conference papers

​2018 (September): Rituals of Refurbishment: remembering/remediating Philip Rawson’s Tantra exhibition. Conference paper (co-author Janaki Nair), ASA18 Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination: re-creating anthropology, University of Oxford. The recent refurbishment of the Hayward Gallery prompts memories of the Indologist Philip Rawson curating the 1971 Tantra exhibition in what was then London’s key art venue. Our paper remembers and remediates the gallery and the exhibits using rituals recognisable to the Indian diaspora 50 years on.
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2018 (June): Static Art and Temporal Imaginings: thinking about Philip Rawson amidst a numinous cast collection. Conference keynote, Lasting Impressions: the roles and perceptions of reproductions in the museum, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Cast collections endure in various institutions and it is the central proposition of this paper that we could do more to activate the layers of time that have been, as it were, imprinted into the monumental bulk of these plaster reproductions. My thought is that Art and Time (2005), the last book written by the art educator and museum curator Philip Rawson, points to this possibility. His analysis of the multiple levels of time evoked by a single static image, Titian’s painting of Bacchus and Ariadne, is an interpretive tour de force that could transform environments like the Ashmolean Museum’s cast gallery into other-worldly regions of time.

​2018 (February): OK, this record is my chosen object. Or rather it’s one of my objects. Guest speaker, Gravity:material public lecture series, Sheffield Institute of the Arts, Sheffield Hallam University. When I first heard Sílvia Pérez Cruz’s atmospheric recording of Gallo Rojo I imagined her performing on an expansive wooden floor as noisy and well-worn as those in Carlos Saura's flamenco films. However her YouTube video shows the recording being made in a cellar-like rehearsal room. I have dabbled in experimental music since the 1960s and this paper explores why I misheard what Cruz and her guitarist were doing as they extemporised freely on their instruments.

2017 (October): the train starts – it stops – it starts again (effort, stasis, and the Glasgow Museums Resource
Centre). Conference paper, Doubtful Occasion: A creative symposium based on artist Christine Borland’s research into WW1 objects in Glasgow Museums’ collection, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre. Linked to my curated event Thoughts for a journey: a prepared text with passing discussions, a scripted train journey from Glasgow Central Station to the Centre at Nitshill.

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2017 (January): On waking up, say a spell backwards. Public seminar. Thinking Tantra (curators - Rebecca Heald with Amrita Jhaveri), Drawing Room, London.


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2016 (June): Handling the taste of emotion (Rawson’s Rasa). Conference paper (co-author Janaki Nair), Presenting the Theatrical Past: interplays of artefacts, discourses and practices, IFTR 2016, Stockholm University.



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2016 (May): Revisiting Tantra: contemporary British and Indian responses to the Tantra-oriented songs of Rabindranath Tagore. Conference paper (co-author Janaki Nair), Variations, Rewritings and Adaptations of the Jātaka Tales and Buddhism in India Today, SARI 2016 Annual and International Colloquium, University of Paris 13.

2015: Revisiting Tantra: a contemporary British and Indian response to the “seductiveness” of Tantric museum objects. Conference paper (co-author Janaki Nair), The Culture of Seduction [The Seduction of Culture], Cyprus Semiotic Association, University of Cyprus.






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2015: Studio Ruins: narrating “unfinishedness”. Conference paper, Material Culture in Action: Practices of making, collecting and re-enacting art and design, Glasgow School of Art.


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2014: Negotiating the Icebox: cold collections, dark museums and contemporary art.
Conference paper, Art Out of Time, Institute of Visual Research, University of Oxford.

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2014: Museum stores, genetic junk, experimental art – conversations on a train.
Conference paper, ASA14 Decennial: Anthropology and Enlightenment, University of Edinburgh.



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​2013: At a moment’s notice: according to the pleasure of the holder: the semiotics of paper. Conference keynote, DeSForM 2013, School of Digital Media, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China.
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​2012: Synaesthetic Presences: new sights from old sound objects. Conference paper, Making Sound Objects: Cultures of hearing, Creating and Circulation, British Forum for Ethnomusicology Conference, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

2011: Stilling the flow of signs: creative action and the discontinuity of the museum archive. Conference paper (co-author Sachiyo Goda), Exhibitionary Geographies and the Post-Museum, Royal Geographic Society-IBG Annual International, Royal Geographic Society, Conference, London.

2011: Semiotic Uncertainty and Resonant Presence. Conference paper, Transformations in Art and Culture, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, Leiden, Holland.

2010: Stilling the flow of signs: creative action and the discontinuity of the museum archive. Conference paper (co-author Sachiyo Goda), The Everyday Conference, University of Cyprus.

2010: Audience-free practices and the art school panopticon. Conference paper: Art Schools: Inventions, Invective and Radical Possibilities, UCL Art Collections, University College London.

2008: Objects, knowledge and practice-led research. Conference paper for Material Worlds: a radically interdisciplinary conference in honour of Professor Susan Pearce, Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.