This is the sixth collaboration between La Biennale di Venezia and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London , who present a Special Project jointly organised by the two institutions at the Applied Arts Pavilion in the Sale d’Armi, Venice Arsenale: Tiger Strike Red by Sophia Al-Maria , an artist selected by the Curator of the Biennale Arte 2022 Cecilia Alemani.

Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria explores the echoes of colonialism and racism as they have bled into the contemporary relationship between humans via the inherent biases of our algorithms and machines. Al-Maria’s work raises questions around the alienation and dysfunction arising from a culture of “alternative facts” and whitewashed history, identifying remnants of colonialism in the fields of quantum computing, virtual space, and artificial intelligence.

Tiger Strike Red (2022) is a new single-channel video created for the Applied Arts Pavilion in response to the Biennale’s theme, The Milk of Dreams . It is the third in an ongoing series of Al-Maria’s video works that include Beast Type Song (2019) and Tender Point Ruin (2021). Taking inspiration from the collection of automata at the V&A, Al-Maria was drawn to the peculiar eroticism of the automaton known as “Tippoo’s Tiger.” Made for Tipu Sultan, an 18 ^th century ruler of Mysore in South India, the mechanical sculpture depicts a tiger mauling a British soldier. In Al-Maria’s eyes, this automaton both demonstrates a yearning for revenge on the colonial oppressor and, in the suggestive entwinement of man and beast, the subconscious fantasy of sexual coupling. Tiger Strike Red proposes that the non-consensual projection of Orientalism’s (white male) gaze is once again at work in our collective vision of the future, suggesting that the imaginary monsters conjured by British colonialism – whether the tiger of Mysore or the image of women wearing niqabs – are deeply entangled in our present-day machines and technologies.