Meena Hasan // Terrible Beauty
On View: June 5 – August 20, 2025
Opening reception: Sunday, June 8, 3-5pm
Brooklyn-based painter Meena Hasan’s Terrible Beauty is shown in conjunction with her site-specific installation at the Old Stone House in Brooklyn. The project draws inspiration from the fact that British commander Charles Cornwallis, who occupied the Old Stone House during the Battle of Brooklyn, later defeated one of the fiercest opponents of colonialism in India, Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore. Hasan has created a body of work to wrestle with the connections and contradictions of history, memory, and image - and her relationships to them.
The title, Terrible Beauty, references William Butler Yeats’ 1916 poem about the Easter Uprising in Ireland, and by extension, anti-colonial resistance across the world. Situating the heroic defeats at Brooklyn in 1776 and Seringapatam in 1792 into this broader lineage invites us to reflect on the occupations, displacements, and chaos that have brought us to our own moment.
Hasan’s subjects and processes invite viewers into a search for meaning in history. At Main Window, she engages with the infamous life-size semi-automaton organ of a tiger devouring a British soldier that Tipu Sultan commissioned - triumphantly displayed at the British East India Company museum after his defeat and currently on view at the V&A in London. A line drawing of this looted artifact has been scratched into paper and submerged in layers of competing pigments. A proscenium assembled from symbols of Americana like the inflamed bald eagle, fair paraphernalia, forms reminiscent of nearby Brooklyn Bridge, patterns from Tipu’s war tent and sword, and traces of the artist's own legs, sets the stage.
Hasan’s works are terrifying, but also playful. They are rooted in historical scenarios, but also create their own performative fictions. They hold the fearful symmetries and terrible beauties of centuries of violent dispossession and resistance, inviting us to piece ourselves together within the various layers of disruption, connection, destruction, and creation we have inherited.
Tipu Sultan was a hero and a monster, a tyrant and a freedom fighter, a remarkable success and also a tragic failure. The same can be said for William Alexander, George Washington, or any of the intertwined legacies of colonialism and independence across the globe. Battles in Brooklyn have reshaped South Asia, and vice versa, for centuries. Where we draw the lines around these complex and contradictory histories, and find our places within them, is up to us. – Dylan Yeats
Courtesy of Deanna Evans Project