Explorations in South and Southeast Asian photography: A roundtable discussion on three ongoing research projects
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Russell Square: College Buildings
- Room
- RG01
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
This roundtable discussion brings together three researchers who will share their insights into South and Southeast Asian photography through their current projects.
Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra DSG
Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra’s research is informed by her concept of “veins of influence”, tracing not simply an image or object, but the people, institutions, collections and journeys through which it acquires meaning. This approach underpins her 2023 monograph, Veins of Influence: Colonial Sri Lanka, (available at Hatchard’s and Daunt Books), which draws on more than 450 photographs from international collections. Her current interests extend to the dispersed photographic and material histories of Borneo and the ways colonial images can be re-examined through contemporary scholarship.
Conan Cheong
Conan Cheong’s doctoral project is a history of relations between people in Luang Prabang, Lao PDR, as mediated by photography and the camera. He draws from the over 35,000 photographs accumulated by monks now held in the Buddhist Archives of Luang Prabang, as well as on interviews and ethnographic observations of the communities centred on the archive conducted in 2024–25. He investigates how this close-knit Theravāda Buddhist Sangha (monastic community) incorporated photography into its quotidian existence over the course of the twentieth century, with nodes of convergence including monastic comportment, ritual practices like merit-making and transference, and doctrinal points like non-self (anatta) and impermanence (anicca).
Joshua Hoskin
Joshua Hoskin’s project grew out of a CO-OP internship where he investigated a box containing unidentified photographic portraits at the British Museum. Through his research he has now reliably attributed these 879 silver bromide prints of Cambodian dancers to Sir Gerald F. Kelly. They are currently part of the British Museum’s non-registered collection. This began a process of digital repatriation to Cambodia, with the hope that the archive will eventually constitute a vital resource for practitioners and scholars of Cambodian dance. In December of 2025, a workshop in Phnom Penh opened a dialogue on the future of the archive as a site of remembrance, resilience and reconstruction in the wake of twentieth century ruptures in practice and in memory. Connections were also made with family and former students of one of the pictured dancers, for whom the images represent relics of an ancestor and a teacher.
Registration
This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.
Organisers
This event is jointly organised by the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies and the School of Arts South and Southeast Asia Research Seminar.
Header image: Wedding of Amelia and Louis Pieris, Rajiyiriya Mansion, circe 1920
About the speakers
Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra DSG
Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra DSG is a cultural scholar, art historian, curator and author whose research explores colonial photography, visual archives and material culture across South and Southeast Asia, with a particular interest in Sri Lanka, Malaysia/ Borneo. A Research Associate at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), she is also among the first Adjunct Professors appointed to the Institute of Borneo Studies at UNIMAS, bringing an interdisciplinary perspective shaped by three decades of scholarship and curatorial practice. Ganendra has held academic and cultural appointments and advisory roles including, a former Visiting Fellowship at Oxford University, service on the Tate’s South Asia Acquisitions Committee and Advisory Board of Cambridge University’s Heong Gallery. Her work consistently connects archival research with curatorial practice and public engagement, bringing historical photographs and objects into wider conversations about memory, cultural heritage and the making of historical narratives.
Conan Cheong
Conan Cheong is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS University of London. His doctoral research investigates the photographic practices of Buddhist monks in Luang Prabang, Lao PDR, with a particular interest in modes of self-representation, portraiture, and memory-making. He is curatorial advisor for the Sathu Nyai Khamchan Museum in Luang Prabang. As Curator for the Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist collections of the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore from 2016-23, he organised special exhibitions such as Body and Spirit: The Human Body in Thought and Practice (2022-23).
Joshua Hoskin
Joshua Hoskin has recently completed an MA in History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS, University of London. His dissertation explored the production, collection and (re)appropriation of memory in a series of photographs of Cambodian dancers taken by Sir Gerald F. Kelly. During the second year of his part-time MA, Joshua took part in a collaborative internship between the British Museum and Circumambulating Objects: on Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art (CO-OP), during which he researched the history and content of these photographs. He is particularly interested in images of Cambodian dance(rs) as sites of cultural and personal memory, identity and knowledge.
Moderator: Stephen A Murphy
Stephen A Murphy is the Chair of the Centre of Southeast Asian studies, Deputy Head of School of Arts and Pratapaditya Pal Reader (Associate Professor)in Curating and Museology of Asian Art. He specialises in the art and archaeology of Buddhism and Hinduism in first millennium CE Southeast Asia with a focus on Thailand and Laos.
He has a particular interest in the 7th to 9th centuries CE as well as maritime connectivity between Southeast Asian cultures, Tang China, and the Indian Ocean world in general. His museological focus engages with issues of restitution and curation of Asian art.
M.C.: Ashley Thompson
Professor Ashley Thompson is the Hiram W. Woodward Chair in Southeast Asian Art, at the Department of History of Art and Archaeology. She was the Principle Investigator on a collaborative research project funded by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories Scheme: Circumambulating Objects: on Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art.
Over the years she has maintained a sustained focus on premodern Cambodian arts and literatures, and complemented this with more punctual work on the contemporary period and the arts of the larger Southeast Asian region. Her research is informed by deconstruction and psychoanalysis, and revolves around questions of memory, political and cultural transition, sexual difference and subjectivity.
