Himali Singh Soin
Himali Singh Soin’s expeditionary practice begins with a journey on land, with poetry at its center, and then spirals outwards into performance, music, and moving image. She uses metaphors from the natural environment to construct speculative cosmologies that reveal non-linear entanglements between human and non-human life. Her method moves between a myriad of technologies of knowing, from scientific to intuitional, indigenous, and alchemical processes. After five years of research in the North and South Poles, she has begun a series departing from the Third Pole: the Himalayas.
At Amant, she will research Mount Meru, a real and mythological mountain that is considered the centre of the universe in ancient texts, spiritual depictions, pop culture, literature, and geology. In 1986, her father made the first Indian ascent of Meru while her mother was pregnant with her. This personal, umbilical urge will propel the narrative, leading to a new, liberator expedition.
Himali Singh Soin was born in New Delhi, and lives between London and New Delhi. Her art has been shown at Khoj (Delhi), Serpentine Gallery (London), Gropius Bau (Berlin), DesertX (CA), the Dhaka Art Summit and the Shanghai Biennale, among others. She was the recipient of the Frieze Artist Award 2019. Her almanac from the poles, we are opposite like that, was published in 2020, and her prayer talisman from unsung Himalayan deities, ancestors of the blue moon, in 2021. Her latest stamp booklet from a nuclear mountain in the Himalayas, Static Range, was released in 2022. Her first solo show in the US is open at The Art Institute of Chicago till May 15 2023.