminds us of the fact that the museum it's a huge tomb, a coffin, a casket or rather a mold a container where the dead bodies of nature and human history are displayed like cadavers for inspection. It was in this universe of the dead that we decided to organize an exhibition of contemporary art. By law, the jury and the museum should not contain animal object, animate object.  And a secret tree and casket and without knowing it the inanimate turns into the animate in a grass showcase half concealed by the photographer's masking cover seat. I did not care if the tree that I suddenly gripped and it suddenly gripped me was real or is usually the fact remained that the exhibition can offer some unexpected effect by not revealing objects under a spotlight but rather hiding them from the observer's gaze. Many esophageal and art museums are said to be haunted and stories are frequently told at least behind scenes that ghosts have been seen floating in stories rooms. It is not my intention to deny or clarify such irrational heresy. However, it should not be forgotten that the museum also contains without noticing it the hidden side of the insides of mysteries that modernism or naive belief in the process of progress of science and visibility as suppressed under the realm of the dead. The use of writing for the sake of visual display has not intensified, has also intensified the dark side of the invisible world. What has been oppressed and repressed by the main current of Western modernism is now secretly resurfacing, launching covers with directions in museums without being obviously noticed. Is it a form of revenge? Are the objects imprisoned in the darkness of storage fighting back? Here is the question. Is it trying was revered for the 60th and 60th and 60th second time in the year of 2013. The trying may be regarded as a reservoir with imaginary ancestral spirit as specific museum and nation dead be it usually political or whatsoever. As is well known, the wooden container at the shrine building has been demolished and moved back in force between neighboring sites at the diverse of two decades ever since the inauguration of its succession which are from the year of 690. Any material continuity is rejected by this behavioral dismantling of the architecture. Only the spiritual content is supposed to be transmitted from generation to generation and through the ritual succession. It is believed that the sanctuary is haunted by the scripts. The empty vacant site called the Kodenshi on your right located beside a current used architecture point to lost origins as well as the coin not yet realized future. The periodical repetition that we production evokes the image of the double spiral of DNA reproducing itself as a token of the succession life by way of metabolism. Here is also one ultimate strategy of invisibility, the lack of visibility and the rejection of visuality in the spiritual dimension and gender and new vision of impenetrable mystery and intimate secrecy within the invisible empty space. According to one English guard book edited by Basil Ho Chiambro and at the end of the 19th century a frustrated English tourist they said to have complained that essentially I quote, there is nothing to see and day that the native Japanese will not let you see it. It is in this total logical black box of double negation that the mysteries were and they are secretly whispering and watching us without revealing their presence to invisibility. If we are interrogating Western modernism on a global scale, why not investigate what is hidden or not exposed? What are the victims of liberation or exhibition as an idea as a way of knowing but as Western modernism fair to press what is left behind due to the criteria of Western modernism when it imposes its measurement globally. I remember visiting my solution post to work in Philadelphia Museum for the first time in my life in 1979.  This heavy wall has a peeping hole from which people are invited to have a look at Dushan's last work, Etendoni. Dushan's intentional tactic of hiding his secret is highly individual and mischievous. To what extent is Dushan's point of work comparable to the sanctuary of Isshui? Here is my question. Next question. If the former authorized the genitals of the naked adolescent girl and implicitly referring to its sadness in the sense of child abuse and obviously it's a hidden reference to Ustap Kurudu's Oijinemon, the latter, the Isshui, is equipped with a no less intentional but fully institutionalized and all free austere void, the realm of nothingness. Shirakawa Yoshio, a contemporary Japanese artist, famous for his documentary book, Dada in Japan, was made a tact-tact-trade solution. He pressed Mashi Dushan's fountain beside the level three reserves for the use of the imperial family only during their visit to the Riverside Pavilion in Kōkaku in the city of Bonibashi on your left. According to Shirakawa, the juxtaposition is justified as both Mashi Dushan and the Pavilion were born in the same year of 1887. Discontemplarity in continuous leads us to a couple of questions in regard to the globalization of wariness. Let us now briefly examine the notion of artwork as well as that of the copy in the ready made. So putting the autonomy of art into question in the means of originality versus copy, may be the meat is meaty size. Apart from being a domestic tool for everyday life, the post-war urinary is also a receptacle of container, a function of this to catch and give expression. Usually it is not merely because of its indiscent role that the urinary cannot claim to be a piece of fine arts. Rather, post-waring wares are treated in a derogatory fashion as their functionality and utility require them of an autonomous status of aesthetic origin. The same is true of ceramic layers for the misuse, so long as they serve professional purposes, they are classified as a private art and in an inferior and subordinate category in the social highlight pictures, dishes and vessels to not qualify for the exactest status of sculpture, so long as they are useful and know that it cannot be regarded as piece of fine arts. Thus, however, it becomes useless or suddenly it can claim the right to be treated as artwork. This is the Kairasi, which again Imania can justify in critical, well-attached craft in 1790 has been maintained from the era of high modernism up to until the advent of post-modernism, despite the design age in the mid-1920s. It is not to say that the contemporary African artists rescue the use of domestic hands into the piece of work and are rooted in the human destiny. The juxtaposition of his pieces by Martin Duchenne as fontain is merely striking. Western modernity has not questioned the classical Kairasi of fine arts. The supremacy of painting, sculpture, and architecture was maintained even during the height of modernism of the regime of colonial empires for the more of the bifurcated art of fine art were replaced during this period by the death between design and decorative arts. And it suffice to recall the ideology put forward by Le Corbusier or other girls who both manifested vehement hatred toward anything decorative like tribe art from Africa and Oceania still suffered from high modernism and from the end of the 19th century Africa and Oceania still suffered from high rational discrimination in the category of primitive art up until the 1980s. And that's why the comparison is quite striking. However, this scheme is not autonomous and unconditional applicable to non-western cultural spheres. Let us take up this here beside the African case, the case of Yagi Kazo in Japan a representative of avant-garde ceremonies and ceremonies that you could not bring himself to do away with his origin as a master of rice bowl in Oceania as he visually identified himself. His generation was strongly inspired by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi in the 1950s and yet Yagi did not stop asking whether the question whether or not an empty cavity remains inside the sebumic pieces. Resident sculptors do not care about the void within their sculptures. In bronze casting the empty cavity is the void of any significance. In marble carving only the surface of the mass determines the value of a piece. However, for the Japanese army artist of the Yagi generation the same emancipation from the material was identical with the self-negation of one's previous career as a craftsman on the left side and avant-garde in the right side. Accordingly, his ceramic creations deeply inspired one mural of Lucia Fontana in the 1950s and even to a mass edition and in an acute concurrence with Jasper Jones forced Yagi to engage in constant self-mutilation. He confesses that creation meant for him inflicting new wound on himself his workwork covered with secret traces one after another. This passivity to infractions must have been double. So as they emancipate himself he had to be passively exposed to the influence of western modernism that are coming from without. And the very emancipation causes mental as well as physical injuries with the end. It was in this double mind that attachment to and detachment from the Islamic way of craftsmen that Yagi searched for the ultimate limit of his kajah which had been a course culture in the west. His historical work of Mr. Samuza in 1954 marks his departure from traditional kajahs. First for the convention Yagi first makes a spherical vessel shaped by the photo wheel. However, he brutally cuts its to form a circular band with at the bottom, bottom to or top. Simply useless as it can over contain any liquid. Then he stood the band virtually on its side so that it couldn't go around and added parasite like open tubes which again no longer play any practical role. There are nine bases of basis for flowers nor elsewhere drain pipes. They reject in a rational explanation of the existence except for the fact that they eventually solve at least to prevent the vertical wheel from falling down sideways. As if to turn this absurd metamorphosis of ceramic aware into this guy the vanguard sculpture Yagi borrowed a title from Franz Kafka's famous short story about a man who finds himself transformed into a cockroach and this of course again is still there.  Yagi had to destroy the notion container in ceramics to absorb and contain the modernist notion of artistic autonomy. This receptacle of the western idea of modernism named Mr. Samuza is achieved when the very receptacle Utsua had lost has broken and lost the practical function as a receptacle. And here is the paradox. In the nevertheless the emptiness within the surface remained intact working as a generator at the core of Yagi's creativity. Yagi witnessed this major transubstantiation in terms of our experience from the 1950s up to the end of the 1970s when he died and his career as well as well was an incarnation of this overwhelming transition where the border lines of Ergon and Paradovon were constantly in mutual erosion. How to evaluate his work he arrives when the task with museum in the era of modernization had to carry on. And with that I'm coming to my last point today. And this brings us to the dichotomy between the original and the copy. More often than not the avant-garde of the non-western nations had been accused of being secondary and inferior copies of the western wisdom. If the west is capable of creating the prototype of the avant-garde the non-western west is only allowed to produce second hand ready-made copies. As in the case of the Japanese and primitiveism the western re-appropriation of western sources has not been criticized. Although the non-western sources be the Japanese African or Syrian could not claim to be the original originator of the western avant-garde. The mechanism is quite simple. In the case of the Japanese avant-garde what can be recognizable or recognized as the avant-garde according to the western criteria is as a matter of course automatically classified as its secondary European its secondary imitation of the European goods. And the product not classified or classifiable in the western theory because your work are lumped together under the level of traditional works. Thus the non-western world is logically deprived to create an authentic avant-garde work of its own and of its own right. And this is not the case of what happened at the Lujapong Desert Garde show at the Santa Pompidou in 1886. And the frustration at this western century in the second half of the 19th century during the worldwide double economy seemed to have erupted on the occasion of the primitiveism in China-centric art exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984. Yet it is not my intention to bring in the manner of Jim Clifford the rest for the economic use of patient, the symbolic monopolization and the aesthetic self-appropriation of our own western models onto this unilateral balance sheet. Nor am I eager to disagree with a certain disagree with a certain a certain focus on the stand distinction between the Esmeralda Museum and the Art Museum for the sake of promoting African contemporary art. Now, what is at stake in my opinion and in both is the preparing cult and the obsession with authenticity. Here allow me to introduce some basic vocabulary from the Japanese language. You know, all the Japanese utsushi or utsushi, utsusu or utsushi meant the rear but utsushi also refer to the term utsushi. It is also close to utsudo, void or vacancy. A receptacle is called utsua, suggesting the vacancy of the container, utsua. Vacant concavity is a necessary condition for transporting liquid or any other solid materials. The verb to transmit or remove is utsusu which would be impossible without the vessel, utsua. It must be already evident that those three notions rear and vacancy, utsushi vessel, utsua and remover of transport, utsusu share the same etymological root. The semantic association are almost unconvincing. It must also be noted that during the medieval era in Japan the idea of the rear utsushi apparently began to come up the opposite term of absence. Under the inference of Buddhism utsushimi or counter-existence in the sense of incarnation became interchangeable with utsushimi or the body of void devoid of soil. So utsushimi literally educated as empty and semi-transparent shell happened to have a similar pronunciation and it strongly evoked the ephemerality and the transience of existence. The rear body utsushimi and the cast of skin or slo, utsushimi are nothing but two sides of the same coin. Indeed the rear and the fountain may be the face and the reverse side of the same substance in the process of the intangible transmigration of the soil. Our body is an empty vessel like a skater's empty shell in which the soil wears for a short moment of physical existence before departing to the realm of the spirits. This is neither original nor unique to Japan similar ideas are known to be developed also known as the Pythagorean school in ancient Greek. Somerset mind grace of course means the body in the tomb. The brief etymological and semantic exercise about will allow us to propose a new model. This model will serve if not entirely invalidate then at least to eviscerate to a certain degree the western binary position between the original and the copy. In fact, the pair utsuru intuitive remove chain shift and spread and utsuru. Utsuru transitive copy imitated in fact depict and so on cover a huge semantic field embracing such notions copy, duplicate, replace, exchange, succeed and even process and haunt. In traditional Kabuki theater an actor is part of the family lineage of performers and it's highly praised when he recreates the art of his predecessor Geiga utsuru or the art of the predecessor is copied or transmitted implies enormous magical sense of reincarnation or position as if the actor were haunted by the ancestor spirit. We can certainly detect here a possible alternative among others to the western obsession with the original and the originality. Let us return to the vessel utsuru the continental spirit. Among several craftsmen there were conviction for a long period of time that the technique of the utsuru or the art of making a perfect copy of ancient masterpieces were worthy of the highest praise and many of the technical achievement which has allowed the realization of marble pieces of some of the post reign were already lost and the generation remained incapable of reproducing pieces of the same quality with incomparably distinguished aesthetic value. Transmitting this lost secret to the present time was what utsuru meant for ceramic craftsmen. This high reputation would seem to have been destabilized by the drastic partnership during period rapid westernization which took place in the 7th half of the 19th century Japan. With the creation of new patent regulation in 1985 taken as a secret have been progressively registered as legal patent. The patent pieces naturally gained authenticity. This shift in the legal system inevitably induced a deterioration of the status of utsushi in the market as in society at large. The once prestigious utsushi or copied pieces may now be prosecuted as same for fix and utsushi may face accusations or poetry or find as kind of it a famous western scandal which happened immediately after the 7th world war may be understood as one major after effect of this change in values. The copied utsushi that has ceramics produced to show his absence in scale were segregated in antiquarian market as genuine historical pieces of the 14th century and 15th century. The question that their authenticity led to a scandal implicating an imminent border and a high ranking concern. Looking backwards from now however it is curious to know that they eventually gained greater world fame and authority thanks to this infamous incident. So this brings me back to the initial question here is the conclusion. Why should the guardian god have disappeared from the modern world? And why does their disappearance explain in case of a chronistic survivor to this day? The answer should be clear by now. In my opinion, Sosaki is criticizing more than the western way of understanding the artist's creation. The modern-claimed artist is an entitled holder of the idea Eidos to be projected on the material.  And in the material were forced to withdraw and disappear. Demons, goblins, and all kinds of spirits would disappear in the age of enlightenment. For the simple reason that and the tower to use max-level term meant disenchantment the death of all the enigmas. If Ok was still living to this day, it could not be found as an explanation, namely because his presence is indispensable so as to witness and to testify to the loss enormous and irretrievable loss the modern industrial age has entailed. To restore this lost demons and spirits must be one of the tasks to be assigned to the Asian artist active in western metropoles. And may I dare to declare to finish let me wear kimono clothes for the next time, even if my English is getting still more awful. Thanks very much for your attention and stop here. Thank you. Thank you so much is has sorry has she gave me joined us do we know for the conversation? Yes. Great. Well, I'd like to thank him. I'd like to thank you for such a richly conceived paper that I think was full of questions and provocations for all of us to consider today. Particularly in the context of thinking through the entanglements the collisions the violence the invisibilities and the resistances inherent in thinking through the conditions of London Asia art worlds. There were many potential avenues of discussion today I think an inquiry in your extremely rich and thoughtful paper and I just wanted to start by picking out a few that resonated with me and then perhaps to start the conversation also with the audience today as well. But I just wanted to start by saying that first of all I thought that the trope of sort of latent content content whether conscious or unconscious visible and invisible within the material and the materiality of the selected examples you considered was an extremely resonant way of thinking and of sort of thinking through the kind of issues and problems of western modernist paradigms within arts histories and in particular I was interested in from your examples and how latent content is or isn't activated by different sensory forms of human contact and also how the visual matrix of western museums have such a dominant and in this context damaging role in rendering objects of culture that originate from outside the west as mute and so how you know a question really for me and I think opening for discussion with you as well is how do we untangle our reach for an expanded global human condition from the scopic regimes of western modernity and it's an open question really and I'd be interested to know whether you might be able to say first of all a little more on that from your own perspective and thinking. I think you've done a really beautiful job in this paper of talking about the ways in which sort of thinking through the conditions of the void and invisibility enable us to think differently about objects from out of the kind of western colonial matrix but I think it's ongoing work isn't it but attending to the objects and the aesthetics from the objects enables us to have these other ways of knowing I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that she gave me yeah so sorry for my bad bad throat condition and my bad bad pronunciation I was very amazed by myself by the bad pronunciation by recording thanks very much for this rich questions and yeah there are two or three factors that I can mention the first one is I wanted to put emphasis on the tactility instead of visuality and from time to time I dropped out that part of my paper but those who are visually disabled people can feel better than the usually people not only the temperature but also the tactile sensations and so forth and forth and in a sense they see of course not visually, they see things better than the so-called ordinary usually people and that aspect is very important and some of the contemporary artists are also making the investigation into that aspect of a hidden side which is hidden side of the other side of the visuality and that is one of the targets that I'm aiming at and the second one I don't really simplifying overlapping in a simplified fashion the dichotomy between the world on to the opposition between colonized and so forth but still the museology for example visualize one aspect but this is constantly at a price of other side and I'm also interested in the other side and which may be overlapped in a very simplified way on the between the west and the rest and that may be the starting point. I like the way you're sort of I think if I'm understanding correctly you're sort of trying to hold both things in play you're trying to disavow the kind of binary thinking that has really damaged our kind of reception histories of modernism really and sort of holding both things in play and also I think what you illustrated really beautifully in your talk actually through your examples is that through the cicada but also through the pots and through the sculpture that you showed us always that attention that we ought to be paying to the void as well as what we see and that holding those two things in balance enables us to have a different lens in terms of thinking about meaning I think and that the sort of scopic regime of say you know easy target but we're going to mention it because you mentioned in your paper the V&A the scopic regime of the sort of museum has sort of really cut us off from a more expanded way of thinking about objects on western cultures and objects that are not traditionally sort of fine art and also how sort of sort of histories of western art have kind of sort of in a sense committed sort of epistemic violence to these objects and I think your project seems to me to be really a sensitive one of recovery actually but I don't want to hock the conversation with you I don't know if you wanted to respond to that and then we can open it up to other people at all I don't know if you want to say more about your project more widely just simply one thing in a museum space I'm more interested in the storage room than the exhibit because something is hidden there and it's also the same with the pot people tend to pay more attention on the surface on the exterior what is painted there the big pot for example but I'm rather interested in the hidden interior what is hidden there and both side is of course necessarily indispensable to constitute a pot but curiously enough in my opinion the western gaze are not seldom penetrating into the inside and I'm wondering why this is a mystery for me I wonder yes no go on sorry carry on you talked about the scopic legium and how would be the secret or hidden side of that scopic legium that is my question very interesting yes I like the way you raise provocations for us actually you raise a lot of provocations in your paper and we can perhaps come back to them but Sarah you've just joined us thank you so much for the paper you say so many provocations about how we treat objects historic objects now and the narratives and the meaning that those objects accrue over their histories and through different generations as well I think your paper also highlighted that for me you talked about artistic interventions in the museum and putting contemporary art practice into conversation with historic objects and historic museum sites do you think that is a particularly successful strategy for bringing some of these perhaps lost narratives or lost meanings lost interpretations alive by kind of bringing the contemporary and the historic into conversation through contemporary artists intervening in the museum space and I'd be interested to note if there's any other particularly interesting or successful examples of that that you know of from Japan or elsewhere in the world that you have researched and worked in that's very much for a commentary on the question I try to say bringing both the classical work and the contemporary work is just asking you if that comparison is still relevant or for the contemporary artist is the question that I raised is no longer relevant so I'm asking the question and I'm not quite sure if my way of presenting this contrast is effective but it's up to the reactions from the audience from the listeners I think yeah I think it's really interesting I think that I think that that came through for me actually that you know you sort of discussing how it is that the viewer can activate meaning and that we are you know in the west we're confined to this kind of visual activation but what I thought you brought in so beautifully from your account of the tea ceremony and the environment in which the tea ceremony is formed is how it's a sort of much more holistic experience that activates the aesthetic in the tea ceremony that's not just about going to see the teapot or the cup and I thought that was a very sort of resonant way of kind of sort of opening up thinking about what is lost in museums and how then what is gained from thinking about objects sort of haptically if you like and Ming and Hama you've both come in do you have also the audience I mean if you have any questions that are coming or occurring to you as we're speaking please do type them into the chat or raise your hand and we will come to you. Firstly just thank you for taking me for a really brilliant paper and I was just actually thinking for Sarah's question in mind and sort of in our own experience Sarah and I are working on an exhibition of around an artist called Li Wanqia from China and then Taiwan and who settled in the UK and one of his sort of most famous bodies of work which he sort of generically described as toys were magnetic discs in which there would be magnetic objects that he would arrange and he would invite the audience to rearrange and of course this in his lifetime this would be arranged and he would organize his works that way but post his death and when these objects become museum-ified museums for the best of intentions around conservation actually they refute the possibility of those objects being art the way he conceived it and I think there is this with that juxtaposition of the void and the object so this so beautifully I think there is that dichotomy of the art and the object and that idea that sometimes objecthood actually kind of kills the art you know it's sort of I think it's a wider question around almost as to what should the purpose of museums be you know if they're actually about the preservation and the study and the engagement with art how can we lift this fetish of the object I wonder if I might be able to jump in here just for a second to maybe build on this question thank you again for this amazing paper and especially under the conditions that you are facing right now in Japan with the state of emergency what I'm wondering about is to what extent can we also talk about performativity when we're pushing against the idea of the object and the ways in which the museum enshrines the object as a visual site of visuality can you maybe address that question as well when thinking about that transformation may I make some commentary not quite in the context right the first thing is whenever I talk about the tea ceremony my Japanese colleagues got upset and I'm quite often scolded by them partly because I'm not practitioner of tea ceremony partly because I'm enhancing the so-called oriental aesthetics which is not very authentic and third partly because the way I explain in a rational way the tea ceremony is not their custom at all so I'm wondering what I'm doing is it the act of conservation or is it the kind of heresy or it's against the rule against the convention and to skip to the second part I'm wondering if the museum can be a place where the objects are decaying instead of conserving it may be interesting to see how the things decays and actually some of the contemporary ceramists, potters in Japan are trying to make that kind of performance where their objects are decaying interesting at the beginning it's alright but at the end of the show it's already broken for example showing that kind of lack of permanence I know it is the way how they try to make the performance I wonder why they like it anyway can I ask related to that can I jump in so you talked about the boxes they're transported to the museums and then often western museum curators throw the boxes away against the traditions of keeping the boxes and reusing them and the decay of those boxes is part of that historical lineage, that time of transmitting knowledge and linking minds so are the other boxes are they left to decay or are they repaired in the narrative process involved in that transmission of knowledge and it's a very interesting question of course the wooden boxes are cannot may be broken quite easily and people have to try to repair it the problem is that in the western tradition if it's repaired it's no longer authentic and it's the way how the heritage conservation is the policy of heritage conservation the original material must be there but in oriental culture with wooden materials the wood blocks would decay and it must be replaced and somebody talked about the so called a thesis complex as you know the Greek mythology and the thesis had a ship and it returned triumphant to Athena but dedicated to the god but 10 years ago later 20 years ago it began to decay so they had to replace one part and the other and so forth in such a way within 100 years no original material kept it's completely replaced and there is a controversy about that but Japanese practice of replacing either for the new timbers for the Buddhist temple or also the case for the Ise Shrine and the replacement is part of the practice and that loss of materiality gives a guarantee of the immaterial continuity and so on and so forth I don't know if I answer to your question but anyway yes yes very much so yeah I think that's another kind of very resonant way of thinking and sort of enabling us to rethink our practices if we were able to go that far but I think your paper in general points to so many ways in which there are other modes of attending to aesthetics that really demand that we kind of dismantle some of our precepts within Western modernisms not just through colonialism but just through aesthetic practices as well that offer other forms of knowing I realise that we've all spent a lot of time talking with each other are there any questions from the audience at all or points of conversation or comments that anyone wants to contribute to the conversation at all you haven't got any on the Q&A box or the chat that I can see but we can pick up threads in the next Q&A session so perhaps if people have got ideas that are just sort of percolating we can follow those up I know that in our game stay with us for the rest of the session but we can always pass on questions as well via email through other social media or other forms of communication but we can more generally pick up on chat in the next discussion okay I don't know about time whether we should wrap it up or whether perfect yes and if people could join us if we have a 10 minute break and maybe for clarity sake actually we say we join at 45 minutes past the hour I know people are on lots of different time zones so that's yeah 145 in the UK but for yeah 45 minutes past the hour wherever you are joining us from in the world that would be great perfect and so can I just reiterate my thanks again to Shigemi for making the time especially under the current circumstances to be with us here today and also to prepare your talk for us and to really provide a really rich set of things to think about and provocations for us all as well so thank you very much see everybody after the break thanks Doc thank you hi shall I start again is it time perfect Docs yeah thank you yeah okay welcome back everyone I hope you've all managed to take a quick break and back again for this afternoon's session it's my great pleasure to now introduce I'll introduce all of the speakers shall I for this afternoon Sarah do you think and then we can go straight into the each each paper or yeah that sounds good that's perfect perfect okay so we have three shorter papers this afternoon and so from three brilliant speakers our first speaker is Sadia Shirazi who is a writer, art historian, curator and architect based in New York and she's instructor for the Curatorial Studies Programme at the Whitney Museum of Art in the Independent Study Programme she's also part-time faculty at Cooper Union in the New School and is completing her PhD in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University her research focuses on trans-regional histories of modernism and contemporary art across the United States Europe, South Asia and the Middle East with a particular interest in race, gender, post-coloniality and decolonisation and she's published extremely widely including in Art Forum Bidwan Movement Project Research Journal MoMA Posts Sea Magazine The Phenambulist and also in exhibition catalogs and edited volumes and her work has also been shown at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale and in performance based New York and the Devi Art Foundation in New Delhi and Shirazi was a Helena Rubenstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Arts Independent Study Program and also Artist-in-Resident at Clark House Initiative in Bombay and the Add-O in New York so she's extremely busy so I'm really pleased she was able to join us today and the speaker after Sadiya is Elena Kripper who is a Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art British Art at Tate where she contributes to the research, display exhibition and acquisition of artworks from 20th and 21st century with a focus on 1940 to 1980 in particular and at Tate Britain she has curated large-scale exhibitions including All Too Human of 2018 and Frank Bowling of 2019 and Spotlight Exhibitions and Displays including on Joe Spence in 2015, Stan Fermer Inner England Stan Fermer Inner England in London in 1970s in 2016 Artist Lives speaking of the Kasman Gallery and Kimlin Carving and Printing in 2020 to 21 and she's going to talk a little bit more about Kimlin this afternoon and she's currently excitingly working on Polaregos Retrospective Exhibition opening at Tate Britain in July 2021 and she's also very widely published and there's a full list of publications on the Paul Mellon Centre biographies of each speaker this afternoon so I won't go into everything but I will draw your attention she's currently I think putting together the Polaregos show so I'm glad she's also made the time to be able to be with us today and it's also my great pleasure to welcome and introduce this afternoon Ava Bencheva who is an art historian and curator and Ava is currently an Associate Lecturer in Art History at the Centre for Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University and a Postdoctoral Researcher and Publications Coordinator for the International Project Worldling Public Cultures the Arts and Social Innovation she completed her PhD in Art History at SOAS University of London and her research and curatorial work focuses on histories of conceptualism performance art and archives and their diasporas and her previous positions have included Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre Adjunct Researcher at Tate Research Centre Asia in London and Goethe Institute Fellow at the Haus der Kunst in Munich where she co-curated the exhibition Archives in Residence Southeast Asia Performance Collection with Annie Jale Kwan and Damien Lentini in 2019 and it's my great pleasure to welcome Ava as well and in fact to welcome all of our speakers with Sadia's talk from this afternoon which is titled Zerina, a Post-Colonial Grid Welcome, Sadia Hi Thank you, hi Dorothea, thank you so much Can you hear me okay? Yeah, fine I'm just going to share my desktop screen Can everyone see the screen? Okay, great In home is a foreign place 36 black woodblock prints and black ink are arranged in reconfigurable grids that the artist varies depending upon their installation Instead of exhibiting the works in one row like smaller portfolios such as Santa Cruz or the disturbed grid formation of homes I made, a life in nine lines In this work the artist uses variable grid formats that include two 6x3 arrangements in which the prints contract into tight horizontal courses and one larger grid of 6x6 in which they expand the scale of a wall If Zerina's iconic work dividing line condenses the history of partition into one thickly rendered frame home is a foreign place explodes across multiple space times The prints are held together by a poetic title that can be interpreted as an illusion to a cycle of possession and migration and having found a home in a foreign place Yet it also evokes a different condition and meaning in which home is a place in which one is othered made to feel as an outsider This work by Zerina is both epic and episodic It condenses the artist's peripatetic and exilic life as well as its entanglements with the afterlife of partition into discreet yet simultaneous movements Zerina's mnemonic aesthetics her technique for remembering relies on architecture to recall and then preserve memory The artist imbues the usually anodyne language of the architectural floor plan with affective and memorial registers Home is a foreign place painstakingly recalls the spatial practices of everyday life in allivar in which habitation is the performance of dwelling to which architecture is secondary particularly in conditions of insecure or inadequate housing In an interesting inversion of postcolonial feminist renunciations of the enclosures of the feminine space of the Zanana or the women's space of the home Zerina privileges it as a space of sociality preservation and care over the nation state as a political space of identification This portfolio begins with the print Ghar Home In it we see a simplified floor plan of the artist's family house in Aligarh, India which was faculty housing provided by Aligarh Muslim University where her father was a professor The plan shows two entrances with corresponding courtyards that reflect a mode of homosocial spatial organization that was common in both Hindu and Muslim households at the time where households were segregated by gender although staff and children clearly passed through both spaces The top area of the plan depicts the more publicly accessible and visually penetrable men's space called the Mardana which Zerina's father and his guests primarily occupied While the entrance to the lower courtyard of the Zanana or women's space is circuitous It blocks visual access to a higher degree of privacy A black circle in the image locates us next to the lower entrance of the Zanana or the women's space of the home In these domestic spaces of feminized labor where the rest of the work is in fact located in spaces of rest, care habitation and reproduction that are burnt into the artist's memory and hours after encountering the work This floor plan is the final iteration of a form that has evolved out of the artist's previous excavations of her childhood home through standalone works such as Father's House 1898-1994 Abhaka Ghar and My House 1937-1958 Father's House is an etching that consists of a line drawing of the plan of the house Every portion of the plan is fastidiously annotated in Urdu to describe the function of each room a careful self-ethnography and recording of the fusion of space and language Zarina labels her mother's and father's rooms the kitchen, food storage areas courtyards and the garden's flora and fauna In the next version of the same floor plan, My House 1937-1958 the walls begin to take on a thickness through the artist's use of poshé As a result, open spaces and courtyards bound by exterior walls are clearly differentiated from the enclosed room of the Zenana or women's quarters which are rendered black There is no Urdu inserted into this image and the dimensions of the home are different than in the previous version Placing the two prints side by side reveals that this is because Zarina has removed the top portion of the house which contained the men's quarters This is to say that Zarina's rendering of her house in this work with these dates of her birth in 1937 and her departure from India in 1958 is solely cited within the women's spaces of the home and through what Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak calls the lens of gender of calls gender as lens of analysis It is this space of the Zenana that contains the events and experiences of Zarina's birth her experiences of partition as a 10 year old child her adolescence and the artist's matriculation and graduation from Aligarh Muslim University after which she was married and then left her home and country I will follow this move of Zarina's that locates us within the Zenana as a gendered space or feminism in translation throughout this paper and argue that Zarina represents home through the Zenana as an architectural relic or a marginal space but as an alternate site of habitation and belonging to the nation state moving from home as a foreign place to cities blotted into the wilderness Adrian Rich after Ghadla I will trace the artist's use of haptic abstraction in which floor plans and maps modes of spatial and cartographic representation both counter the distance and the boundaries of the aerial view and avoid the failures of figurative representation that invariably index an ethno-racialized body offering us instead a minoritarian feminist critique of and counter narrative to not just colonial cartography and technologies of vision but also the patriarchal gendered politics of Indian nationalism and of post-colonial modernity and its gendered representations more broadly The black push that represents exterior walls in Ghadla home, the first print is now compressed into a single line in the following print Chokat Threshold the next print in this portfolio this thick beveled line tightly constricts the narrow space below it while the space above feels expansive Zarina relays the feeling of its threshold condition of entry that exceeds its tectonics and is entangled with gender, space, and sociality the word Chokat has a resonance in Urdu that is not fully conveyed by its translation in English as threshold it evokes a spatial, temporal and social condition of entry as well as beginnings and access the word can also refer to the literal material of threshold the wood that lies under a door this thick black line expands in Divar a wall, a loose perspectival elevation of three walls in closing a courtyard that moves us out of the omniscient gaze of the planned view black is also the color of the earth in Zameen, ground as well as the night sky in Sitare stars it registers scratches in terror dashed while in Zaban language empty musical staffs are visible against a black page that is as of yet unwritten or perhaps has simply been erased the last print Hudud, boundary returns us to a black square bisected from corner to corner into four equilateral triangles an ominous image that's akin to a flag of exclusion that has taken us very far from the interiority of Kar, home, the first print while the order of the images remains the same in each installation of home is a foreign place beginning with Kar home and ending with Hudud, boundary read from left to right the Urdu Nastali calligraphy in each print is read from right to left the works fragmentary structure and its reconfigurable format encourages multiple readings, directionalities and modes of display although I've taken us quickly through one possible itinerary through the 36 prints, I'd like to note that the artist is not just moving us into and through her recollections of the passage of light and shadow and day and night North Indian seasons or the sight of the blades of a fan upon waking up from slumber in the summer heat but that Zarina breaks with the stable representation of home in which she begins the work through cuts throughout the work that function as portals of time and space and interrupt any linear movement through the work as well as the order of the grid itself which she breaks apart and re-aggregates depending upon its installation but also depending upon our own itinerary through the images contrary to Rosalind Krause's claim that the grid functions to declare the modernity of modern art Zarina's work subverts the seeming teleology of the grid not to declare or announce as much as inhabit colonial modernity with its ruptures and breaks that coincide with experiences of violence and the afterlife of colonialism that are not experienced solely as events but as structures that saturate the very material conditions of everyday life from minoritarian subjects. Flatness in this work does not denote anti-medicism nor does it turn its back on nature. The work's feminist formalism as I call it is invested in materialism that does not distinguish between thought and feeling and betrays an investment in the handmade materiality of the paper itself which the artist so often liken to skin saying you can scratch it you can mold it it even ages Zarina emphasizes the relationship here between the work and the human body. The artist gathers these moments across time and space together with the artist and the artist who were in place making a whole out of fragments privileging a multiplicity that is further underscored by the use of multiple languages within the work. Although Zarina's work is often discussed as mourning the loss of an originary home and language I argue that it is an originary home that the artist centers in her work a before that disrupts ontological claims her work foregrounds experiences of migration and displacement as foundational to colonial modernity particularly for what Amir Mufti calls the exemplary crisis of minority Zarina dislocates belonging as something tethered to the nation state or through affiliation with the Urdu language through what Nooki Sakai calls heterolingual address In homolingual address by contrast Sakai explains that the artist adopts the position representative of a putatively homogenous language society and relates to the general address sees who are also representative of an equally homogenous language heterolingual address in contrast does not take a single national ethnic or linguistic affiliation for granted Zarina's work employs Urdu its translation in English and its counter translation as an image of the language translation and counter translation are understood to articulate language through certain representations of the labor of translation prior to which the perceived unity of these languages and communities cannot even exist I also read Zarina's use of Urdu Nassali calligraphy as both visual and textual against the reading of calligraphy as solely literary I argue too that the artist preoccupied with loss in relation to the Urdu language but with language anterior to ethnicity prior to the ethno racialization of Muslims and their conflation with the Urdu language in postcolonial India nevertheless there is an opacity in Zarina's work an incommensurability a lack of equivalence that occurs between the Urdu words and the English translations between the Urdu word and the image and between the English word and the language that requires viewers to engage with these gaps and slippages at multiple levels of comprehension Zarina's work evokes both the affective pull of home and its incommensurability as a universal signifier underscoring the need for multiple iterative translations that we find in her work the questions of translation ethno racialization dispossession and violence also arise in the history of the Urdu language in which the Urdu language is brought into wilderness Adrian Rich after Ghalib this work consists of nine woodcuts of an assemblage of cities Ghazni written in Urdu as Johar Sarajevo Srebrenica Beirut Jinnin Baghdad and Bardard conjure the hand of the artist and the materiality of the wood itself, countering the pure opticality of the aerial view that is deployed in the print. The artist's investment in conveying touch or hapticity through vision, as well as visualizing temporality and labor, is underscored here by her investment in the degradation that time will wreck on fragile organic materials such as the handmade paper with which she usually works. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney define hapticality as modernity's insurgent feel, its inherited caress, its skin talk, tongue touch, breath speech, and laugh. This is the feel that no individual can stand in no state abide. Hapticality, the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you, this feel of the shift is not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a piece of land, a totem. Rizvana Bradley extends our understanding of the haptic as an explicitly minoritarian aesthetic and political formulation, a figuration of alterity that simultaneously marks the overlap of and break between thought and feeling. Zarina's work demonstrates this overlap and break between thought and feeling in the way she extends these cartographic representations into this realm of the haptic. Eight cities are represented as eroded city maps in this work, and as in home is a foreign place, the artist also introduces a cut, a shift in modes of representation in her last print of this portfolio, New York. In this final print, New York is not rendered in plan view but as an abstract elevation, with two vertical lines running through the center of the solid black print, alluding to the twin towers that were targeted during 9-11, near to the artist's home in New York City. And what of the other eight cities? Rather than read the print of Baghdad through the singular event of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I read it as palimpsestic, evoking the Gulf War of the 90s, the campaigns of aerial bombardment used by the British to control Iraq in the 1920s, and even farther back to the siege of Baghdad in the 13th century. I haven't also forgotten my promise to follow Zarina's move of locating us within the Zanana, the women's spaces in her earlier prints. How might our reading of these nine prints alter if we read them also through this lens of gender? The motif of the circle as a location from home as a foreign place returns in this print of Srebrenica. Sighted within a mass grave, perhaps it is of one of the many women, sisters, or children who were not killed alongside their fathers, brothers, and sons, but who, as Zarina writes, are the first victims of war and subject to other violences. Zarina's work engages architectural and aerial representations that are the products of the distance technologies of vision historically associated with colonial modernity that are used as weapons of surveillance, domination, and war, while also thinking beyond them. In both home as a foreign place and these cities blotted into the wilderness, Zarina foregrounds processes of translation, reproductive labor and materiality, and invokes habitation and care as constitutive of home and belonging, particularly for minoritarian subjects within the post-colonial nation state. The artist introduces haptic abstraction to the detached omniscient gaze, thereby returning the view of the figure from above back to the ground. A critique of what Achille Mbembe describes as colonialism's vertical sovereignty with its separation of the airspace from the ground. Zarina employs mnemonic aesthetics in the wake of crisis, displacement, and migration, as a form of memorialization of minor figures, a witness who staves off the disappearance of minoritarian life. Thank you. Hold on. Thank you very much. My video is controlled by, hold on, by the PMC, but here I am. Thank you ever so much for that really enjoyable and rich paper, and I've got a number of questions and I'm sure the audience has two, but we will keep those if everyone can keep their questions to the discussion session at the end, and we will move on to the next paper now, which is my pleasure to welcome Elena Cripper, curator of modern contemporary British art at the Tate, who is going to talk to us more about Kim Lim's early work, reconfiguration and reconciliation. Welcome Elena. Thank you Dott and thank you also to me, Hamad and Victoria for, and sorry, yeah, for all the work that has been done for the London Asia and the journey that they taken us into. I will try to share my screen now, and if you have any problem seeing or hearing me, please let me know. So Kim Lim's early work, reconfiguration and reconciliation. So in the past few years, Kim Lim's work has been the object of important research, and of particular notes is Joello's essay relocating Kim Lim a cosmopolitan perspective, which was published in 2008 in Southeast of Now. The text makes a compelling case for a need to locate Lim's practice as part of the artistic milieu out of which the asporic and immigrant artists in Britain engage with various forms of critical modernisms. This research provides a much needed context for a discussion of Lim's work that transcends the artist's individual experience. Yet, there has been very little, if any, research into Kim Lim's early work. Additionally, and inevitably, looking at Kim Lim's work alongside that of artists as diverse as Rashid Reem or Devin Modella, highlights a common asporic experience, but equally, first to engage with aspects specific to the context in which Kim Lim grew up and came into maturity. So today, I would like to do the following. Spend a few minutes telling you a bit more about Kim Lim and her story and explore how Kim Lim's early work speaks to her personal experience and to the specific geographical and geopolitical context in which it is rooted in a knowing, complex, layer, poetic, and often playful manner. So let's begin with Kim's story for which I am relying on two primary sources. Cathy Corn is interviewed for Artist's Life at the British Library, which was conducted in 1995 and is available online. And the Artist's Personal Archive, which is with the artist's state. And what you see in these and in the next slide is sort of a collage images from her photo album, her family photo albums, which belongs, as I said, to the estate, and which I think resonate in a special way with the Easter inscribed with fragmentation, reconfiguration, and wit. So Kim Lim was born in Singapore in 1936. She was a mixed ethnic and cultural heritage, her father's family having immigrated from China, and her mother's family lying being from Thailand. Her father studied law in the UK and was a magistrate in Singapore. Lim spent much of her early childhood in Malaysia, Demalaya, living in Penang and Malacca. And this area of Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, was part of the straight settlements, which had been under direct British colonial control as a crown colony since 1867. In 1941, during World War II, the Japanese army occupied the region and the British left. Lim, who in the early 40s was living in Penang, remembers that the expatriates were taken away very silently at night, while the local population, even though serving in key position for the British rulers, and working as volunteer officers, as in the case of her father, were left behind. This was a devastating betrayal and one that left the family adrift for years. The family lived with little. They had a vegetable garden, and Kim Lim's mother resorted to cooking baked goods in the home and sell them. Lim began schooling in a Japanese school, and she found the strict discipline and punishments very upsetting. For years, she developed a high temperature, which enabled her to stay at home and be primarily home-schooled. Her memories of the period are of persistent feelings of threat. Unlike most people in the region, Lim spoke various languages, Chinese, Malay, English, and learned Japanese. The Japanese rule lasted until the end of the war in 1945, when Singapore was reoccupied by British, Indian, and Australian forces, and was made a separate British crown colony. After the end of the war, Lim returned with her family to Singapore, which remained under British control until 1971. In 1954, at the age of 18, Lim traveled to London and enrolled at the Martin School of Art, where she concentrated mainly on wood carving. Lim was dissatisfied with the teaching, which focused on the human figure, and two years into her studies, following the active advice of one of her tutors, the sculpture Elizabeth Fring. She transferred to the late School of Fine Art, where she studied for a further four years. She studied sculpture, but also was taught by the etcher Anthony Gross and by the lithographer Stanley Jones, developing a stroke commitment for printmaking alongside sculpture. This late was part of University College London, and compared to most art schools in Britain at the time, deferred in the emphasis plays on the teaching of art history. Given her life experience, Lim was able to look critically at Eurocentric teaching of the subject, whereby what was then referred to as primitivism was a footnote in the history of the great achievements of European art. Rather than accepting the traditional European canon as mostly taught in our schools and taken as a given by the British art establishment, Lim looked far and wide to find references that resonated with her cultural interests and preoccupations and love of materials and surfaces. She was attracted to sculptures seen at the British Museum, the Cycladic heads she saw in Greece, and which she found to be extremely potent in their simplicity and even having a sort of magical quality. Lim felt that their true art education took place while traveling each summer and stopping to visit museums, religious and secular sites and architecture in different parts of Europe, Southeast Asia, South Asia, North Africa and Japan on their way to and back from Singapore. And the images that you see in these slides are a small selection of undated photographs from Lim's personal archive. They just simply give you a sense of the wide remit of the work she saw, started and documented over the years. I told you about Kim Lim's early life in reasonable detail to redress accounts to date, which have focused on Kim Lim's experience of journey and visiting archaeological sites, but have omitted the fact that she lived under Japanese as well as British occupation, experiences which were specific to the Southeast Asian context that she inhabited and inevitably linked to displacement, trauma and betrayal. This personal is much as geopolitical history, we're searching for the next part of my paper, which will proceed to discuss how Kim Lim conceived of her own identity and analyze some of her early works. So we might agree that Western modernity's love of raw materials and simplified forms and their making homage and appropriating of the artifacts produced in other localities across the globe from West Africa to Oceania is rooted in the assumption that aesthetic qualities can be appreciated in their assumed purity. They can be seen as unrooted, detached from the culture that produced them. And we might also agree that such aesthetic views were linked to Europe's history of moving and appropriating goods, people and cultures. Digiopolitical culture and aesthetic premises underpinning Western modernity is not something a young artist relocating from Singapore to London in 1954 could have aimed to undo, but what she could do and she did was to travel to see those artifacts in situ, experiencing them as part of their landscape and the contemporary culture that emanated from their history. Further, Kim Lim took as a given the unrooted quality of modernism love of raw materiality and simplified forms and structures and made manifest its condition of homelessness and displacement. This was a condition Lim had been made to inhabit and which directly related to her personally and to the collective experience of migration and displacement of people in a region. Lim discussed her experience of seeing and documenting the artifacts she saw and admired during her travels as follow. I suppose one accumulates on a kind of mental pinboard such experiences which sometime later act as some points so that one can find one's bearing so to speak in the process of discovering one's identity. I think this statement is keen understanding Kim Lim's journey is one of taking as a given her unrootedness and the fact that her identity was not given and fixed but in fact ahead of her in a process of becoming and I would like to argue that this process of forging her identity as singular and collective is engraved in her work and particularly in her early work and finally we're coming to look at some works and this is one of Kim Lim's earlier wood sculptures from 1959 Sphinx which is currently on view at the Britain as part of an infocus display on Lim's early carvings and prints. In this work we can certainly see aspects of Brancus' work particularly the wood assemblages from the interwar period but there is also much more. While still a student Lim had begun to salvage, carve and assemble wood offcuts found in wood yards, the nature of having different pre-histories being displaced cracked by changes of environmental conditions over time is inscribed in their materiality. Lim added additional layers to it by scorching the surface so that different sections would acquire distinctive textures and reflect the light differently and I just show you another picture also taken by Kim Lim which gives you a better sense of the surface treatment. Importantly Lim did not only highlight materials quality and their histories, she played with them, she used them as building blocks which are seemingly precariously balancing atop of each other in a mudder that does not follow rules of symmetry or organic or serial development and which create a playful configuration. I think it's also very interesting that there is so much such a strong haptic quality to the work and really when Shijemi and was discussing early in his paper and then Sadiya's I really felt there was a great resonance in terms of the tactile and Arctic qualities also of Kim Lim's work. And last but not least Lim titled the work Sphinx. The title is a hint to the artist's love of ancient artifacts and their eroded surfaces. A nod to the long history of writers and artists referencing the Sphinx as a symbol of hybridity. Hybridity is a condition of empowerment reflecting and celebrating unenriched and multifaceted existence rather than one perceived as diluted by lack of homogeneity. Martin Halman has remarked that Lim's cultural forms imply monumental associations and yet indeed there is also something rather witty in Sphinx, possibly the immense Sphinx of Gaza in this contained sculpture constructed from salvage block of wood. And I will end by discussing two among a group of works made between 1960 and 63 which Lim titled after Japanese figures including Shogun Samurai and Ronin. And here you see two different sculptures titled Samurai from 1960 and 1961 and the one on the right which is in the collection of the Arts Council is currently on view as part of the exhibition Breaking the Mold A New Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It is important to note that Lim gave the same title to these two works as this demonstrates as this demonstrates that she was not typing sculptures as an afterthought taking a cue from the resulting formal qualities but actively exploring particular subjects. This culture retained what can Lim later described as the raw and arrogant quality of early works which indeed are remarkably bold and apologetic. At the time of their making Lim was 24 to 25 years old. Much of what we have discussed in relation to Sphinx can also be applied to these works then being assembled from pre-existing blocks of wood or slabs of stone and being both monumental and playful. Additionally in the subject of these works we also have something differently and directly relating to Kim's early life in a more specific way. What did he mean for a child who had experienced a Japanese occupation as inevitably traumatic to go on to make these works after pre-modern Japanese figures of authority? I would argue that in these works this warrior's history and cultural significance and relevance is equally honoured and demystified. These cultures enact a process of healing and reconciliation whereby one can salvage, adapt, mend and even find irony. We could say that in the process of discovering her identity, Kim Lim turned the passive nature of the condition of unrootedness as experienced personally and as underpinning the aesthetic condition of European modernism into an active stance furnished with agency, defiance, rapprochement and a desire to play entities. And I will just end with an image of ruining the wanderer from 1963. Thank you very much for listening. I will now unshare. Thank you very much, Helena. Again, really interesting resonances coming through in your paper and across the papers as well. So we're going to move on to Eva Vencheva's paper now and then we'll come back to questions at the end. And again, just to the audience, if you have questions for any of our speakers so far, please do either type them in the chat and we can collate them or kind of continue to ferment them and we'll return at the end to all of our speakers for further discussion. Okay, so no further ado then. It's my pleasure to welcome Eva, who is going to speak to us with a paper title called Incommenstable Abstractions Rashid Areen and Prafulla Mohanty's Performances Between Britain and South Asia. Welcome, Eva. Thank you Dot and thank you to him, to Ming and Hamad and Sarah and the whole Palmer and Centre team as well for the invitation to speak today. I'm just going to do a quick screen share. Okay, so if everybody can see that. My paper in a way follows not only from the fantastic papers before me and from Professor Inaga's talk also earlier in the panel, but it also connects to some of the ideas that have been cropping up throughout the conference earlier. And so I'd like to start with this idea, an idea that has been circulating around in the last 20 years in particular, that the once sort of celebrated universal quality of abstract art is now widely contested. In her opening talk for this conference, Leela Gandhi talked about the interplay of visibility and invisibility in abstraction. Abstraction, she noted, was also a way of kind of speaking about hidden systems of knowledge. Now thinking about art and about painting in particular, I can't help but think back to Covenant Mercer's seminal edited volume titled, Discretant Abstraction, in which he notes that abstraction was mobilized within decolonial and postcolonial thought. Coming at a slightly later time, was Aquian Weisar's introduction to the exhibition, Frank Bowling, Mapa Mundi, in which he interprets abstraction as a kind of mapping of invisible and unspoken histories, connections, but also differences. And it's through the lens of these unravelings of abstraction that I today would like to present the work of two wonderful artists, Rashid Arain and Profula Mohanti, whom you see here on the cover screen. I bring them together not only for their rich work with abstraction, but also for their self-reflexive explorations of the transnational and transcultural resonances and readings also of their works. Through their art, but also through their writing, both artists have voiced a concern with the incommensurability for the different standards, interpretations and expectations cast upon their works. This varies not only according to geography and time, but also according to language, power relations and culture. And what I find really fascinating in both of these artists is that they actually channel this unfixed status of their work as a way of critically questioning the relationships of aesthetics and universality. Born in Karachi in 1935, Rashid Arain's early works were marked by a number of figurative portraits and landscapes of Karachi. However, his work also had a strong element of abstraction, in which curved lines and geometric forms, often based on experiments which the artist himself carried out with everyday materials, started to crop up within his artworks. Another important influence for his abstraction were urban forms, in particular as Iftikar Dadi also notes not just urban structures, but also abstract forms arising from Islamic calligraphy, history and philosophy. With a training in civil engineering, Arain came to the UK in 1964. Throughout the late 1960s, he began to combine his interest in abstraction with a kind of experimentation with three-dimensional installations and sculptures, more commonly known as grids, for which he is fairly well known today. But more importantly, several of his works from this period also took on a markedly relational and playful nature. And here I show you photographs of a series of works called canal events, more broadly also sometimes termed chakras, which entailed the throwing of rounded abstract discs by groups of friends, colleagues or simply passers-by into canals and waterways. So the picture on the left is from London and as noted by art historian Courtney Jane Martin, this kind of collected action was also Arain's way of engaging with London's urban space on the one hand, but also overcoming certain political and personal senses of isolation which he felt at the time. The images that you see on the right are art balls, it's a five-week conference that reflects in the ways in which to cry. What's that? Have we been zoom bombed? Are you? I think it was more of a sound bomb. Okay. I'll just continue. So the images that you see on the right were when the work was executed in Paris in 1970 and here it's not so much anymore about the urban structures as it is also an expression of solidarity with the 1968 political protests, the union and student protests that had happened at the end of the decade. For Arain, however, very importantly for both of these iterations was another element and that was embracing the forces of nature as a way of symbolically kind of challenging the systems of hierarchy and power and control within the structures of Europe. And I bring this up because this is one interpretation which in a way gets also lost when the work comes to be performed a couple of years later in 1974 in Karachi for the first time. And here you see the discs once again floating on the surface of the water in Geo Park in Karachi, a work that was executed in a very similar way with acquaintances of Arain gathering together and throwing the discs collectively. However, the making of this work within Pakistan also marked a certain turning point in Arain's thinking. Here it was no longer about symbolically challenging western hierarchies by kind of drawing on the random forces of nature, taking the discs away. Rather, it became a symbol of connectivity and interdependence, an idea that Arain would go on to explore in a number of his writings and other works throughout the 1970s, most noted the preliminary notes for Black Manifesto and the magazine Black Phoenix which he would go on to publish. Simultaneously, however, the work was also received in quite a different way within Pakistan from the very few reviews which are actually available on it. Most of them seem to deal with the work in terms of its aesthetics. They speak of a kind of beautiful ripple effect happening when the discs are thrown on the water. And there's a very strong contextualization of the work also within a Euro-American avant-garde practice. This reception for Arain also signaled a certain incommensurability within the art world. On the one hand, his works having been situated quite firmly within minimalist practices in Europe and seen, on the other hand, as foreign and experimental from the side of Pakistan. This is a subject to which he would come to explore through a series of writings and idea-based works almost three decades later. These would deal not only with the incommensurability of reception of art, as this review shows, but also they would substantially delve into the different lived experiences which actually underpinned those different receptions. And here I think he's tapping into something that art historian Monica Gineja has recently referred to as a kind of critical globality. So recognizing local differences as a kind of questioning the sort of the universalizing tendency of the word the global. So the series of works that I'm talking about go by the broader title of return to Baluchistan. What you see here on the screen at the moment are photographs taken by Arain himself in the 1970s and 1980s. In the region of Baluchistan, which is to the southwest of Pakistan, it's a desert province which also borders with Iran and is one of Pakistan's most arid and rural areas. So this was also an area where Arain spent a substantial amount of time in his early childhood. In the essay Return to Baluchistan, nominalizing the bourgeois aesthetic written in 2001 and delivered between 2001 and 2002 and then subsequently published in Arain's book Art Beyond Art, the artist offers the reflections on this as one of the poorest provinces of Pakistan. However, he also reflects upon rural poverty and third world life also as a product of global capitalism. These reflections of the third world are also extended to think about the role of intellectuals in the third world, which he notes for him are also complicit with certain international capitalist forces. And he also voices a desire for art that departs from Eurocentric canons of art, which he sees as trapped within a bourgeois premise. So this is a series of reflections that comes out also of the product of having shown his work across multiple spaces and having also observed different responses to it. But it's also an exercise and abstraction of its own. Through it, Arain also launches another series of works which are more map based and also conceptually abstract in their own way, in which he in which he proposes, and I quote, one way to stop thinking about the West as the society or as the center of the world. So on this map in particular here, for example, you see a series of nodes. You see also where Pakistan is, the city of Karachi also bordering the province of Balochistan being as one in a series of nodes connected to other parts of the world, either through a collective consciousness or an individual consciousness. So what these two series is combined to do is they actually advocate for a more also material and philosophical way of creating art in order to engage with the struggles of deprived peasants and exploited workers of the world. And importantly, Arain actually elaborates this through two notions. The first one is that of nominalism. It's a term that comes from medieval thought and denotes the idea that universals and general theories are mere ideas with no corresponding realities. What Arain does here is he makes a call, a call essentially to account for local epistemologies and ways of living. And he refers to this as the nominal, in other words, making art the subject of things that are within everyday life, that are lived realities within everyday life. So he wants, he advocates for a kind of art making that is a collective creative activity that gives creative solutions for rural dwellers. So it's a kind of art that is also not divorced from social processes. And sort of building onto this is his notion of cosmoral ruralism, which follows in which he actually critiques urban living and suggests that it's one of the main causes also for the destructive forces of anthropocentric living. Through both these terms, he makes a plea, essentially a plea for creative solutions for sustainable infrastructures in rural underdeveloped areas. So we can also think about this as a kind of act of translation, a certain translation of Arain's own abstract practices away from their bourgeois connotations, and into the context of the nominal, the grassroots and the lived experience. However, what's important to note here is that these ideas, and Arain himself also refers to them as ideas, are propositions that are rooted in design solutions and development solutions. They live on today in the form of writings and sketches and talks. But now what I'd like to do is turn my attention to another artist whose work has also similarly initially stemmed from a place of abstraction. But over the times, over the period of time, also recognizing the limits to its universality has also shifted towards a more localized non metropolitan engagement. And the work that I'd like to present is that of Profula Mohanti. Born in the village of Nanpur in the state of Orissa in India in 1936, Mohanti studied architecture in Bombay before migrating to England in pursuit of further study and professional development. He arrived in Leeds in 1960 and registered to study town planning. And here you see Mohanti on the far left with fellow students from the town planning class. Fueled by feelings of social isolation at the time in Leeds, Mohanti began painting in the 1960s. His initially vibrant watercolor paintings had certain motifs and designs on them, which over time became more and more abstracted into the form of concentric color circles. Simultaneously, to sustain himself financially, Mohanti began teaching evening dance classes to students and businessmen in Leeds. Gradually, by combining the two, he developed a form of abstract dance performance which was loosely based on Indian Catak dance in which the artist also related back to his painting. So he has this beautiful way of describing it, saying, when I'm painting, I'm dancing. In 1964, he saved the first official performance of this at the Leeds City Art Gallery. This was his first painting performance in which he positioned his own canvases amidst the old masters and proceeded to dance around them. In the late 1960s, Mohanti moved to London to work as a town planner for the Greater London Council and continued to develop these performances, also staging them over the course of the 70s internationally. The emphasis, however, on this point started to be on his hand gestures and the abstract nature of the works, which became increasingly interwoven also with the discourse of modern art. And here I show you a photo of his first solo exhibition at the ICA from 1970. Mohanti used the term pure dance to describe his works. And this is the kind of first incommensurable moment which I'd like to discuss in relation to his work. And through this use of the word purity, Mohanti's work often came to be contextualized by his curators and reviewers as an allusion to the notion of pure as it was being used by theorists such as Clement Greenberg at the time to represent a kind of pure abstract form and a division between different media. For Mohanti, however, use of the word pure was not about the separation of the media. His painting, his dance, and his writing all formed for him a kind of composite practice which was meant to be seen together. Pure as he also used it was a way of distancing himself from fixed categories of identity politics. Initially, this had been to distance himself from notions of traditional Indian art and dance. And later it also became a way of distancing from more fixed and restrictive notions of black art. While Mohanti never formally partook in the activities of the British black arts movement in the 1980s, he very much ascribed to their struggle of overcoming racial discrimination and gaining equality. And he's described many of his experiences, observations and struggles in detail in his book through brown eyes, which I would all encourage you to read if you haven't until now. So these sort of distinctions in the use of the word pure is the one level of incommensurability. The second one, which I'd like to explore though, is maybe traced back to the international showing of Mohanti's works. Starting with an exhibition in Delhi in the 1970s, Mohanti's work first came to be framed under the rubric of neotentric art, which was starting to gain a lot of international prominence during the 1970s. In particular, the circle formation of his paintings were seen as representative of the birth, life and regeneration cycles. Also the Bindu dot and the concept of Shonyav, the boy that the nothingness from which all life emanates. Within this kind of neotentric framework, his work came to be shown in exhibitions between the 1970s and 1990s in India, but also in Japan and the Philippines and in Germany. This interpretation persisting up to this very day and here I've included the cover image of the catalogue for a recent exhibition at the British Museum on tantra in which Mohanti's works were also featured once again. And yet Mohanti's own relationship to tantric expression has not been such a clear cut one. Arguing for tantric forms as an ingrained part of a wider kind of visual lexicon, Mohanti has actually rooted his biggest influences within the lived realities of his native village of Orissa, of Nampur in the state of Orissa. Here, tantra is one among a myriad of other influences. And the figure of the village is itself in a way a much bigger driving force within his overall practice. It's both prominent in the personal and the formal influences of his abstraction. He's spoken, for instance, about the circular form as having a relationship to Oriya script, which has this kind of rounded curvy linear form. He's also related it back to childhood memories of drawing concentric circles as an act of meditation and the worship of deities, Ramavishnu and Mayeshwar. He has also connected the act of making circles to shellograms, small oval stones worshiped by the artist's mother when he was growing up. So here is another one of his publications called My Village, My Life that I've included here to kind of emphasize the prominence and the imagination of Mohanti, of the figure of his village, which quite often gets left out of certain accounts of his work that focus on their abstract nature. Further to that, I'd just like to end with this slide as well, emphasizing an aspect of Mohanti's practice, which is different from Arian's notion of cosmoruralism, which is a detached abstract idea in a way. Mohanti also returns annually to non-poor at the age of 85. He continues to do that to this day, including, if I may add, throughout the COVID pandemic. So this is a kind of a much more real-life commitment to the idea of using the village also as a building block, but also as a source of inspiration and as a material as well for art making. It is a kind of practice rooted in real life exchanges and mutual inspiration, which sometimes becomes difficult to account for within discourses that are strictly rooted on modern and contemporary art. So just to conclude, I would like to think about abstraction in the case of Mohanti, not only as a bridge between the contemporary art and the local world of Nampur, but also as an embodiment of these differences. Returning back to Lila Gandhi's observation that abstraction plays a role in communicating systems of knowledge that often remain obscured. Both Mohanti and Arieen have aimed to establish, on the one hand, a kind of cross-cultural dialogue or translation through their work, but on the other hand, their works have also taken on a life of their own. And through that, they have illustrated the incremental ability not only between art centres, but also between the rural and the urban divide. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ava, for that really fascinating paper. And indeed, to all of us, speakers, this afternoon. Can I invite them all to turn on their cameras again? Just give you a moment while Elena and Sadea turn their cameras on. Hello. Hi. Welcome back. Thank you all so much. It's been a really rich and fascinating afternoon. So many interesting resonances, I think, across the papers, particularly in terms, I think, of issues to do with, obviously, abstraction and modernism and other modernisms, and other sort of experiences and uses of abstraction, not stemming from a kind of Western modernist perspective, but being received as such, and then the tensions and, as you say, the increments of ability in those receptions is really interesting, I think. And sort of, you know, the interaction between materiality and meaning and how meaning is embedded in the materiality of choices that the artists make, but also how it's kind of misread as well, I think, quite often, depending on the context. And also, I think the collision of personal and political histories is something that's really strong in all of the papers this afternoon. And sort of geographies and mapping and plotting and plans and kind of geographical location is key and also the personal and the political. We have a question already in the questions, so I will go straight over to the audience, actually, and hopefully, you know, more questions will come in as we're speaking. Oh, yes, there are a couple of questions now. So the first one, a great question, from C.C. Lee, who asks, she says, Identities are never singular, but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions. So cultural identity is constantly changing. Under this change is modern Asian art presenting, quote, what we can become today, more importantly than who we are or where do we come from, a really kind of interesting question. And so I'm going to throw it open to any of you to think about or to answer in relation to your topics this afternoon or your thoughts. Yeah, Ava. Yeah, I think the question hits the nail on the head in many ways, and it's steward Hall's argument as well that identity is always in the state of flux and always in the state of becoming. So rather than saying it should be written a certain way, we just need to look at, we need to acknowledge that there are different ways of framing and ask ourselves who is doing the framing and with what aim in mind. For those of us who work on diasporic art histories, this notion of becoming is an extremely valuable one and a productive one for thinking about these things for somebody aiming to write an art history from a more national, perhaps recuperative art history. Maybe the positioning there is different, but I don't know how the others see that. Yeah, do I have a viewpoint to come in there? Yeah, Elena. I might just add that I read a quote in my paper precisely, I think that refers to that where Kinley says that, you know, she used a sort of pin board of what she saw in the world as the tools in what she defines as a process of discovering her identity. And I think in all the statements she made and reluctantly answered questions about her identity, there was always a sense that her identity was ahead of her rather than behind her. And I think it was never about denying her history at all, which of course is also in her work, but wanting to propose or focus more on the journey ahead as much as on the past. And I think this is also part and parcel of a refusal to partake in Rashida Rean's the other story, because writing wrongly, that's exactly what she feared was that sort of being fully molded into the past identity rather than in the way her work was developed. I think that's a really important point, actually. And it's very difficult to untangle what others, how others perceive you and receive you in relation to how you're trying to create meaning or construct meaning for yourself. It's a constant tension, I think, for a lot of the artists we've been talking about today and indeed in general, actually, as well. So yeah, thank you for that. Sadiya, I don't know if you want to add anything to any of that. I think, I mean, just to follow with what you were saying, I think that, at least with Zarina's work, the question of I think I'm not interested in the question of identity or the way in which the artist identifies or anything like that, but thinking about how there are structural paradigms that name the artist, whether or not that's the way that the artist kind of names himself. So if you think just about, I mean, in the context of India, with the Babri Masjid, the destruction of the Babri Masjid in the 90s, there's a way that Zarina's generation identified as Indians in the post-independence, post-colonial period, but then became identified by religion, what I call kind of ethno-racialized religion. And so it's almost that Zarina couldn't identify otherwise. And so then that's when she comes to kind of speak about herself as, I think if you're facing conditions of persecution, you begin to take a position in relation to whatever part of your identity I agree, it's totally intersectional and keeps changing, but it becomes a kind of political question, I guess. So yeah. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I think that came through as well in all of the examples you were all talking about, that intersection between the personal and political and how they all engage with that or sort of deal with it in their work and how it can't be untangled. But it's a question of how then one sort of, I think, decides to play, I guess, in terms of the art that is made and how it's received. I think that's, yeah, a kind of ongoing, resonant kind of sort of live set of issues. We have another question in the chat. We have two in fact. So one from Kylie Gilchrist who says, thanks very much for the incredibly rich papers. And her question runs across the panel regarding the significance of the haptic. To what extent does the haptic in the work of Zarina, Kim Lim, and Rashida Rean compel a rereading of Euro-American traditions alongside and in dialogue with those from Asia? And I'm thinking, for example, of Harold Rosenberg's emphasis on action rather than flatness in modernist painting. And Herbert Reed's emphasis on tactility over opticality. Both thinkers more committed to internationalism than Greenberg, and who are eclipsed by Greenberg's formalism. In response to Shigem's very rich paper, I wonder if you could expand on your thoughts regarding methodologies that enable the translation of lived, tactile, haptic context, countering the formalist and decontextualised paradigms of the museum. Wow, great question, Kylie. I don't know who wants to, who feels like they want to take that or whether Kylie wants to unmute herself and actually talk a little bit more about the question. Are you there? Okay, perhaps not, in which case. Okay, there's a haptic then in the work of your artists that you have selected. Hi, I think I'm unmuted now. Hey, great. Yeah, I just thank you to everyone for your papers. And I think I was quite interested in this pressing upon the dominant paradigm of, let's say, formalist modernism in Greenberg, which of course has been sort of endlessly displaced, but perhaps not enough. And the way that I think all of your work invites a kind of local rereading of these different traditions in dialogue with other traditions in the Euro-American context that have been sort of marginalised themselves. And so I'd be wondering and be curious to hear kind of more specifically, for example, Sadio, what is during his dialogue in New York with other art critics or art historians? How does she see her work in dialogue similarly with both Elena and Eva? How do you see that operating in both Rashid and Kim's work? So yeah, I'd be curious kind of the granularity there, and maybe that sort of preemptively responds to my other question about translating context. So yes, thank you. Don't know who wants to take it first. Yeah, I can just begin just by saying, I mean, of course, it's a very good question, and particularly for an artist who use culture and litograph, which are, you know, haptic, essentially, activities. I think, you know, we can contrast Grimber's emphasis on v