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. |
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. |
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.
|