Medium: Performance
Duration: 4 in X 6 in
Year: 2021
The horror of Tulips attempts to question and resist narratives that favor exotic and nationalistic rhetoric through which Kashmiri landscape and body are seen. This performance at Asia’s largest Tulip Garden, a landscape that recalls the popular memory of Kashmir as a land of pristine beauty where a nationalistic gathering is called to celebrate Spring festivals at times of the COVID pandemic when gatherings were not allowed. In an attempt to claim over the territory and project a kind of normalcy, such gatherings manifest the violence perpetuated structurally by the state. This performance critiques this idea of beauty and normal to re-imagine the dialogue around the same. It uses narrative pieces from the Residual Landscape in order to narrate alternate stories of the lives and events happening parallelly in the region.