London, Asia, Art, Worlds conference: Circulation & Encounter

Hew Locke was born in Edinburgh, spent his formative years in Guyana before returning to the UK, eventually completing an MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1994. He has exhibited extensively internationally, and his work has been included in Prospect New Orleans Contemporary Art Biennial, New Orleans, LA, USA (2014) and Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art (2016). In 2010, Locke's work, Sikandar, was shortlisted for the Fourth Plinth, London and in 2015, he was commissioned to create The Jurors, a public artwork commemorating the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta, for which he was nominated for the 2016 Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture.

Locke’s work explores the languages of colonial and post-colonial power, how different cultures fashion their identities through visual symbols of authority, and how these representations are altered by the passage of time. Public statues, trophies, weaponry and the costumes and regalia of state are appropriated in his sculptures, wall-hangings, installations and photographs in a continued deconstruction of state powers and histories. He is known for his portraits of the British royal family and traditional symbols of imperial authority. He uses ships as images, objects and physical sites for artistic intervention, discovering in them a potent symbol as an instrument of control in warfare, trade and culture. He has also initiated a series of altered share certificates, now-obsolete documents referring to this same violent, turbulent history of colonial trade, ownership and power, as well as subtly referencing the contemporary art world’s participation in commodity culture.

Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, of which he was Chair from 2015 to 2021. He specializes in British art and art of the British Empire. Books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). He co-edited Frederic Leighton (1998); Colonialism and the Object (1998); Art and the British Empire (2007); Victorian Jamaica (2018) and On the Viewing Platform (2020). He was co-curator of American Sublime (Tate, 2002); Art and Emancipation in Jamaica (Yale, 2007); Before and After Modernism (2010); Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate, 2012); Pastures Green and Dark Satanic Mills (2015); Thomas Cole’s Journey (Metropolitan, 2018) Picturesque and Sublime (Catskill, 2018) and Radical Victorians (2019-22). He gave the Paul Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery, London, in 2019, on Global Landscape. He is currently completing a book Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock.

Michelle Wong is a PhD student in art history at the University of Hong Kong. From 2012–20 she was a researcher at Asia Art Archive, with a focus on Hong Kong art history and histories of exchange and circulation through exhibitions and periodicals. Her projects at AAA included the exhibition Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys at Tai Kwun Contemporary (2021), the Ha Bik Chuen Archive Project, and the Salima Hashmi Archive in Pakistan amongst others. She was Assistant Curator of 11th Edition of Gwangju Biennale (2016), and she independently runs the long term curatorial/collective project Sightlines with artist Wei Leng Tay. She was a 2019 Pernod Ricard fellow at Villa Vassilieff & Bétonsalon, Centre for Art and Research, Paris. In 2020, she developed a series of episodes around the deliberation of discursive justice with Lantian Xie and Kabelo Malatsie, as part of Afterglow, Yokohama Triennale 2020, artistically directed by Raqs Media Collective. Her writing has been published in Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 1945–1990 (2018), the journal Southeast of Now (2019), Oncurating and Ocula Magazine.

Sophia Balagamwala is a multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Karachi. Her practice explores the space where history meets nonsense, and questions how histories are written and disseminated. Her work verges on satire taking inspiration from museum building, archives, current politics, and children’s books. The context of her practice arises from the Indian subcontinent, and is concerned with a wider exploration of how national narratives are constructed.

Balagamwala has a BA from the University of Toronto and an MFA from Cornell University. She has previously worked as the Lead Curator of the National History Museum in Lahore, and is currently an advisor for the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, a non-profit which she has worked with for over 8 years. Recently Balagamwala founded Kurachee, a platform that facilitates animation, illustration and design collaborations and workshops. As a part of this project, she is curating a reading room at the COMO Museum, Lahore, to encourage research and create dialogue around local artist publications. She is an adjunct faculty member at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.