Raisa Kabir | Tiger, Tiger. Silk Throat…

10 October -8 November 2025

Raisa Kabir weaves her works in the lampas structure, a compound cloth that was the fabric of kings and the wonder of great empires – Mamluk, Mongol, Mughal. Yet these are not textiles that seek to overawe. We see the backs of the works, with their weft threads traveling in and out. If imperial textiles depicted the mastery of the hunt, the shikargah scene, or the triumphant warrior with bow and arrow in his hands, Kabir’s works unpick and upend the triumphalism, revealing the unseen structures of the cloth. Held within a lampas textile are binding warps; above, are floating wefts. These are structural names that betray the tension and foundations, but also the release and fragility that work together in a supple silk surface. The intertwined nature of binding and floating, of enemies and brothers, of deep-seeded grief and the possibility for pleasure emerge too in the stories that Kabir’s textiles tell.

A movement between stability and flow characterises the watery, riparian landscape of the Bengal delta where Kabir’s ancestors lived, where her grandparents are buried. As the site of the convergence of three rivers, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Meghna, this landscape on the coast of present-day Bangladesh is one of arbitrary borders where dry land is created through seasonal alluviation, and then flooded to disappear with the deluge, a ‘Deluviation’ of water. It is a place where what is land and what is water, what is human and what belongs to the earth is unsteady. With climate change and rising sea levels, more of the Bangladesh lowlands have been steadily submerged, a piecemeal process that Kabir has documented using scans of satellite images that are then stitched together into the imagery on these textiles. In Kabir’s works, created on a jacquard loom, we know that the land is right beneath the surface, that the water is always coming near in cycles, in floods to come. The fact of the water’s movement is remembered through the red, the blue, the orange, the purple threads that, even if not the most visible color on the surface, are embedded just beneath the surface in these densely-woven works. Floods can be natural, floods can be human-made; the floods of climate change are both. Referencing too the Chakma indigenous regions of Bangladesh, where huge dams submerged the lands of Adivasi communities, Kabir’s textiles carry into them a recognition that it was only recently that these lands, which had previously been protected under the British, became subject to the floods of nationalist development.

In Tiger, Tiger, the scene is tense with the push and pull between entangled figures. Arrayed three times along the horizontal repeat of the hand-woven red silk cloth, a pair of figures forms one whole. The limbs of a giant cat entwine around the historical wrestler, Shyamakanta Bandyopadhyay (b. 1858, Dhaka). The tiger can be seen both nestling and tearing into the wrestler’s chest. Adapted from a nineteenth-century Bengal Kalighat painting, the scene presents a queer re-envisioning of the attacking tiger that haunted the British imperial imagination of the Raj. There is the tiger automaton that grips a British solider in his jaw which was made for Tipu Sultan, the final independent ruler of Mysore. Edward Armitage’s 1858 painting, ‘Retribution,’ by contrast, created after the violent British suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, depicts a blond British man twisting a tiger’s head back, poised to slash its throat. Yet Kabir’s work finds the other gesture in this painting, the giant paw of the tiger that almost tenderly rests on the man’s arm, asserting another possibility of not enemies, but brothers; of a queer embrace. On this satin surface, the binding and the floating, the violence and desire, are interwoven.

The work of a loom is cyclical. On many looms, a warp is created from a circle of threads that must be cut when the weaving is done. And looms repeat. Even a hand-operated drawloom, the precursor to the jacquard loom that Kabir often employs, has been programmed by a naqshband, a pattern master, to produce the same intricate pattern again and again. As Kabir notes, history and empires are cyclical too. The forces of displacement, migration, suppression, and then independence recur again and again. And on a smaller scale, weaving also speaks to the return and the endurance of skill. Cycles may keep moving, they are programmed in. But there are also moments of escape, breakage, interruption, eruption, and change through care. Tiger, Tiger breaks the already three-dimensional surface of the silken cloth, bringing it to a fourth dimension of interaction. The textile is weeping golden threads, drawing us into a lament that will continue, a flood that shows no signs of abating.

Sylvia Houghteling

Raisa Kabir [b. 1989, UK] lives and works in London. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kabir uses woven text/textiles and performance to materialise multiple concepts, concerning the interwoven cultural politics of cloth. Kabir’s work draws on textile mobilities, embodied archives, and geographies of anti-colonial resistance.

Kabir has exhibited work at The Whitworth, Liverpool Biennial, Arnolfini, Whitechapel Gallery, British Textile Biennial, Glasgow International, Australian Design Centre, HH Art Spaces Goa, India. Yorkshire Contemporary. The Craft Council Gallery London, CCA Glasgow, Archive Berlin, Ford Foundation Gallery NYC, Textile Arts Center NYC, and the Center for Craft Creativity and Design U.S.

SELECTED WORKS