The Return of Tipoo’s Tiger | 2017
Performance, 2 video projections, masks, paper plaques
V&A Museum | London

In Raqs’ media rich performance, Tipoo’s Tiger becomes an uncanny meme for Europe’s presence in the world – a fantastical, funny reminder of the ongoing joust between defeat and victory, European and non-European histories, man and nature, human beings and machines.

M : All hail the roar, the rampant stance, the man-beast victorious. The machine has now spoken, and has been spoken for.
S : From the frozen seashore to the blossoming desert we wait for the relics to speak. We listen but we cannot yet hear what they say.
M : So we begin, as we must, with homagery and gratuitude. All hail all that needs hailing, taxicabs for time travel, autonomiles with expandable leg-room for constricting consciousnesses, epiphenomenal epiphanies, sunbursts and sultan-lotion for the radioactive illusions of thermodynamic sovereignty.
S : All hail, all hail, all hail. ”
-except from The Return of Tipu’s Tiger (performed by Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Monica Narula)





