Tigers & Dragons: India and Wales in Britain
Arthur William Devis, Portrait of an Indian Lady, Traditionally Called the Bibi of John Wombwell, ca. 1785-1795, Taimur Hassan Collection, Photographer: Justin Piperger
Tigers and Dragons: India and Wales in Britain explores connections between the Indian subcontinent and Wales. The show scrutinises the British Empire’s continuing legacy; its contemporary relevance for Welsh identity as well as for India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In the light of current calls for Welsh independence, what better time to re-examine the Imperial encounter and its contemporary resonances?
South Asia and Wales have had a long – if not always cordial – liaison, stretching back to the earliest years of Britain's socio-political infiltration of the Subcontinent. As the controversy about Robert Clive (aka Clive of India) makes clear, Wales’ part in Empire warrants urgent examination. After all, the Clives were central to kick-starting the British Empire in India, and their subsequent accumulation of a substantial collection of colonial ‘booty’ – including the fabled treasures of the defeated ‘Tiger of Mysore’, Tipu Sultan – resides at the edge of Wales: in Powis Castle.
The accumulation of ‘collections’ during the Age of Empire look controversial to contemporary eyes, but not all of them are cast in the same mould. In the 1870s, industrialist Richard Glynn Vivian – founder of the museum and the scion of the most successful copper smelting plant in the world – took off from Swansea for foreign shores, equipped with a sketchbook and camera, wending his way to Madras, Bombay, Lucknow and Sri Lanka.
Given Wales’ own status within British-ness, Tigers & Dragons argues that the Welsh involvement in Empire was different to the larger British experience. Highlighting Imperial connections (through war, trade and language), it also probes other equivalences: between Tigers and Dragons; Mothers, Maps and lost mother tongues.
The exhibition spotlights this shared territory, featuring over 120 artworks – paintings, photographs, performances, textiles, sculptural installations and new media – by roughly 70 artists from Wales, England, America, India and Pakistan. It juxtaposes South Asia’s historic fine art traditions (gleaned from the Imperial encounter) alongside modern and contemporary artworks.
New commissions by contemporary artists (such as Goa-based performance artist Nikhil Chopra’s From Land to Fire, 2025) have been supported by CELF (national contemporary art gallery for Wales).
Glynn Vivian’s intersectional community textiles group, Threads, has been working with international artist Adeela Suleman, who lives in Karachi, Pakistan, and Swansea-based Menna Buss, to produce an artwork in response to Suleman’s own large scale tapestry, Imperium Amidst Opium Blossoms: A Kashidakari on the era of the East India Company (2023 - 25) commissioned for the exhibition.
Historic and contemporary loans are drawn from private and public collections, including National Museum Cardiff, National Library Wales, National Trust’s Powis Castle and the Bristol Museum’s British Empire & Commonwealth Collection. Loans are supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund. Created by the Garfield Weston Foundation and Art Fund, the Weston Loan Programme is the first ever UK-wide funding scheme to enable smaller and local authority museums to borrow works of art and artefacts from national collections. The exhibition is grateful for support from the Arts Council of Wales, Taimur Hassan Collection; Canvas Gallery, Karachi; Grosvenor Gallery, London; Chatterjee & Lal Gallery, Mumbai, and Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai. The accompanying book, with Tigers & Dragon’s Curatorial Essay by Zehra Jumabhoy as well as texts by Pakistani art historian Salima Hashmi and Welsh artists Iwan Bala and Peter Finnemore, will be published in collaboration with Hmm Foundation with a grant from Seher and Taimur Hassan.
