conference papers

2021 (March): Doing Harm in Exhibitions. Conference paper, ASA21 Responsibility, University of St Andrews (online). When Alison Wilding’s sculpture Blue-Black collapsed in front of me at the 1984 British Art Show I felt responsible for what had happened. My approach across the gallery floor dislodged the delicately balanced structure, destroying at a stroke the artwork’s adaptation to the environment of the spectator. Like any unpromising pile of materials in a studio, the sudden horizontal disposition of ‘parts’ made it much harder to understand how, of all the sculptures these bits and pieces might have become, Wilding’s arrangement remained the aesthetic optimum. My accidental act of unmaking, occurring as I planned my first interventionist exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, conjured, as if from nowhere, the dead matter out of which the living presence of the art work had been constructed. Unlike Mary Richardson’s attack on the Rokeby Venus in Gell’s Art and Agency, doing harm to Blue-Black prompted in me a lasting awareness of the fragility of artefactual agency. Whereas Richardson confirmed art’s power, Wilding’s sculpture punctured the aesthetic force that keeps art acting upon us.My thoughts often return to this moment and I have recently extended the idea to inanimate materials that were once alive themselves. My new ASMR-style videos, utilising Holly Dugan’s 2019 article, offer a practice-based response to an unsettling juxtaposition of animals drawn on a calf skin manuscript now in the British Library. By transforming this biological artefact into contemporary media, I hope its 17th century approach to ‘harmed life’ achieves aesthetic validity once again.
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https://vimeo.com/539033599/d3a958b54c

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2021 (March): Re-treading the art school corridor to 'Cast Contemporaries'. Ancient plaster: casting light on a forgotten sculptural material, The British Academy, London (online). ‘Cast Contemporaries’ was an exhibition proposed by the architectural historian Margaret Stewart to mark the completion of the restoration and cleaning of Edinburgh’s historic plaster cast collection. She had overseen this project as the curator of collections at Edinburgh College of Art and, having heard me speak about my work with contemporary art in the museum environment, she invited me to curate an exhibition for the 2012 Edinburgh Arts Festival. There had been conferences and symposia. Historians and classicists had discussed the cultural significance of this truly outstanding accumulation of sculptural and architectural reproductions. But what would artists make of the physical restoration of the casts to the working environment of a major contemporary art school? This paper reports on what happened when the theoretical debates gave way to the creative process of exhibition making and public attention was drawn to the newly conserved presence of the casts.
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https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/british-academy-conferences/ancient-plaster-casting-light-forgotten-sculptural-material/

https://vimeo.com/534443359/24f8d5399e

2019 (November): Voice-Over: archived narratives and silent heirlooms. Archive Alive research symposium, Tavistock Institute of Human Relations

This multimodal presentation is, at present, work in progress. It was initiated after visiting the Tavistock Institute archives in November 2018 and involves audio-visual reconstructions of the acetate recordings my late father made as he encountered ‘civvy street’ following demobilisation in 1946. I have been drawing his records for many years and the project aims to bring together my graphic and media experiments as a single installation piece for display in museum environments (my speciality as an artist-curator). The audio-visual component of the project responds to a report archived with Hugh Murray’s papers (SA/TIH/B/2/1/2/1/3) that was prepared in June 1945 for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). It concerns the psychological problems experienced by people displaced during World War ll. The report contains information that sits poignantly with my father’s ambition to develop an audio postcard service for families with relatives still undertaking military service overseas. He made many test recordings on acetate but these are now in such a fragile state that their content cannot be retrieved, even with the aid of advanced scanning technologies. Thus the records no longer speak for themselves and require other remediating forms of expression. While my drawings were only conceivable because the records remained resolutely mute, the UNRRA report overlays this embodied silence with layers of re-instantiated narrative (the ‘voice-over' of my project title). The latter development is a new departure and the Archive Alive symposium will be an opportunity to screen some of the audio-visual experiments and present a short paper about the project in general. My thinking certainly complicates any straightforward notion of historical contextualisation. I will frame the discussion with reference to three expanding fields of scholarly research that enhance our understanding of the material dimensions of political displacement: 1) art historical accounts of the looting of major museum collections by the Nazis; 2) literary interpretations of displaced objects in the novels of Iris Murdoch (who worked for UNRRA); 3) recent anthropological debates about repatriating ethnographic holdings at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (where I am based as a Research Affiliate). This cross-disciplinary overview, and the art project it elaborates, would not be possible without a widening acceptance that collected and archived objects are never passive reflectors of the society from which they originate. Rather they are themselves generators of meanings simply by being stubbornly present at diverse moments of social transience and change.

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​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.