Carlos Quijon, Jr.: Can you walk us through the decision of choosing ruangrupa (ruru) for the Exhibition Histories book series? Of course, with the recent developments in ruru’s practice, talking for example about their artistic direction of documenta 15, the book has turned out to be a very timely historicization and mediation of the collective’s practice. I am wondering what the considerations were in writing about ruru’s practice at this particular historical moment?

David Morris: We can recall that conversations toward the book solidified around 2018, when farid rakun came to visit Afterall and spoke with exhibition studies students, and we started exploring the idea of archiving and historicizing ruru—the whys and the hows of it. It quickly became clear that this presented a number of challenges to the kind of research we do, practically and intellectually, and this seemed like a good place to start. As with most of the Exhibition Histories publications, the book developed quite organically from there, in a slow-burn way and across many conversations with our editorial collective and ruru friends and network, until it felt “ready.” (We often describe the Exhibition Histories process as a kind of simmering, slow cooking with multiple pots on at once.)

In short, when the documenta plan was announced, we were already some way along. If anything, it diverted our book plans since, understandably, documenta 15 (d15) took up a lot of the ruru bandwidth—although how things played out in Kassel made the need for a deeper analysis and understanding of ruangrupa’s work seem all the more urgent. 

Wing Chan:  In the book itself, ruru’s participation in d15 takes up maybe 2 percent of the overall page count. What interested us more are these questions: what kind of collective activism is ruru evocating? Where did it come from? How has it kept ruru going for decades in Jakarta and beyond? Personally, I feel ruru’s stories can teach us a lot about why it is important to not do things alone, about genuine, sustainable ways of relating to one another. It’s timely in this world full of wars.

Arianna Mercado: After 2022, so much of the conversation around ruru and their process suddenly became only about d15 and its aftermath. There was much to be said about ruru and how they operate in global and local art ecologies that goes way back to before d15. In the process of making this book, we felt that it wasn’t necessary to just continue adding to the conversation around d15, hence it is only briefly covered in the book. Ruru has been working through lumbung, through ideas of sharing and reciprocity, since their inception, so we felt that it was necessary to highlight this immense body of work by focusing on their support systems and the infrastructures they have built in Jakarta, Indonesia, and beyond.

When Wing and I were first doing the research before we went to Jakarta, it was a lot of, “OK, so let’s put ourselves in their shoes in 1998. What did their life look like back then? What pop culture media were they consuming? What was circulating in universities and in more artistic circles?” We watched a lot of movies, especially romcoms, like Ada Apa dengan Cinta? (What’s Up with Love; 2002). We read some of the books that were banned at the time—Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novel This Earth of Mankind (1980), for example. We also listened to a lot of music of their time. We wanted to put ourselves in the shoes of ruru to think about their dreams, aspirations, and lives before even trying to understand their practice.

CQJr: I am interested in how you imagined the structure of the book. Of course, the book is about ruru’s 25-year history, so for the most part, it takes ruru’s practice as a frame through which a possible history of the interfacing between art, exhibition, and history (in Indonesia, in Southeast Asia, in Asia, in the global contemporary, etc.) can be written, understood, or—even as a baseline—be made legible. Because of the apparent “centrality” of ruru in the development of contemporary artistic discourse in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia (i.e., how almost all practitioners active in the contemporary art ecology of Indonesia were once part of or have worked with ruru), I am wondering if there were considerations around how to foil this narrative of centrality. 

DM: ruru’s 25-year lifespan is the longest timeframe we have attempted in the series, and this was among the creative challenges we had in making it legible to a wider audience (we hope) as well as in opening up larger questions about “art”, “exhibition”, “publics” and their interconnected histories, geographies, economics, ecosystems, etc., and the difficulties and possibilities they create for researchers, art historians, artists and institutions—what methodologies they demand or suggest. 

At some point early on, we were thinking it could be productive to constellate ruru with other different but comparable initiatives in the region, to look at all of them together, which might have worked to “decentralize” ruru and foreground a regional narrative—this is an approach of some earlier books in the series. But for this book, we took up a different challenge in trying to develop a kind of “institutional history” of ruru with the idea that perhaps a method would develop that could then offer an approach for other kinds of institutions, whether quite similar to or very different from ruru.

WC: Contributions to the last chapter of the book, namely Enin Supriyanto’s interview write-up and Nuraini Juliastuti’s essay on jamming, offer a long view on sustainable collective practices shaped by the sociopolitical climate in Indonesia and globally since the 1970s.¹ We hope that people who care about ruru—and ruru themselves—will be informed by these perspectives. In addition, Melani Budianta’s research on ruru’s economic models from 2000 illustrates how ‘centrality’ could be a myth.² I’d like to believe that our writers have introduced some new focal points.

There are things that repeatedly emerged that we just picked up on. For example, people will say, “Oh, ruru is a boys club!” So Arianna and I would debrief and ask what they really mean? People would say, “Oh, ruru, they were a product of Jakarta.” When you hear this more than two times, three times, four times, you start to build a vocabulary about how to describe ruru and the narratives that counter these descriptions. Somehow, along the way, we also identified the writers that we wanted to commission to talk about these things. I think what is quite interesting about the ruru book is that the commissioning or the identification of the writers or artists happened throughout the entire process—rather than at the start of the actual research. It doesn’t matter how many books we have put together before. No formula applied neatly to ruru. Everyone—scholars, artists, ourselves—were learning. Our team learned by doing.

CQJr: How did you engage with the scope and address of ruru’s practice? I am imagining that looking at ruru’s practice would necessitate looking at it in relation to various coordinates and geographies and publics and ecologies and addresses: “Indonesian,” “Southeast Asian,” “Asian,” “global contemporary,” and so on. How did you deal with this editorially? 

DM: I remember being very struck by how it was almost like there were at least two versions of ruru in circulation. Or, there were two in particular that we were thinking about from early on. What have they meant to people locally in their immediate context? And what have they meant to their wider publics, beyond Jakarta, beyond Indonesia? We were thinking about how to “translate” in both directions—people locally knew one side of the story, and people outside Indonesia (or even, outside their local Jakarta neighborhood) would know another. It’s a story that has many sides, but these are two parts of it we tried to bring together. They have such a presence internationally, such a currency, and it’s not really my sense that they’re much more concerned with that than with building their local infrastructure, with thinking about the next generation—you know, they’re very committed to that. I think that to some extent, there’s a calculation of using the international footprint as a way to consolidate the projects they have in and across Indonesia.

AM: It’s hard to specify the who’s of ruru’s address, because on the one hand, Jakarta (and Indonesia as a whole) is a really important part of the work that they do—on-the-ground and as material. But I do think that in extending their networks internationally, they give people different understandings of how to work, the ways in which you can work equitably or do things with your friends and  build something together.

In the process of doing research for the book and commissioning writers, I personally felt that the idea of placing ruru within conventional narratives of “Southeast Asian art” seemed less and less appropriate—or necessary. When we visited Jakarta, the impact of ruru in the building of arts infrastructure felt very clear and palpable. Their documents, archives, and personalities have a somewhat mischievous nature, but in speaking to ruru and their collaborators, it was really interesting to hear about their efforts to build projects outside of Java, about how important upskilling is and how they engage with students and practitioners outside art fields. All of these plans and ideas are not very known or talked about in the realm of “global contemporary art,” partly due to language barriers, but perhaps also due to conceptions of what a “global contemporary art practice” might look like. We hoped through the book to be able to communicate the breadth of their practice and how it escapes these labels.

CQJr: Lastly, in terms of the category of the series Exhibition Histories: How do you make sense of ruru’s inclusion in this series? Did you see it as a case study that extends the categories of the “exhibition” and its “histories”? Is it a critique and maybe a move toward doing away with this framework? What were the kinds of conversations that you were having in relation to Exhibition Histories as a discursive formation and the book’s entry to the series?

WC: I think in terms of the series, from the book FESTAC ’77: The 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (published by Chimurenga and Afterall Books, in association with Asia Art Archive, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and RAW Material Company, 2019) onward, the Exhibition Histories framing is already not containable. Because the FESTAC book was already blurring what is actual historical material and what are new commissions. Visually they are treated pretty much the same, which means that the chronology is very blurry for a book on exhibition history. 

If the ruru book is not part of Exhibition Histories, if it were placed in a bookshop, it would be grouped under something like relational intelligence instead of exhibition histories.

DM: We were also looking back to Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98 (published by Afterall Books in association with Asia Art Archive and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2018), which was already starting to rethink the parameters of “exhibition history” in a comparable way. I think we’ve kept that descriptor even though in practice it’s become pretty expansive. FESTAC and Chimurenga were so amazing. It was a massive learning on my part—and on all our parts—in terms of how to take a very different approach to historical research and publishing. 

FESTAC was a massive Pan-African festival that contained exhibitions as part of it. It was important to think about the whole thing and that’s where the focus must be. You miss a lot if you’re just talking about one of the exhibitions that were part of it. (They had a lot of really interesting exhibitions as well as the expansive presentation of artistic work from across the continent and diaspora there were dedicated exhibitions on contemporary Nigerian art; African architectural technology; Pan-African books, fashion, science, plus film and performance programmes, a huge conference . . . and still more!)

The way that “exhibition” was always understood by us is as a point where art meets a public, where it becomes a collective activity. With ruru, the idea of “art” is put into question—and while the “exhibition” is not where they’re coming from either, it’s still about practices of coming together.

I think there’s something to be said for the analytic—there’s something that it does when you put it in a framework of exhibition history that is, to me, still productive. 

For one thing, it helps with people who are more invested in the exhibition as form, allowing them to reconsider their assumptions. In the part of the world where we live and work, there are more parts of the art ecosystem that are more invested in a certain idea of exhibition’s white-cube lineage. There’s a certain strategic value to saying, “Well, this practice has equal, and in my view, much more relevance. And if you want to talk about the history of exhibitions, we need to talk about this.” And perhaps the more things you put in this “box” of exhibition history that don’t look like that, the more stretchy and expansive the term can become. It allows a bit more openness to thinking about “exhibition” and “history,” both of which are, in the case of ruru, tricky terms.

The post Tricky Terms, Coming Together: Arianna Mercado, David Morris, and Wing Chan and Carlos Quijon, Jr. in Conversation appeared first on post.

Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar: I think we need to think a little more carefully about what we call “our inheritance.” What you think is yours may not actually be yours in the way you imagine. I am not saying you do not have a right to access it, but you have to think about how and why and where you are using it. The culture I want to be part of, the culture I want to help create, is shaped by artists from oppressed castes, from Adivasi and Indigenous lineages.¹ But being an artist from an oppressed caste in South Asia is not new. These are communities that have produced culture and developed visual traditions for centuries. Traditionally, we were the artists. We were the ones creating looms and weaves and pottery.

What the Western world now calls “craft” and what it sometimes demeans as “craft”—all of it was developed by those who belonged to oppressed castes, not by those from oppressor castes. So when I see people casually referencing certain patterns or weaves—as if it is simply, “I’m South Asian, I’m Indian, this exists in my work”—that is not how that works. That is not how those loom and weaving codes came to be. Those codes were developed in very specific political, social, and historical contexts.

So we have to think about what that canon really is. And we have to think about it very intentionally. I am not the first person saying this. Many artists, like me, talk about how the entire cultural, political, and visual culture of South Asia comes from communities that belong to oppressed castes. Yet in the larger art world, South Asian art is often represented only by those from oppressor castes. And that is deeply warped. It smells a bit of appropriation to be honest.

MV: This way of very intentionally thinking about inheritance has shaped how you work with material history, especially your Dalit Panthers Archive. You’ve often described yourself as an “accidental archivist.” Can you explain what the Dalit Panthers Archive is and what it meant to take on that work? 

SNS: The Dalit Panthers Archive grew out of very practical circumstances. A few friends and I were researching a documentary on the Dalit Panthers, and we kept running into the same problem: There simply wasn’t enough accessible material.² There were very few photographs, very little visual documentation, and that made it difficult to work on the project as nonfiction. As we continued researching, we realized that much of the Panthers’ history was being held privately. People had posters, pamphlets, and publications in their homes, but they were often in very fragile condition. We began scanning and recording these materials initially as part of the research process, but it quickly became clear that this work needed to be done more deliberately.

One thing that’s important to understand about the Dalit Panthers is that they were not visual artists or performers. They were writers and poets deeply involved in radical literary movements in Maharashtra at the time. The movement existed largely through poetry, writing, and publication. So we focused very specifically on that print culture: manifestos (fig. 1), book covers, little magazine publications, and writing by or featuring Panther poets and writers.³

After that, I spent months editing hundreds of images one by one, cleaning them up, and assembling them into readable PDFs. But almost all of this material was in Marathi, and I was extremely dissatisfied with displaying or circulating it without translation—especially outside of Maharashtra. When people can’t read the text, engagement stops. It becomes a visual reference rather than an encounter with the writing itself or the image and text in tandem.

That’s when translation became central to the archive. I applied for funding through the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation so that the work could be translated, edited, and interpreted. Because this writing is rooted in a very specific time and place, translation required more than just linguistic accuracy. It meant understanding slang, cultural references, and historical context that doesn’t immediately carry across generations. In that sense, translation became part of the archival labor itself.

MV: As you were working through this material, was there a particular publication or person that you found yourself returning to?

SNS: Through this process, I ended up getting extremely close to Raja Dhale’s work.⁴ Not in the sense of speaking to him, unfortunately, because he passed away around the same time I was working on the translations. We had spoken earlier, during the documentary interviews, but not during the translation phase of the research—as I really wish we had.

Because once I started reading everything he had written—slowly, carefully—I understood him very differently. What became clear to me was how urgent his relationship to language was. He was thinking constantly about how we speak, how we write, how we publish, because he was deeply concerned with being misunderstood. He wanted language to be sharp, so that what was being said could not be easily distorted. I relate to that very strongly.

One publication that stayed with me was Chakravarty, a literary daily he published for fourteen days straight (fig. 2). That in itself is kind of insane! It was not about current affairs; it was only literature, only radical writing. And he did everything himself. What struck me about the text was that it was not dry or heavy. It was funny. It had a real sense of humor. There were fake obituaries, satire, moments of play. That combination of rigor and humor felt very important.

Working with Chakravarty also raised questions for me about form. I spoke to one of the artists whose work appeared in the publication, and he told me that the images often had nothing to do with the text. Dhale would simply say he liked the work and include it. The image did not illustrate the writing, and that separation was interesting to me. The publication itself became the work. And spending time with that material made me think much more seriously about skill, rigor, and intention in political practice. It challenged the idea that it is enough to just have something to say. The Panthers, and Dhale especially, were extremely precise about how they said it.

MV: What I find especially compelling in your work is how you move between very specific materials, like Dhale’s Chakravarty, and much wider cultural inheritances in India. How do you understand the Panthers’ place within older lineages, particularly Buddhist histories in Maharashtra?

SNS: When I think about my own lineages, the Panthers are a very direct influence, but they are only one part of a much larger anti-caste movement. And that movement comes from Buddhist cultures as well. Growing up in Bombay, a huge part of my childhood was having access to the Kanheri Caves (fig. 4). My mother used to take us every year during the monsoon. We would trek up and spend time in these over-2,000-year-old caves with extraordinary carvings and sculptures. These were not just monuments, but also Buddhist learning centers, places where people lived, studied, and created. Being in those spaces makes you think about what Mumbai once was—green, swampy islands where philosophers, artists, and writers lived. That is a very real cultural lineage for me.

At the same time, you become very aware of how quickly these histories get absorbed into Brahminical narratives. These sites are constantly being reinterpreted as something else, often as places where the Pandavas rested, when they were clearly Buddhist spaces of learning.⁵

More recently, I was at the Elephanta Caves, and I was struck by how aggressively Buddhist history is being suppressed.⁶ The site has a layered history, but what is happening now is not about complexity. On the plaques, they avoid even using the word Buddhist. Things are described as stylistically Buddhist, not as what they actually are. There is a very clear erasure of Buddhist and Jain traditions happening. Parts of the caves that are visibly Buddhist are left to crumble and remain closed, while other narratives are foregrounded. 

MV: What does witnessing that erasure demand of you as an artist working with history?

SNS: I think about this a lot in relation to my position as an “accidental archivist.” I am not a historian or an archaeologist, but rather an artist working with history, I know that symbols matter. It becomes important to use them deliberately and clearly. This is not only about Buddhism as a religion of liberation for my community. It is also about recognizing traditions in South Asia that existed in opposition to Vedic culture. For me, engaging these older inheritances is part of the same work as engaging the Panthers. It is about insisting on histories that are foundational but repeatedly pushed aside.

MV: When you work within these older inheritances and the Panthers’ print culture, you are encountering symbols that already carry enormous political weight. I’m thinking of the panther in particular, a symbol shaped by a long history of Black civil rights struggles in the United States. How does this image surface in your work?

Being a Panther was something that people took on very passionately and very immediately. We adopted it because the panther is such a powerful-looking animal. It’s strong; it’s striking. Even now, I have a panther tattoo. That image resonated very deeply with people. I think it also stood in opposition to other symbols at the time, like the Shiv Sena tiger.⁷

I was thinking through this symbol while working on an illustration based on the 2022 film Jhund (fig. 5).⁸ I represented one of the characters with a whole world operating around her, and from those details you can tell so much about her life. At the same time, she’s still the focus: She carries a sense of ambition and aspiration, and she’s also holding something of the “learned culture” that comes from expressing yourself through fashion or hair. We never see her like this in the film, but this is the version of her that has existed in my mind.

She is wearing a leopard print in the illustration, which is very intentional. It could easily look like a Western fashion reference, but for me it comes from somewhere very local. It’s inspired by Namdeo Dhasal, a leader and poet in the Dalit Panthers. He was known for his flamboyance, for wearing wild, printed kurtas. I’m not saying the girl is a “panther” or that the Panthers are the main point of the image. It’s more that their presence exists as a backdrop that she can stand confidently against. So even when a pattern or an emblem looks global, the reference is very local, very specific. It’s Dhasal. It’s the Panthers. And this is true across my portraits right now.

In one of my portraits in [the series] Educate, for example, I made a self-portrait about my early education at home (fig. 6). In almost every childhood photo of me, there’s a book—or I’m scribbling on the wall. Those scribbles aren’t imagined. My parents let me practice writing the alphabet directly on the walls. They encouraged that kind of learning. That portrait is about education in the home and how formative it was. From it, I made a ceramic chalk box with a panther on top as a companion object (fig. 7). When I started looking up references, I realized there’s a very popular Indian brand called Panther Chalks. It’s completely ordinary, mass-produced. So, I thought, I’m going to use it. I’m going to take this panther and make it mine.

MV: In works like Panther Chalks, you’re clearly engaging the panther as a symbol, but not by reproducing the Black Panther image directly. Instead, you draw from the Indian leopard. Where does that image enter your thinking?

SNS: Yes. The specific panther I’m referencing was made by Subash Awachat, for a cover of Manohar Magazine (fig. 8). It wasn’t published by the Panthers themselves. It comes from a lineage of progressive print culture in Pune. The artist was representing the Indian panther, the leopard. I really loved that, because that’s also how I like to approach the Panthers. I don’t use the Black Panther panther in my work. I don’t think I ever have. That is not the panther I’m speaking through. It has its own legacy and its own history, and there was a reason the Dalit Panthers used that symbol in the 1970s. But now, from this moment and place, I use the Indian leopard. And even within the movement at the time, people were trying to visualize an Indian connection.

MV: It’s interesting because you’re creating new connections and lineages for this symbol. Now that you’re also working in the United States around the other lineage of the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement, has the panther taken on new meaning for you?

SNS: I’ll be honest: I don’t force myself to go looking for it. If something comes up naturally, I follow it. I had an opportunity in Chicago—a print workshop paired with a talk on the Dalit Panther Archive—at an event called “From Panther to Panther.”⁹ People who had engaged with both movements were there, and I met some former Black Panthers. That experience felt like being at home. But I don’t want to seek things out in a way that feels imposed on me. I also don’t want to exoticize Black history or Black political struggle by chasing after parallels. I do seek connections, but only when they’re organic. And there hasn’t been enough time for me here to explore that [connection] deeply. I also don’t want to replicate the dynamic of some white visitors in India who arrive and say, “Tell us everything.” I don’t want to replicate that here by demanding access to Black histories. If I was a tourist, I might spend all day in museums and archives. But when you live somewhere, you need to find your place in the culture instead of declaring, “I’m here now; love me.”

It would be a disservice to both communities and both political movements to place them side by side as if they’re the same. The contexts are entirely different, including [with regard to] the role of women in each movement. And while I feel deep solidarity with African American, Caribbean, and Indigenous communities here, I don’t want to impose that solidarity. It’s like any relationship: It has to be reciprocal. You can’t force it. It has to have time and space to emerge. That’s why I haven’t rushed to draw strict parallels. But when genuine connection happens—when I tell someone here about the Dalit Panthers, and they feel an immediate kinship—it’s beautiful. It feels like meeting someone from home, even though they belong to a different history.

MV: That’s why I find the leopard illustration so compelling. It’s not about superimposing one history onto another; it’s about finding forms of solidarity that grow from where you’re rooted.

SNS: The main reason that the leopard resonates so much with me is its relationship to Bombay. Its life inside that city, with its shrinking habitat and environmental pressures—that context matters. When the Black Panthers chose the black panther, there was intention: The animal’s sleekness, its quiet strategy, its defensive intelligence. If you look at the Indian leopard through the lens of Bombay, its survival carries a different meaning: Its connection to the land, to Indigenous communities, to environmental neglect, to the fact that leopards are often sighted near the Kanheri Caves—all of that is present. So when I use the leopard, I’m thinking very specifically about the leopard of Bombay, the context of the Dalit Panthers, and what it means that we come from the same place as this animal. That authenticity, that rootedness, is at the core of how a culture becomes deep enough that it can’t be erased. The Dalit Panthers as an organization didn’t last long, but the culture [that its members] generated runs deep. The same is true of the Black Panthers. The culture they built endures through the imagination of Black women, community programs, healthcare initiatives, the Free Breakfast for Children Program, etc. These are the things that sustain a movement, and they’re also what sustains culture.

It’s the same with art. The same energies that sustain political movements sustain visual culture. So the work has to keep reactivating itself. As an artist, I have to stay tuned to that. I don’t want the work or the culture we’re building together to be something that can easily disappear. There are always people ready to erase it the second they get a chance. I don’t want that chance to exist, and I want my art to offer a mutual sustaining, a feeding of each other.

The post “It’s not about superimposing one history onto another; it’s about finding forms of solidarity that grow from where you’re rooted.”: Maya Varma in Conversation with Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar; Part II appeared first on post.

In looking at photographs of live models, plaster casts of Greek sculptures, and students on the website (figs. 1a and 1b) of the Sir J. J. School of Art (JJ) in Bombay (present-day Mumbai), one notices how the condition of the body and labor in relation to art is a haunting presence in 20th-century photography. Shot between the 1930s and 1990s by three notable photographers—Homai Vyarawalla (1913–2012), Foy Nissen (1931–2018), and Raghubir Singh (1942–1999)—the photographs I’ve chosen to highlight in this essay articulate the interface of art and labor over a long and unwieldy terrain.¹ I also analyze how these images capture the unstable status of student artists and its correspondence to the precarious trajectory of JJ.

This essay marks four phases in twentieth-century Bombay. It touches upon the nationalist heyday of the late colonial period, coinciding with the interwar years and the eventual onset of deindustrialization in the postcolonial city as evidenced by the Great Textile Mill Strike (1982–83). In doing so, it delineates the popularity of the Shiv Sena, the ethno-regionalist, right-wing-organization-turned-political party, from the 1960s to the ushering in of neoliberal reforms and state-sponsored violence in the early 1990s. The photographs discussed showcase the distressing circumstances of the city’s working poor as they came knocking on the doors of the art school. They represent a departure from prior illustrative studies, many of which depict the laborer as inseparable from their craft. These earlier visual renderings not only are rigid caste-based occupational studies, but also commodify and group people and goods for the colonial economy.² While the unnamed subjects of these types of images are categorized as “Santal Mother, Girl, or Man,” “Fishwomen [sic] of Bombay” (the native Koli community), or “Palanquin Bearers, Bombay” (who were mainly Dalit Mahars), the bourgeois photographers who took them are identified and thus accorded authorship (figs. 2 and 3).³

In the 20th century, as live models at JJ were placed in conversation with plaster casts of Greek sculptures, the worn human forms of the models underscored the stark valorization of art over labor. The photographs that capture this dichotomy evoke the continued incongruence between outmoded colonial art instruction and the parlous position of both fine artists and laborers at JJ and beyond.⁴ While nationalist sentiment swept through many aspects of life in the 1930s, the influx of Eurocentric methods extended unevenly to the temporary hiring of live models to proclaim an “authentic” Indian art. These live art sessions disembodied the model by decontextualizing and romanticizing the absented adivasi (tribal) figure or pious, religious woman as the symbolic native type, untainted by the trappings of colonial modernity (figs. 4 and 5).⁵ Anonymized men and women assembled as native types bore witness to the canonization of carving, painting, etching, and setting in stone—that is, to the colonial practice of classifying and essentializing select communities.⁶ While live models and art students were interminably devalued and alienated during deindustrialization, some of them, as seen in photographs by Vyarawalla and Singh, resisted being cast as the marginal figure by returning the subaltern gaze.

JJ was established in 1857 by cotton and opium merchant Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (1783–1859) to provide relief to and upskill displaced migrant workers in what was a ruthlessly competitive colonial market. However, it eventually cultivated only a preferential, cultured class.⁷ On the one hand, though JJ facilitated commissions for artists to design sculptural forms in city structures, a detachment from and dismissal of Indian artistry steadily grew among the Indian art circuit in the late 19th century for various reasons, including the difficulty in cultivating a sustained patronage.⁸ As artisan and agrarian populations were compelled to migrate in large numbers to Bombay and engage in laborious work in textile mills, construction, shipping, and other manufacturing industries, their lives were upended on an unprecedented scale by colonial expansion.⁹ On the other hand, while opportunities may have been available to some prospective students to apply to JJ, many of those gaining acceptance fell by the wayside as they faced extraordinary difficulties there, with only a handful later succeeding as fine artists.¹⁰ However, with concerted endeavors over time, JJ’s reputation improved, and students from other regions were able to avail of dedicated scholarships and thus to enroll.¹¹

JJ was premised on the bourgeois, individualistic apprenticeship structure that developed in response to industrialization in England and Europe from the mid-19th century onward. As with other colonial art schools in India, JJ exacerbated a sharp divide between traditional, familial, and community-based workshops and the colonial education system, which mandated English as the language of instruction with prerequisite training in geometry and arithmetic at the admissions stage.¹² These “reformist” requirements, along with education fees, systematically disqualified and disbarred poor and lower-caste artisans, thereby separating the field of craft from that of art. Even though craftspeople were considered important practitioners and knowledge-makers, they were viewed as mere copyists and only brought to art schools to exhibit their artistry and wares and assist students (fig. 6).¹³ Subsequently, an exclusive echelon of elite, upper-caste “gentleman” artists burgeoned as “intellectual tastemakers” at the colossal expense of artisans.¹⁴ Despite preliminary efforts to integrate them into the student body, artisans were apprehensive about foregoing their more dependable, albeit paltry agricultural earnings for non-remunerative education.¹⁵ Over time, their absence was transferred, disincarnated, and disseminated by illustrated publications circulated at JJ.¹⁶ Hence, in the photographs taken at JJ by Vyarawalla, Nissen, and Singh, displaced migrant workers make spectral appearances as live objects in art education.

Colonial art schools promoted scientific drawing via human anatomy lessons, and for this purpose, plaster casts of Greek sculptures were favored over live models.¹⁷ In the late 1930s, JJ student and photographer Vyarawalla pictured her contemporaries Rehana Mogul and Mani Turner creating a sculpture exemplifying such principles, including clarity of view and precision of measurement (fig. 7). In this striking photograph, Turner (on the far right), bends forward with calipers in hand to ascertain the proportion of her subject’s upper leg. His waist is also cinched with a measuring tape. For Vyarawalla and her classmates, who came from a host of backgrounds, JJ was extolled as an artistic abode for experimentation in photography and freedom for women.¹⁸ It was also projected as the ground for the reinvention of Indian artists, including women, at a time of soaring nationalism in late colonial Bombay.¹⁹ As a female photographer and student, Vyarawalla cancels the male gaze and gives space to her female subjects, downgrading the male model’s status and labor. 

Returning to the photograph, Mogul looks up, decidedly satisfied with her sculpture of the live, male model. While the work is not life-size, it is strategically located within the composition and thereby rendered the tallest figure. Thus, it is given prominence and a larger-than-life stature in the high-ceilinged JJ studio. Just as he posed for hours for the sculpting session, the model was forced to stand still as a photographed subject; nonetheless, he looks straight at the camera, holding our gaze.²⁰

The live model enacts the queries of renowned British industrial design educator Henry Cole (1808–1882). After the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, a world’s fair that heralded the colonial empire as the global pioneer in processing and harboring goods from around the world, Cole interrogated the worth of artisans. He questioned whether artisans should be expected to function as automated machines as per their employers’ demands, whether the commercial aspect of their labor could be compromised for skilled creations, and whether manufacturers recognized this and, moreover, were willing to invest money in educating artisans in order to foster a more skilled labor force.²¹ In figure 7, however, there is a split—the live model, who is no longer an artisan and thus deterritorialized, is at the service of Vyarawalla, Mogul, and Turner’s education. Yet, he does not entirely subdue himself to the machinery of sculpture-making and photography.

Vyarawalla directs a twofold production in which the live model has been relegated to a specimen, while Mogul and Turner are enhanced as artists. The deskilled laborer is utilized as raw material for a sculpture and thereby demarcated from the artists, who pay him no heed. Thus, a neat and graded symmetry unravels itself. While both Mogul and the sculpture as a finished product occupy the foreground, the model and Turner are arranged in the background to demonstrate various stages of sculpting. The two female sculptors are on either side, absorbed and tending to their respective props, one artificial but more exalted than the human male model. 

The model is not lionized like a permanent fixture of JJ, such as the plaster casts of Greek sculptures or the students’ sculpted figurines, but instead beckoned to JJ whenever there is a need for his muted and sampled presence. He represents an eerie and curious amalgam of the “native type” and the Greek ideal but still stands out.²² His look, which evinces personhood and a cynical consciousness, defies and pierces the composition, as he does not conform to an anonymized live model. ²³ His gritty stare reflects the long-standing labor networks of caste, kinship, and village through which single male workers, like him, navigated the workplace and neighborhood in a fluctuating economy.²⁴ In this regard, the long stick that he holds—archetypal of idealized “native type” imagery—comes into view in figure 8.²⁵ The man’s encounter at JJ underpins the grave situation of “mobile incarceration,” whereby badli (temporary) workers would have been picked from designated spots in the city and brought to the school to earn an income.²⁶

A formalist and painterly rendition of a sketching session attended by mostly male students, with a few female students scattered across the class, is framed by Vyarawalla in figure 9.²⁷ In this image, a sari-clad woman seated on a raised platform encircled by the students models with her hands clasped on her lap and her body on silent display. Though this is the only photograph of a live, clothed female model discussed here, women often modeled nude at JJ.²⁸

The Postcolonial Moment

Forty years later, three male students engrave busts modeled after a middle-aged man sitting slouched on a raised platform (fig. 10), a scene captured by Foy Nissen, the prolific photographer, writer, and amateur historian of Bombay who was of Danish origin. This oblique composition captures the static disembodiment of the alienated model, who stares vacantly into a clutter of half-open and half-closed window shutters.²⁹ An unaligned and haphazard path of abject unemployment and deindustrialization stretches out before the live model, whose corporeal presence is as bereft and hollow as the sculptures underway.³⁰ He ekes out a living as an expendable live model, a still life always in supply. At the same time, we can discern some changes in the student composition at JJ in the late 20th century.³¹

In 1955, steps were taken to make the art school more inclusive, with 5 percent of seats reserved for candidates from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds (“Backward Classes”) based on an entrance test.³² Following an arduous struggle by the diverse political base of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (Unification of Maharashtra Committee), the State of Maharashtra was formed along linguistic lines, with Bombay as its capital in 1960. However, from the late 1960s onward, the Shiv Sena’s regionalist but wide socioeconomic membership, goaded by its middle-class leadership and driven by increasing financial instability in Bombay, violently advocated for and took direct action to secure ethnicity-based job reservations for the local Marathi population.³³ Since 1970, JJ has instituted monthly scholarships and fee exemptions for students, thus attracting a broader pool of applicants.

However, in 1984, the year in which Nissen’s photograph was shot, Bombay was marked by two imbricated major events: The nationwide imposition of the Emergency (1975–77), when emergency powers were applied across the country, paved the way for the brutal sundering of robust labor politics and history in the city.³⁴ This was ramified by the Great Textile Mill Strike, which accelerated neoliberal reforms.³⁵ After this labor stoppage, mills in the city shuttered, driving more than a hundred thousand workers into casual, informal employment. In this atmosphere of economic uncertainty, scores of disenchanted Marathi workers were galvanized and girded by the right-wing, anti-migrant, and anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Shiv Sena.

Color and a Postmodern Critique 

The pall of deindustrialization hangs heavy in the downcast eyes and static body of the elderly live model captured by Raghubir Singh in figure 11.³⁶ A dire juncture at JJ is presented via this photograph of an emaciated, aging man who, seemingly diminished and disenfranchised, is clad in an oversized kurta, dhoti, and turban. His frail and bent frame is at odds with the plaster casts of classical, nude Greek male sculptures symbolizing Eurocentric ideals of the male form that surround him. Moreover, the color photograph offers an incisive reading of the problematic continuation of this “educational” tradition and artisanal and scholastic disempowerment at JJ well into the late 20th century.³⁷

Singh composed this aberrant scene to unsettle notions of colonial grandeur and to foreground its oppressive hangover in the lackluster confines of JJ. The ongoing, ill-fitting presence at JJ in 1991 of casts of Greek nude sculptures tells us of its unrelenting durée in the postcolonial city. Singh has orchestrated a disharmony between these two teaching aids—the live model, an “ethnographic type” (again holding a stick) of which he was critical, and Greek sculpture—and that of art students, who represent a third category. The students are not portrayed as dutifully immersed in a conventional classroom setting; instead, like the model, they stay on, compelled to “wait” and remain on-site.

The young male student pictured with slumped shoulders and his hands on his back evokes restlessness and unease. He is seemingly caught unawares, despite the reassuring hand of a friend on his shoulder. The intrusive photographer draws us in, setting up a trenchant triangular network of gazes as he inhabits the place of student-artist and intervenes as scathing outsider-spectator—in effect, creating a visual critique that extends beyond the male student in the photograph to encompass the general dissent among students and alumni regarding outmoded education at JJ, among other issues. He constructs a postmodern critique, arresting the apparent friction at JJ by transfixing the male student’s consternation and awkward stance within his own field of view.³⁸ Both the institution and its students faced numerous obstacles well into the 20th century—including the unaffordability of art materials, a dearth of faculty, low attendance, outdated teaching methods, a lack of residential facilities for students, and even an attempt to close the school.³⁹ The apparent wariness of the confounded student and the constrictive environment speak to the repeated demands of students and alumni to revise syllabi, upgrade infrastructure, and introduce English-language tutoring. In the course of time, some of these measures were undertaken.⁴⁰

The continued veneration and aegis of objects over labor at JJ tie together labor and education through the disparate gazes and positions held by the photographed subjects whom Vyarawalla, Nissen, and Singh capture and bring to our attention. Their photographs unfold the dynamics and impact of art education and labor beyond the precincts of the art school, highlighting the convergence of social inequities and the scarcity of resources.⁴¹ They infer a narrative of the reverberating consequences of colonial knowledge and the concomitant making and entrenching of hierarchies, in which the resources necessary for artmaking became privileged enclaves unto their own, with hardly any public or private intervention. The indigent labor of the city has continued to serve as live models well into the present day, as demonstrated by photographs on JJ’s website (figs. 1a and 1b).⁴² Disaggregated, disarmed, and appropriated by art schools, artmaking, and the accumulation of capital in the city at large, the below-minimum wages paid to said live models were recently upgraded.⁴³

The JJ studio portraits encapsulate interconnected points of disproportionate modernity in a city teetering on the precipice of chronic unrest. They are distinct traces enunciating the poignant state of affairs within the school’s lofty walls and sunlit, capacious interiors for live models and students. Though monumental scale allows for the bodily autonomy of labor and studenthood in Vyarawalla and Singh’s photos (figs. 7, 8, and 11), in figure 9, by Vyarawalla, they are dwarfed and made a diminutive spectacle of. The photos by Nissen and Singh (figs. 10 and 11) show a consistent decline in both sitters. Together, as apparitions, they carry the burden of coerced historical experience, enduring the industrial capital model upon leaving a stagnant rural economy. Thus, the drawn-out process of mill closures, the protracted affair of deterritorialization and depoliticization of the urban poor, and the hastening of liberalization and right-wing propaganda—enabled by the Emergency—were inextricably coterminous with the pedagogical inertia of JJ. ⁴⁴

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While Tibet has ceased to exist as an independent nation, Tibetan material heritage continues to be extensively circulated, collected, displayed, and interpreted in museums, the art market, and academia (fig. 1). Exhibitions of “Tibetan art” remain a regular occurrence in the exhibition circuit. Moreover, Tibetan objects are omnipresent in auctions of Asian art every season at all the major international auction houses and continue to fetch record prices in the global art market. This hypervisibility of Tibetan objects in museums and the market raises a fundamental question: Why is so much of Tibet’s material heritage circulating outside Tibet, displaced from its original place of worship and practice, and so far removed from Tibetans? This phenomenon is succinctly captured by Clare Harris, who notes, “The bulk of Tibet’s portable cultural heritage has been retained everywhere other than Tibet, and is now most readily at the disposal of everyone other than Tibetans.”⁵ Hence, further attention to the provenance of Tibetan collections dispersed across the world in public and private collections is warranted, particularly to assess the colonial entanglement of sacred Tibetan objects. 

The complex colonial entanglement of museum collections in the Global North has led to a growing body of scholarship suggesting that museums must engage with the communities to which these objects originally belonged as a form of symbolic reparation and restorative justice.⁶ This practice has been gaining recognition and momentum, with various attempts to “transform” the museum or, at the very least, alter the relationship between the museum and “communities of origin,” a move that has been deemed “one of the most important developments in the history of museums.”⁷ However, to this day, there is an acute absence of Tibetans in museums, whether as curators, interpreters, collaborators, or other agents in the construction of knowledge and representation or as members of the audience for museum displays.

“Doubly colonial” Tibet: An Inheritance of Loss

In her seminal text The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet (2012), Harris highlights that the hypervisibility of Tibetan objects is due to the extensive scale of displacement of Tibetan heritage from the Tibetan landscape and people through repeated waves of extraction of objects in a “doubly colonial” context, that of both British and Chinese looting in the twentieth century.⁸ She articulates that Tibet is a possibly unique example of being “doubly colonial” as before the People’s Republic of China assimilated Tibet, it witnessed a British colonialist intervention in the form of the Younghusband “Expedition” of 1903–4. These repeated waves of pillaging have physically deprived Tibet of significant quantities of its material heritage, which is now found primarily in Western or Chinese museums and private collections worldwide, not in Tibet itself.

The Younghusband Mission was a British military campaign sanctioned by Lord Curzon (1859–1952), who served as viceroy of India (1898–1905), due to rising anxieties over perceived Russian influence in Tibet. There was no intention to annex Tibet into the British Empire, but the aim was to force the Tibetans to end their suspected dealings with Russia and to establish a dominant British influence in Tibet, an agenda some have deemed “almost entirely bogus.”⁹ Strikingly, the Younghusband Mission was primarily a military campaign, deploying the latest technology available to the British at the time: four field guns firing shrapnel shells and two Maxim machine guns capable of firing 760 rounds per minute. To illustrate the scale of senseless violence and plunder that took place during this invasion, let’s revisit the infamous “Battle of Guru,” known among Tibetans as the “Massacre of Chumik Shenko” (fig. 2).

On March 31, 1904, the incursion of British forces was halted by Tibetan forces in the valley of Guru in southern Tibet. According to Tibetan sources, the British proposed that as a precondition for negotiations, all Tibetan soldiers must unload their weapons and extinguish the fuses of their muskets.¹⁰ While preparations for negotiations were taking place, British forces strategically positioned their machine guns on nearby hills and surrounded the Tibetan army from three directions. According to Tibetan government records, when the British opened fire, 523 Tibetans were killed and 300 more were wounded.¹¹ While there is debate about what started the skirmish, it is apparent that the British army used a strategic maneuver to outflank and “box in” the Tibetan army, attacking them from three sides and firing over 15,000 rounds of ammunition on retreating Tibetans.¹² British forces pursued Tibetans for 12 miles and continued to kill and maim them.¹³ After this massacre, many battle trophies were collected from the bodies of the dead or from surrendered Tibetan soldiers, including earrings, gau (box amulets), bandolier belts, weapons, and clothing.

After seizing key strategic positions in Tibet, such as the monastery-city of Gyantse, British officers committed what Patrick French has termed “casual robbery” in deserted monasteries or houses.¹⁴ What began as collecting battle trophies at Guru became frenzied looting among the ranks at every available opportunity, but the expedition later followed a formalized protocol to sift through the material, which would, in appearance, be “a more reputable form of collecting for intellectual pursuits.”¹⁵ According to Harris, the Younghusband Mission is significant because it created a desire and appetite for Tibetan objects in the market.¹⁶ Even before Younghusband’s military campaign reached its conclusion in Lhasa, a steady stream of looted Tibetan objects had been trickling into Great Britain, some of which fetched high prices at Christie’s auction house in London.¹⁷

The state-led destruction of Tibetan cultural heritage peaked later, during the Cultural Revolution (1967–77), when according to Tibetan sources, more than 6,000 Tibetan temples and monasteries were ransacked and partially or fully destroyed mainly by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).¹⁸ During this purge of Tibetan culture, sacred Buddhist sites such as the Jokhang temple in Lhasa were desecrated (fig. 3). This systematic desecration was through the destruction of venerated sacred images of Buddha, Bodhisattvas and protective spirits; the burning of precious manuscripts, manuscript printing blocks and thangka paintings as cooking fuel; and the turning of the area into a pig slaughterhouse and toilet by the PLA Garrison Command.¹⁹ Sam van Schaik notes this destruction was a “carefully planned operation” as each site was first inventoried, with “all precious stones and metal objects carefully labelled and prepared for transportation to Beijing.”²⁰ The desecration and destruction of the Jokhang temple are illustrative of what happened to many sacred temples and monasteries all over Tibet. 

In an overview of different case studies on plundered cultural properties for the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) publication Countering Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods: The Global Challenge of Protecting the World’s Heritage (2015), Sam Hardy argues that the loss and destruction of Tibetan heritage under the Chinese state was “incalculable both in terms of culture and in terms of sheer quantity.”²¹ For instance, in the 1990s, monasteries in Tibet were targeted by Chinese gangs who “killed monks in their violent attempts to remove statues from monasteries” so that they could profit from the appetite for Tibetan material heritage in the global art market.²²  In 2008, the Chinese police confiscated cultural assets from Tibetan communities as a punishment for the Tibetan uprising, and this was evidenced by a marked flow of Tibetan cultural material onto the antiquities market.²³

The destruction and dispossession of Tibetan material heritage has been acutely experienced by Tibetan refugees, who were forced to sell their material heirlooms to survive and sustain themselves. The exodus of refugees from Tibet in 1959 has only added further symbolic capital to Tibetan material culture.²⁴ Despite the mainstreaming of debates around decolonizing museums and restitution of looted heritage, the case of Tibet in museums has remained conspicuously absent from both postcolonial and decolonial discourse.²⁵ Tibetans remain completely marginalized within such museum agendas and discussions, giving rise to a paradox that while objects from Tibet are much desired and welcomed in museums, Tibetan people are not.²⁶ Thus, the fractures in the geopolitical and cultural identity of the Tibetan people are further amplified as they endure the loss not only of their land but also of their material heritage. 

Uncovering the “Debt of Truth” in Tibetan Collections

Among the vast Tibetan collections dispersed across museums and private collections in the United Kingdom lie the muted and suppressed histories of violence and plunder that took place during the Younghusband invasion of Tibet, often embedded in the object’s very materiality. This was particularly evidenced by a gau pierced by a bullet and now held in the Cheltenham Museum and Art Gallery in Gloucestershire, which Harris argues was collected as a battle trophy by the British army.²⁷ Another gau riddled with a bullet hole (fig. 4) was discovered in the collection of the National Museums Scotland.²⁸ The late historian of Tibetan art John Clarke highlights that for a gau to be effective, it must be in contact with the body.²⁹ For this reason, although we do not have Tibetan bodies to examine to uncover the violence that took place during Younghusband’s military campaign in Tibet, the gau becomes a proxy for Tibetan bodies and lives in material form. During my collections research at various museums in the United Kingdom, I have encountered a vast number of gau and even if only a minority of them were removed from the bodies of dead Tibetans, this still potentially represents hundreds of lost Tibetan lives (fig. 5).

This loss of life can be even more “explicitly” evidenced through Tibetan objects I encountered during my doctoral fieldwork that have spots of what could be blood. I observed such spots on two objects, both with a direct Younghusband provenance—a gau in the World Cultures collection of the National Museums Liverpool and a wicker shield from the British Museum.³⁰ The gau (fig. 6) houses a tsa-tsa (clay tablet) of Mahakala and a folded kha-btags (white silk scarf). The handwritten label reads, “Charm against bullet—taken from the body of a dead Tibetan at Dongste monastery by Major.”³¹ The label refers to a Geluk monastery at Drongtse (‘brong-rtse), near Gyantse, that was founded in 1442. On examining this gau, I observed a sizeable, red spot on the object’s textile amulet (srung-nga) component. I thought this stain was possibly blood due to the acquisition circumstances (it was taken from a dead Tibetan’s body) and the knowledge of how the amulet is traditionally worn across the body. I immediately requested testing, and the in-house investigation was conducted by senior organics conservator Tracey Seddon. Due to the museum’s hesitance to authorize destructive sampling, we discussed and explored alternative, nondestructive analytical procedures. However, such methods were inconclusive.³² Joanne Dyer and Diego Tamburini from the Department of Scientific Research at the British Museum also conducted noninvasive testing on the shield, with FORS (Fiber Optic Reflectance spectroscopy) as the only available in-house option (fig. 7). Preliminary tests on both objects were unable to conclusively scientifically verify the presence of blood, and multiple experts, including the team at the British Museum, concluded that the only viable route would be to conduct proteomics analysis (a cellular examination of proteins), which would require destructive sampling.³³

Even with the small sample size of the collections review during my doctoral research, I uncovered two objects of potential significance at the British Museum whose origins were inscribed on them—a kapala (fig. 8) and a helmet (fig. 9).³⁴  Both had been “collected” by Major H. A. Iggulden, a member of the Younghusband Mission. Upon examination, I observed that “Palkhor Chode” had been inscribed on the base of the kapala. This refers to Pelkhor Chode, an important monastic complex in Gyantse (located in the historical Tsang province of Tibet), which was attacked and occupied by the British in 1904.³⁵ I argue that this kapala was inscribed by the field “collector” to mark the origins of this battle trophy collected from Gyantse. The helmet revealed a Tibetan inscription rgyal-tse (Gyantse), which is accompanied by what appears to be the Tibetan numeral seven (༧). I believe that these objects were removed and taken from the Pelkhor Chode monastery (or Gyantse dzong) by Major Iggulden, but were transcribed by two different types of agents: Indigenous (Tibetan) and colonial (British). However, it is noteworthy that the museum recorded neither of these easily legible inscriptions, particularly considering they reveal direct provenance. These gaps in the museum database are not highlighted to criticize the specific institutions, as this is symptomatic of the broader sector, but rather to show how such gaps could become focal points for museums to coproduce knowledge with living members of the Tibetan community, rather than re-amplifying what was said or done by British officers. 

Considering the limitations in archival information (notably on early Tibetan collections), and more importantly, due to suppressed and silenced histories in the colonial archive, new modes of scientific inquiry on Tibetan objects could be deployed to uncover “truths” in the collection. Such inquiries can make the hidden violence of Tibetan objects explicit, which historian Achille Mbembe calls a “debt of truth” that museums should address.³⁶ This case study also highlights the inherent conflict between institutional guidelines that seek to preserve the physical integrity of objects and the necessity of conducting tests that generally require destructive sampling.³⁷ Reflecting on the histories of the museumification of Tibet’s material heritage, venerated Tibetan sacred images and objects (such as gau) have been emptied of their sacral contents (gzungs-gzhug) in the name of scientific inquiry and thangka paintings have been radically altered with their textile borders (gong-gsham) removed to elevate them as “fine art.”³⁸ Considering sacred Tibetan objects have been subjected to such forms of museal violence across different institutions, museums must reconsider and prioritize such modes of inquiry that would uncover the colonial violence that caused the object to be in the museum’s collection in the first place. 

Reanimating Tibet in the Museum

While Tibetans have had limited agency in how much of Tibet’s portable heritage was deposited in museums across the world through “doubly colonial” extractive regimes, it can be argued that the objects have only survived significant periods of destruction due to their “museumization.” However, as is apparent, there are substantial gaps in the knowledge and provenance around/of Tibetan collections across institutions. To address these gaps and offer an antidote to the dislocation and destruction of Tibetan cultural heritage, museums must engage with Tibetans and reconnect these objects to the community (fig. 10).³⁹ To begin addressing the colonial entanglement, these Tibetan collections could serve as focal points for long-term and sustainable engagement between museums and Tibetans. Besides tackling issues surrounding the lack of Tibetan agency and the acute absence of Tibetan voice(s) in museums, this could give rise to innovative approaches to creating new knowledge and working with Tibetan collections. However, Tibet’s complex and contested nature raises a foundational question: Who can represent Tibetan interests in museums and in the related “authorized heritage discourse”?⁴⁰

While working with communities has become increasingly mainstream across the museum and heritage sector in the United Kingdom (and beyond), prevailing practices and discourse primarily focus on the outputs of community engagement or collaboration. As noted by some scholars, there is a need to move beyond the prevalent “black box” approach to community engagement and pivot the focus from the products of consultation or collaboration to its underlying process and methodologies.⁴¹As museums become increasingly social spaces and undertake more extensive consultation and collaboration initiatives, divergent actors and groups will inevitably emerge to compete for the role of representing a “community of origin.” Hence, the museum will have to mediate between these competing groups and subsets of communities. Considering the cultural and geopolitical implications and shifting goalposts in ethics, community-oriented museum practices must be grounded in sustained research, methodology, and ethical and critical precision, particularly when the ownership of material heritage is contested and its provenance is complex. My work remains grounded in a simple idea—let’s not propose or conceive of solutions to problems we don’t fully understand, especially if the decisions are irreversible and permanent, such as restitution. Museums (and academics) could instead try to create conditions or spaces that allow communities to undertake “slow agentive decision-making” in choices concerning the future of their heritage accessioned in Western museums, which will have long-lasting impact and significance.⁴² In such slow, agentive processes, it can become more apparent how sub-state actors such as Indigenous/historically marginalized communities could assert agency in authorized heritage discourse currently dominated by (direct and indirect) state actors. It’s evident that the complex and contested case of Tibet in museums requires a nuanced research-led approach. Perhaps this is a true litmus test for the decolonial agendas of the museum and heritage sector?

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Since the 1950s, there has been an active production of experimental film, animation, and video art in Asia. Yet, much of this work has not been consistently conserved or shared with the public due to the lack of accessible archives or organized collections dedicated to its preservation and dissemination.

The conference “The Archival Impulse: Collecting and Conserving the Moving Image in Asia” took place on September 10, 2015 in the The Celeste Bartos Theater at the Museum of Modern Art. Co-organized by Asia Art Archive in America, Collaborative Cataloging Japan, and MoMA’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP), it brought together archiving initiatives that have emerged in recent years across Asia, presenting an opportunity to rethink and share methods, philosophies, and challenges to archiving moving image and time-based media works. The event is divided into three panels.

In the first panel Developing Collections, Hiroko Tasaka, Farah Wardani, Fang Lu, and moderator Stuart Comer introduce collection strategies and compare archiving techniques at their respective organizations in Japan, Singapore, China, and New York. Keeping in mind the different regional contexts, the panel will explore the following issues: What was the impetus behind the development of these collections? What are the urgencies to which these collections respond? How do these collections expand upon existing art historical narratives? Complicating these questions is the complex nature of moving image and media works, which often blurs the boundary between disciplines and requires ongoing reevaluation of the organizational categories within institutions. Hiroko Tasaka introduces the collecting practice at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, covering 19th century film and film production, film history of Japan and Asia, and international artists of today. Recognizing the discontinuities and missing links in the field of Southeast Asian art historiography, Farah Wardani discusses the collection strategies taken at the National Gallery Singapore Resource Centre, where she serves as Assistant Director. Fang Lu talks about how Video Bureau, an artist-run video archive founded in 2012, structures the archival process, and how this project is situated in the Chinese contemporary art world.

Archiving is never just about collecting and safeguarding materials; it is also about how to share and circulate these materials, and bring them into a rhizomatic network of knowledge. With the rise of digital modes of access, archiving initiatives are faced with a plentitude of possibilities, as well as new challenges, such as the privatization and commodification of information. In the second panel, Opening the Digital Vault, archivists Sen Uesaki, David Smith, Alf Chang, and moderator Ben Fino-Radin explore the transition from a static physical archive to a digital infrastructure that is open, nonlinear, web-like, and constantly evolving. They will also share their experience in emerging technologies, examining different ways to effectively digest, preserve, and distribute media works in the digital age. Taking a cue from the discussions on collecting practices in the first panel, Sen Uesaki reexamines the physical and digital natures of archival and artistic material by questioning its physical existence in the first place, exploring its function as information. David Smith discusses Asia Art Archive’s digital presence and the motivations behind its current restructuring efforts, looking at the relationship between the archivist, the collections, and the public. Alf Chang will introduce the history and archive of ETAT, an ongoing experiment started from 1995 to create an autonomous platform for sharing, interaction, and preservation.

In the third panel, Transforming Stories, Mariam Ghani, Go Hirasawa, Huang Chien-Hung, and moderator Jane DeBevoise discuss research projects that develop out of archival materials. Pointing to diverse sources of information, from personal archives to commercial and state-sponsored media production, these projects represent efforts to expand and add nuance to ways of thinking about history, politics, and collective memory. Mariam Ghani will present What we left unfinished, a long-term research, film, and dialogue project centered around five unfinished films commissioned, produced, and canceled by various iterations of the Afghan state. Go Hirasawa introduces his research, preservation, and curatorial projects focusing on two Japanese filmmakers—Masao Adachi and Motoharu Jonouchi—in order to examine how established narratives about certain works or artists may be reconsidered and reconstructed. Huang Chien-Hung presents Liu Asio’s documentary project that traces the life of an anti-communist hero, proposing a possibility to think of a topological Asia, an Asia not based on geography, nations, or races, but on interrelations between events, media, persons and the production of images.

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The Silvermans made their initial trip to Prague to meet Knížák and begin to consider works for their collection in the early 1980s. Their curator, Jon Hendricks, followed up with a visit in 1983 to continue the conversation with the artist and acquire additional works. Hendricks took particular interest in Knížák’s action-based work, including the collaborative pieces Knížák carried out with the group Aktualní Umeni (Contemporary Art, also known as Aktual Art or simply Aktual), which the artist had founded with Jan Mach, Vit Mach, Sonia Švecová, and Jan Trtílek in 1964 (another member, Robert Wittmann, would join the group in 1966). Most of these actions were documented only by the small circle of artists who witnessed or were involved in them. Hendricks and the Silvermans recognized the importance of this work and asked Knížák to compile his records of these activities, imagining the value such material might have for artists and scholars in the future.

The result is the Performance Files, assembled by Knížák between 1983 and August 1985, when the Silvermans acquired the documents. The files are an archive of Knížák’s individual and collaborative activities between 1962 and 1985. They comprise 101 envelopes, each of which is dedicated to a particular event, numbered with a stamp, and, in most cases, dated. Inside the envelopes, Knížák placed photographs—some vintage, some later prints—and/or written descriptions of the activities. The texts are photocopies; some made from original materials or manifestos dating from the time of the activities they describe, but most from later typescripts or handwritten accounts (many in English) that Knížák produced expressly for these files. The envelopes are currently kept in numbered manila folders housed in two archival file boxes.

Beyond serving as a unique public archive of little-known but highly significant works that otherwise might have been lost to history, the Performance Files can be seen as a work of art created from Knížák’s personal recollections and reflections on a period during which he worked both independently and as part of a group. Significantly, designations of individual and collaborative authorship do not appear in the files themselves.

The Performance Files came to MoMA in 2008 as part of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. Their processing and digitization was carried out by MoMA curators, cataloguers, and registrars. Special thanks go to Katherine Alcauskas, Sydney Briggs, Emily Edison, and to Peter Butler, who photographed each of the archive’s 800-plus items.

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Discussed here are the challenges of developing curatorial strategies that allow the performative nature of these works to play out and of providing access to the works while also caring for them and enabling their meaning to continue to provoke.

Read the short presentations and add your voice to the debate. What would you like to see happen with musical and Fluxus scores in the Silverman Collection?

Julia Pelta Feldman: Organic and Artificial Archives

These materials form a small part of the the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection. They are from a group of personal papers formerly belonging to Akiyama Kuniharu, musicologist, critic, composer, and one of the founders of the Jikken-Kobo (Experimental Workshop).

In archival work, we sometimes speak of two types of archival collections: organic and artificial. An organic collection is a group of documents that accumulates naturally from the activities of its creator—whether those are the personal papers of a scholar, like Akiyama, or a museum, like MoMA. An artificial collection, like the Silverman collection, is deliberately assembled and acquired piecemeal. It is curated, in a certain sense. As is often the case with artificial collections, the Silverman archive comprises organic collections that have been assembled—and sometimes mixed together—to create a whole.

While the distinction between these two sorts of archives sounds fairly straightforward, it can quickly become complicated. For one thing, the Silverman archive includes the organically produced records of its illustrious creator, Jon Hendricks. The many publications and exhibitions that he produced are a worthwhile research subject in their own right.

On top of that, the many smaller organic collections in the archive, such as the Akiyama material, have been organized and reorganized by their successive owners, and so the integrity of these original archival groupings has often been compromised. An “organic grouping” can consist of several boxes of eclectic materials or just two letters.

This gives some idea of the complexity of my task as the processing archivist for this collection. I am constantly weighing the identities of individual objects, within the contexts of their archival groupings, against the order created by Jon, whose goal as curator was to research and make clear the historical significance of these items.

Additionally, when discussing archival versus curatorial methodologies, I believe we are dealing with two different conceptions of what “context” means for an object.

There is the kind of context that exists in an essay or an exhibition: this could be described as historical context. When you place an object in a group of other objects in order to make an argument, you assign—you fix—a certain meaning to that object. Different exhibitions and essays may place the same object in different contexts, suggesting different meanings. In each context, that object is assigned a specific role by the curator or historian.

When archivists speak of context, they refer to the original group of materials of which a particular object is an inextricable part. This retention of what we call “original order” preserves the existing relationships and evidential significance that can be inferred from the context of the records. “Context” indicates something essential in the life of the object itself, not something imposed from the outside. This essential context is the stratum from which all other meanings arise. It allows infinite interpretations, exhibitions, essays, and discussions. But if the essential context of an object is either unknown or unheeded, those relationships—that context—is shattered. Some of its meanings are lost, and no matter how much historical context is heaped on top of that object, an essential part of its identity evaporates.

Michelle Elligott: Archival Systems and Absences

It’s very important not to impose “systems” on documents. When I speak of documents, I’m usually talking about unique, primary source materials: letters, business records, diaries, and photos. And certainly, within our archives, usually all these things are mixed together. Also with ephemera and posters, and sometimes published catalogues. But I’m not only looking at a collection of ephemera or invitations—the Museum Library has a great collection of artist files where people throughout time have collected things on various artists. Put them together in one file, and you have flat, egalitarian, one-after-another documents that are about artists, which is great. But in a way, that wouldn’t meet the criteria of an archive according to archival methodology. We talk all the time about how this collection is both a traditional archive and also an artificial collection; it is a meta-archive on top of multiple artificial collections.

Also, I liked Sen’s idea of “absences” in his project documentation. I wanted to think about that not only as it applies to documentation but also in terms of curatorial practice, because in presenting an exhibition, we are not simply trying to represent what is there. I think, with some frequency, that we try to represent what isn’t there.

I am thinking of two examples. One is the 1969 exhibition that we did at MoMA PS1. About five of the works we wanted to include could not be shown, so “curatorially” we found ways to represent that absence. In one case, we substituted a different work from a private collection, and then we had to explain why it was there. It was kind of a strange, bizarre thing to do. People may remark, “substitute one work for another?” but it is a way to deal with this idea of absence.

Secondly, when we weren’t able to show Joseph Beuys’s Sled, we commissioned a piece by a young artist, Stephanie Syjuco, who works using appropriation. She made a Joseph Beuys sled by borrowing all the individual elements of the piece from her friends and calling it Borrowed Beuys. In that way, she was referencing Beuys’s idea of social sculpture. It was a way to use curatorial methods to deal with absences.

And then, lastly, I loved how Sen showed me the flyer of the announcement card and film programs at Sogetsu Arts Center and how one has no inscription while another has an inscription, and how that changes the meaning of the work. With printed work, we often think that a multiple is always the same. We have a great example of that here at MoMA in the form of postcards that Jan Dibbets made for a performance he did. There are eleven of these Jan Dibbets postcards in the MoMA collection. Ten of them are in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books. One of them is in the Archives. There are at least two levels here that we can talk about: Is it art, or is it archive? Is it documentation, or is it conceptual work? But also, we can talk about what would change if you change the definition and change the location of the object.

As it turns out, to answer or not answer both of those questions, the ten copies that are in the curatorial department were never sent through the mail. So the artist actually doesn’t consider them the work of art. They were sort of a source material. The one that is in the Archives was actually sent by mail to MoMA curator Kynaston McShine and has the stamp of the postmark and the address label. When you talk to the artist, it’s only the ones that actually traveled through the mail that he considers a fully executed or fully achieved work of art. So that one is in the Archives. Then people could say, “Oh, if that is the only work of art, shouldn’t that be in the curatorial department?” But if you do that, right now in the Archives, it is with all of the other related materials. There was a whole interchange between Kynaston and the artist, and so you have that context. And you understand the relationship, which tells you more than just that postcard living in isolation ever could. Furthermore, you have all of Kynaston’s other papers, so you see how that can interplay when you talk about the hyperlinks out to the other artists, the other things he was interested in. Then, finally, Kynaston’s papers are within the greater aggregate of the MoMA Archives.

Gretchen Wagner: Curatorial Strategies of Absence and Repetition

Julia Feldman, Michelle Elligott, and I have been working together on the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection. In 2008, the initial acquisition was the shared responsibility of MoMA’s Library and Archives, the Department of Drawings, and the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, each of which practice their own distinct object designation and cataloging methodologies. While incidences of categorization would arise organically in the course of the life of the museum, the Silverman Collection has given us a chance to think analytically about some of these questions and, moreover, to work together for the first time to address whether we have a stance on some of these questions. Maybe we don’t need to. Perhaps things live just where they live, or maybe not.

We have been working together to identify where something will “sit”; that is the normal cliche that everyone uses, and we have come up with several different categories of things—and of course, all these items slide, as they are very slippery and fluid, nor do they always behave in the ways we want them to behave. For example, two “copies” of the same item: one has been sent or one has been postmarked, whereas one hasn’t, or one lived for twenty years in George Maciunas’s studio and another lived for twenty years with Willem de Ridder in Amsterdam. They are technically the same thing, but their differing contexts lend them different meanings. So those are contexts that we haven’t had the time to fully investigate yet, but that we have nonetheless tried to turn into categories.

Jon and I collaborated on an exhibition here at MoMA that presented the idea of Fluxus editions and the particular concept of the multiple art object conceived in this context: Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978. It was a very focused, small show with three rooms, but we tried to create a picture of what a Fluxus edition is in all its varied permutations and formats and in the implied interactivity of many of the objects. In that exhibition, to get at the character of Fluxus editions, something that was recognized or that became apparent was potential absence: “How do I articulate that someone could do something with this?” How someone could activate it, could handle it, could perform with Brecht’s score cards. Of how to make that full picture.

I still come back to the idea of the absence—of putting absence on display—because I was thinking about what gap could be filled. To articulate what it meant for George Maciunas to design some of the editions the way he did—to be very portable carriers for information, to be easily distributed, and to be something that is interactive—I turned to the idea of repetition and iteration. So that there was a way of showing things in multiple, in multiplicity, so that the visitors could potentially get the sense that there were many actions to be lived out through one object, because you could show different dimensions of it. We also invited artists in, once again, to bring the actual “practitioner” into the space and allow them to manipulate a single object in many different ways. For instance, two Fluxkits, each differing in content, were arranged by six artists (Dora Maurer, Shiomi Mieko, Allison Knowles, William Pope.L, Anna Ostoya, and Cory Arcangel) at different times during the exhibition, with each individual approaching the material from a distinct perspective. Conceivably, a visitor, on repeat visits, could encounter various aspects of the kits and discover that as collectively conceived objects, they embodied many differing approaches to the pursuit of experimental practices under the unifying umbrella of the Fluxus moniker. It was very important to me to demonstrate the many personalities of Fluxus, to complicate the established art historical interpretations of the moment. Reiteration allowed for the nuances and polyvocality of the Fluxus crowd to play themselves out. Those were the two things I wanted to bring forward: the ideas of absence and repetition as two factors to consider not only for display but also for establishing long-term institutional categorization, which, for better or worse, cannot be avoided within the context of an institution such as MoMA.

Read the contribution of Jon Hendricks, Consulting Curator of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection: Watch Out! All Is Not What It Seems to Be.

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I think that we are missing the art for the trees. Throwing things into preconceived categories obscures potential experience of art — understandings of art. “Archival” and “curatorial” might be better thought of as convenient holding bins — locations that can be fluid and shifting as we gain better understanding of artists’ intent, and as we disrobe accumulated prejudgment.

There is too much value judgment in cultural institutions, where medium is given weight — resulting in departments, which have served over the years as types of straightjackets: stuff not fitting into the “medium” brackets is shoved off to the “archive” or “library,” automatically delegating it to a “non-art” status. There were problems with this from the beginning, not just in the way things were treated (rubber-stamping Futurist manifestos, for instance) but also where and how things got presented to the public — generally in display cases, frequently overlapping items in casual ways. Archival materials were rarely presented matted or framed. In fact, recently, performance photographs, scores, and posters that I had gone to considerable effort and expense to mat and frame in order to present them to the public as works, which I think they are, were unframed and presented in much more casual groupings in new frames or frameless. The result, I suspect, was that the public viewed these materials differently.

Even in the “event” there is a presumption that all is seen, heard, felt. But this is not true.

The audience sees only fragments. Each brings his/her own pre-experience or knowledge to the “event.”

The “author”/performers don’t see the “play” — they are in it — so they, too, only see fragments.

The camera sees subjective bits, usually chosen by the photographer — frequently we later “see” the performance only through the photograph, an unspoken social contract.

The photograph becomes an inseparable part of the work/piece — and should be treated as part of the art. The score is a conceptual artwork.

A letter might be a letter, it might be a piece (see some by Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono, etc.). A letter might be a score (see George Maciunas re: Paik’s One for Violin, etc., Benjamin Patterson’s Paper Piece). A letter might be an action (see Tomas Schmidt’s Carbon Paper and Paper Inside, Ben Vautier’s Postman’s Choice, Ray Johnson’s “add to it and send it on,” or GAAG’s chain letter to free Angela Davis, for the NYCLU Judson Three Art Benefit [the winner got to start the chain].) Or a letter might just be a letter — information conveyed in writing that sheds light on something, but that is not the something.

Artists can be tricky and deceptive — watch out! It’s not all what it seems to be. Going forward, let’s not be caught in the trap of the past.

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