Sharpen Your Tongue | Snippets From Act III
A Documented Demonstration
Challenging Colonial Narratives Surrounding Public Architectures of Celebration & Barriers of Bureaucracy
The Robert Clive Memorial Statue, sits on King Charles St. in front of the foreign office, a street down from Downing Street, at the heart of the city’s governance.
It glorifies the bribery that enabled Clive’s first incision into India through the East India Company, setting a lasting precedent for the Empire.
As feral feminine Kali, I use sewing as a weapon of disruption. I move with sharp tongue and truth-telling third eye - charting a route to the monument, reframing it as a living blueprint of imperial fraud today.
Film by @joshuamolony
Sharpen Your Tongue | Snippets From Act II
A Multidisciplinary Proposal
Challenging How Colonial Narratives within Institutions are Legitimised & Disseminated
My Dadi’s Satsang, a spiritual, feral feminine ritual of collective survival, memory and resilience that withstood the British Raj and subsequent Partition.
An acknowledgement of trauma in post-partitioned India that I sonically projected onto the Architectural Association Library, London (a reflection of institutional western knowledge).
Sharpen Your Tongue | Snippets From Act II, Testing
A Multidisciplinary Proposal
Challenging How Colonial Narratives within Institutions are Legitimised & Disseminated
Act II - sonically overlaying an immersive experience of my grandmother’s spiritual gathering onto the AA library, through listening devices brought to life by conduction speakers.
I counter the institution with a non-western ritual knowledge rooted in sound, words & transmission of oral histories.
Sharpen Your Tongue | Snippets From Act I
A digital analysis of the Partition Meeting, and speculative rewriting of history
Challenging Colonial Narratives within Media such as the myth of Britain’s Noble Exit from India
Act 1 digitally picks apart this moment in time, by entering the State Drawing Room to displace power, foresee the truth and counter the men at the table with Kali like presences in front of, and behind the lens.
Sharpen Your Tongue is a multidisciplinary practice centred around erased histories - it uses rage as a blueprint to disseminate a ritual knowledge grounded in instinct, collective memory, sound and other non-western epistemological frameworks.
The project asks - In South Asian contexts where western narratives of colonialism still persist, how can one embody the feral feminine in order to disrupt the remnants of these oppressive structures and their deep rooted consequences?
Unfolding in three opening acts, Sharpen Your Tongue seeks to disrupt charged contexts, architectures and archives by introducing a multiplicity of unpalatable decolonial narratives that disregard western fragility and force it to reckon with the discomfort we are inexplicably born with.
Sharpen Your Tongue | The Feral Feminine
Kali is the goddess of destruction and creation
The primal forces of nature
The chaos of existence
She is liberator
Fierce protector
Mother figure
What draws me to her most is her pure rage.
(Kali emerged from Durga during a battle against the demon Raktabija. Each drop of his blood created a clone as it touched the ground, making him indestructible. So Kali began to drink his blood before it could touch the ground and destroyed his many clones. Her rage continued after battle until Shiva lay in her path to calm her as she stepped on him)
