A new exhibition at Powis Castle, developed as a personal response to the Welshpool castle’s colonial connections to India, opens this weekend.

Award winning Welsh artist Daniel Trivedy is set to open a new exhibit at Powis Castle, on Saturday, February 24.

Titled ‘A Tiger in the Castle’, the exhibit consists of a series of art works developed by the artist, which act as a personal response to Powis Castle’s colonial connections to India.

The artist said: “I felt compelled to make this work, on an emotional and psychological level. Throughout the work, I have been thinking about how my identity and family history relates to the colonial history of the site. Despite the difficult history, there has been a sense of personal empowerment and catharsis as the work has developed.

“Thinking about the future, I feel that Powis Castle has incredible potential as a site of social cohesion. Through allowing a plurality of voices to engage with the collection, it can contribute to a more complex and layered narrative, fostering a greater sense of inclusion and belonging; not just to those from the South Asian diaspora, but to wider society as a whole.”

 

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The castle’s Clive Museum contains approximately 1,000 artefacts from South and East Asia, dating from about 1600 to the 1830s. The collection was assembled by generations of the Clive family during the British colonisation of the Indian subcontinent and taken to Powis Castle in the early 19th century.

The titular tiger in the exhibit is a reference to a motif, a connection to the artist’s identity as a person of Indian descent and directly referencing objects in the South Asian Collection.

The tiger is also direct reference to Tīpū Sultān, who adopted the tiger as his emblem, and the fact that during the British colonisation of India, tigers were declared as vermin, leading to a significant decline in their population numbers.

Shane Logan, National Trust Cymru’s General Manager at Powis Castle and Garden said: “At Powis we are continually working with academic and community researchers to better understand the background of the items in our care.

“We are also making space for a variety of creative and personal responses to the South Asian Collection, including the lived experiences of South Asian visitors, to encourage conversation across all audiences.

“Daniel Trivedy’s work is one such perspective and the opportunity to collaborate with Daniel and Artes Mundi to encourage those conversations now and in the future is important to us.”