Three experimental sound chapters from ‘we are opposite like that’ publication (2020)
‘Subcontinentment’, sound, 10:22 min
‘Antarctica was a Queer Rave …’, sound, 13:59 min,
Lady Antigua’, sound, 3:28 min. 
Commissioned and produced by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for st_age


Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and New Delhi. She often works in a speculative way with performance, narration, and immersive audio-visual environments, and frequently uses metaphors from outer space and natural environments. Her multifaceted work we are opposite like that (2017–22) thinks through alienation and intimacy, ecological loss and the loss of home, and explores the geography and imaginary of the polar regions through a series of dreamlike documents, love letters, poems, and predictions. 

For st_age Singh Soin has created a trio of experimental audio chapters with musician David Soin Tappeser. Subcontinentment encompasses a series of fictional ice archives and meditations on south asian futurism. Antarctica was a queer rave… traces an icy history of conjecture, while Lady Antigua starts with the bust of a black woman at the bow of a boat, and reflects on the artist’s “confusion being a brown body in the polar tundra.” 

Subcontinentment has been translated into a sound installation for how to tread lightly where the visitor is invited to submerge into the Singh Soin’s poems, read by the artists and where  sounds from New Delhi during lockdown and the recordings made in her expeditions to the Arctic regions with her words.

This research in the polar regions has taken her to explore her “third pole” and focus a new body of work as grand as what (2018–2021) on the Himalayas. Drawing on research into her namesake, she evokes animistic rituals and remedies, as well as summoning Buddhist concepts of astral planes. One iteration of this piece will be presented as part of the online digital activation programme on the 14th November in collaboration with the Shanghai Biennial. 

PAST LOANS

Solo Exhibition: The Third Pole. Himali Singh Soin with music by David Soin Tappeser
Venue: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Curators: Soledad Gutiérrez
Exhibition 25 October 2022 - 29 January 2023

Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance, and intimacy. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. Her speculations are performed in audio-visual, immersive environments. Her almanac ‘we are opposite like that’, comprises missing paraphernalia from polar archives, false philosophies, unreliable observations from the ship, love letters, ekphrastic poems, and made-up maps. It marks the culmination of the eponymous interconnected body of work (since 2017) exploring the uninhabited parts of the Arctic and Antarctic circles, and their uncanny bearing on the rest of the world.

*1987 in Delhi, India | Living and working in Delhi, India and London, United Kingdom

David Soin Tapeser is a Germany-born, London/New-Delhi-based jazz musician, composer and performance artist. His practice primarily revolves around experimentation and improvisation—more often than not as a means to re-visit/re-invigorate/re-invent established traditions. His studies and extensive travels in India, Nepal, Mexico, and beyond, have brought him into contact with a variety of different musical and percussive traditions, leaving an audible impact on his understanding of the drum set. His particularly subtle, melodic approach to the instrument puts strong emphasis on the aesthetic of tone, sound and dynamics. The theoretical and conceptual backbone of Soin Tappeser’s performative and compositional praxis is audibly shaped by notions of internal pulsation, ideas of phase and fragmentation, as well as thoughts concerning the manipulation of time and time-perception through music. Yet, above all, Soin Tappeser considers music a means of unfiltered, personal expression and play—something mysterious and whimsical.

*1985 in Germany | Living and working in Delhi, India and London, United Kingdom