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Himali Singh Soin with music by David Soin Tappeser

The Third Pole

October 25, 2022 – January 29, 2023

Himali Singh Soin

The Third Pole

MNTB Program

MNTB Madrid

What 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.

Himali Singh Soin’s (b. 1987, New Delhi, London) multi-disciplinary work uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct speculative cosmologies that reveal non-linear entanglements between human and non-human life. Her poetic methodology explores the myriad technologies of knowing, from scientific to intuitional, indigenous and alchemical processes. Her practice unravels speculations performed in audio-visual, immersive environments. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love.

Soin's art has been shown at Khoj (Delhi), Mimosa House, Serpentine Gallery (London), Gropius Bau, (Berlin), Anchorage museum (Alaska), the Dhaka Art Summit and the Shanghai Biennale among others. She was the recipient of the Frieze Artist Award 2019. A solo exhibition of her work, Static Range, will open at The Art Institute of Chicago in December 2022.

David Soin Tappeser (b. Bonn, lives between London and New Delhi) is a drummer, composer and performance artist based between London and New Delhi. His practice centers around ideas of time, interdependence and alterity. His performances and compositions use rhythm to codify, manipulate and deconstruct linear perceptions of time. They hint at intercultural entanglements, parallel histories and extra-human frames of reference. His work has been featured at Shanghai Biennale, Serpentine Galleries (London), Biennale Gherdeina (Alto Adige/Italy), Haus der Kunst (München), Gropius Bau (Berlin), Mattatoio (Rome), Jaipur Jazz Festival, CAC (Vilnius) and Zinco Jazz Club (Mexico City) and Cafe Oto (London) amongst others.

EXHIBITION BOOKLET

CURATOR

Soledad Gutiérrez

LOCATION

Exhibition hall lobby, level -1. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

TBA21 on st_age

Check all content by the artists here

PRESS AREA

Here

PUBLIC PROGRAM

Technologies of love

Performances

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