Himali Singh Soin – we are opposite like that

we are opposite like that

Himali Singh Soin

Join our self-guided Field Explorations below!

Credit: Anne Freitag

Himali Singh Soin’s video piece “we are opposite like that” pairs poetry with archival material and a mythical soundscape to recount the tale of the omnipresent anxiety in Victorian England of an imminent glacial epoch. Inspired by field recordings, an original score for string quartet makes audible the sheets of Pancake Ice smashing into each other, the long drone of a boat, the hard timbre of the wind. Melodic fragments of Victorian composer Edward Elgar’s The Snow (1895) encroach upon the image. The string quartet becomes a chamber of resonances, playing the polarity of a potential, post-human future, sounding an un-orientable, topological alarm. Commissioned by the Frieze Artist Award 2019, the video forms part of an ongoing series of interdisciplinary works that comprise mythologies for the poles, told from the non-human perspective of an elder that has witnessed deep time: the ice. It beckons the ghosts hidden in landscapes and turns them into echoes, listening in on the resonances of potential futures.

Credit: Himali Singh Soin

About the artist

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. Himali works across text, performance and moving image. Singh Soin holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University, London, and has exhibited internationally, at galleries and cultural institutions including Whitechapel Gallery, London, Somerset House, London, and Gropius Bau, Berlin. She is a jury member for the Frieze Artist Award 2020 and part of the curatorial team of Momenta Biennale Montreal 2021.