Monumental exhibition for UAL

by Hoang Quynh Nga

Expanding cross-cultural understanding of monuments has been at the top of the University of the Arts London's (UAL) agenda, after co-hosting a two-day international conference at the Innovation Gallery, Central Saint Martin’s College (CSM).

The conference gathered high-profile guest speakers from South Asia, Europe and North America from diverse areas such as anthropology, art history, media studies, architecture and contemporary art in a debate about the status and survival of key monuments in colonial and post-colonial South Asia.

All the presentations of the speakers focus on addressing three major questions on a local and global scale; what makes a monument, under what conditions does it endure and for whom, and how monuments have been reinvented and transformed for a succession of circumstances, changing audiences and diverse communities.

The British Academy, Nehru Centre and TrAIN (Research Centre for Transnational Art-Identity-Nation) also came together to help host the event.

Controversial thinkers

The conference has become a venue for academic experts, scholars, PhD students, controversial thinkers and individuals with a particular interest to explore the evolution of monuments.

Nika Grabar, a Slovenian architect/research, described what was presented to the conference as “the leap of interpretation.”

“This conference opens up many questions about re-contextualizing monuments and interpreting history in a broader context,” she explained.

Tapati Guhathakufa, professor in history at Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkatta, said: “This conference is very imperative, pragmatic, and relevant to what I am doing with a far greater emphasis on community meaning.”

Expanding the theme of Asia

The highlight of the conference was Dr. Clare Harris’s speech entitled The Potala Palace: Remembering to Forget in Contemporary Tibet.

She aims to “expand the whole theme of Asia.”

Clare Harris is a University Reader-Curator, teaching within the School of Anthropology, University of Oxford and Curator for Asian Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum. She is also the Tutorial Fellow in Anthropology at Magdalen College.

Dr. Harris spends much of her time researching the visual, material culture and modernity of Tibet.

She has been writing about Tibet over the course of 20 years.

Her passion stems from having worked in a Tibet refugee camp in India in 1989, which set the framework for her first book In the Image of Tibet published in 1999.

Asked about future projects, Dr. Harris said: “I’ve been working on a book called The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics and the Representation of Tibet that revolves around culture, contemporary art, and photography.”

This soon-to-be-published book is the brainchild after the culmination of years of painstaking research in Tibetan communities and experience of Tibetan material at the Museum.