EN /
ESWhat is your third pole?
This exhibition is an invitation to adventure into a fictional mythology that encompasses two bodies of
work by Himali Singh Soin:
we are opposite like that (2017 - ongoing) and “As Grand As What'' (2018-2021). Our companions on this journey inhabit different temporalities and parallel realities; traversing a colonial, prejudiced past while dreaming up heterotopic futures even while
love attunes us to the catastrophe of the present moment.
we are opposite like that (2017-ongoing) is a series of interdisciplinary works––video, performance, textile, poetry and music––from material gathered during the Himali’s fieldwork in the uninhabited parts of the Arctic and Antarctic circles. This series tells stories from the poles from the non-human perspective of an archive that has witnessed deep time, an elder: the ice. Ice, a melting fossil, is running out of time. The series fuses a variety of concerns: the ways in which we know the world, the slippery spaces between solidity and spirit, the potential of error, postcolonial preconceptions, a looming climate crisis and the interdependence of the natural and the occult. It proposes that there are no distant “there’s”, but entangled “here’s”. We are all Other.
Drawing on those entanglements, the quest continues from the farthest reaches of the earth to Himali’s namesake and the third pole of the world, the Himalayas. There, she encounters an emergent place where the voices of feminine deities and the physical and symbolic qualities of the natural elements coexist, calling for a transnational spirituality.
As Grand as What (2018-2021) proposes a series of five rituals conducted by earth spirits to reactivate the energy centers of the earth post catastrophe with the tools of rhythm and love poetry.
The Third Pole is the boundless element. It triggers the imagination of a new cosmology fostered by different technologies of love: we listen to nature, acknowledge the many ways of receiving the world, polylogue with humans and non-humans alike and create new rituals for a softer way of being.