Himali Singh Soin, when the past is trapped in ice

Himali Singh Soin he invents myths for remote places that lack native communities. It is inspired by ancient diagrams, atavistic rituals, contemporary literature, the climate crisis or our colonial past.

just opened the third pole on floor -1 of the Thyssen Museum, organized by TBA21, a foundation chaired by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, an invitation to imagine new futures based on intuition, spiritual practice and love.

Her work is ethical and aesthetic, speculative, exhaustively documented, and represents a new generation of creative women inventing alternative cosmologies as a feminist response to colonizing narratives.

Her work is aesthetically ethical and speculative, and represents a new generation of creative women.

Singh Soin was born in northern India in 1987, but grew up in London, where he studied theater and English literature. He currently lives between London and New Delhi. She was writer-in-residence at the Whitechapel Gallery (2020-21) and won, among others, the Frieze Artist Award in 2019. His father was an explorer and traveled to the Arctic in the 1980s to assess the impact of the hole in the ozone layer.

He later opens a travel company based in the Himalayas, also called “The Third Pole” because it contains the largest ice reserves after the polar regions. Her family resides there, allowing them to go on an annual expedition that Himali uses to enrich her work.

A poetic story, but also a sound onevisual, performative, including video installation, traditional embroidery techniques from the Andhra Pradesh region or the publication of several poetry books.

the third pole is an open text with infinite interpretations that invites us to flow through a fictional mythology. It starts in the lobby with instructions for a ritual. Boat trips (what boat) is proposed to us as a guide for the moments when you are adrift in the form of a score diagram. It's a piece for self-care and invoking together.

[Ragnar Kjartansson: repeat yourself until the emotion]

In We are opposites like that (We are opposites like that) (2017-ongoing) tells several stories of the poles from the non-human perspective of the ice. let's not forget this ice is the deepest time file.

The past is trapped in melting permafrost, becoming translucent and slowly releasing the life that once occupied this place. The changing landscape of retreating glaciers is interspersed with the catastrophic history that haunted Victorian England fearful of living through an ice age, or with the image of a dark-skinned woman, the artist herself, closer to the chromaticism of coal mines than to the blue ice. glaucous.

The changing landscape of receding glaciers is interspersed with the catastrophic tale that haunted Victorian England.

the music of David Soin Tappeser (Bonn, Germany, 1985) integrates arctic sounds: the tearing ice or the untimely whipping of the wind with fragments of The snow (1895) by the romantic composer Edward Elgarcreating soundscapes that embrace Himali's voice, which recites long texts ranging from scientific history, political manifesto or Hindu mysticism.

Singh Soin's work is warm and inspiring. It resonates with the primitive rituals of Ana Mendieta, the soundwalks of Janet Cardiff, the waves of Virginia Woolf, the enchantments of Chiara Fumai, but with a post-humanist touch, that of the representation of South Asian Futurism as a tool to subvert the maps of the poles, a voice of tropical ice for love.

[The lucid story of Cardiff & Miller]

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