NCA Library, is set in a college library where it tries to track the movement of a set of publications. While on a residency in the National College of Art in Lahore, Thomas hid thirteen copies of his own exhibition catalogue on shelves in the college library. In each copy he wrote a brief inscription to its intended recipient1 a teacher or a student of the institution. Thomas wanted to see what would happen to these gifts that he was leaving for others to give on his behalf.

In the course of a week all copies of the catalogue were taken away, none of them by the intended recipient ( though some of the friends to whom he had ‘given’ a catalogue helped themselves to another person’s copy). In this small1 face-to­ face community, Thomas found that nobody felt constrained to give the book to the ‘rightful owner: Nor was Thomas able to track the movement of the catalogues although he had access to photographs from sixteen surveillance cameras mounted in the library. The artwork Thomas installed in the show consisted of footage from these cameras. It offered a surplus of information that amounted to no knowledge.
A small library was mounted within Six Degrees’ exhibition space as well. In a corridor, the exhibition’s curator relocated a shelf from the Khoj library within the gallery. On it was a collection of books on modern and contemporary art in South Asia. 1he small shelf of books suggests both the possibilities and the circumscription of the ways we might know about our own or each other’s art. With few survey texts, some monographs, but mostly exhibition catalogues sponsored by commercial galleries, this shelf of books suggests the ways in which knowledge is produced and unfolding events are documented to make the materials for the histories that will be written in the future.