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| As part of her practice, Singh Soin stages experimental spoken-word performances, often accompanied by moving images and live music. Photo: Carlotta Cardana |
In her sunlit live-work space overlooking Brick Lane in East London, the artist Himali Singh Soin
is spinning a narrative about the farthest reaches of our planet. Singh
Soin, a poet and artist from north-central India, has spent the past
couple of years contemplating, among other things, the earth’s polar
caps. “It’s a blank screen to project so much on it, it’s almost asking
for hyperbole and fantasy,” she says. “These two spaces seem like the
closest to outer space.”
Singh Soin is
primarily a writer of poetry and art criticism, but her language also
spills off the page and into immersive audiovisual environments, film
and spoken-word performances that often dwell on the environment, issues
of identity and the nature of deep time. She’s made recent appearances
in exhibitions and performances at Somerset House, the Serpentine
Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery in London but is lesser known to
audiences outside the United Kingdom. With a new commission from Frieze, that looks set to change.
On a roving residency aboard a sailboat in the North Pole in 2017, Singh Soin met the science historian Alexis Rider and learned that Victorian-era Britain was abuzz with anxieties about the imminent arrival of another ice age...
In her new Arctic narrative, she hopes to give equal weight to visual art, science and other sources of knowledge and interpretation. Among the many forms of expression that she’s folded into her film — it includes not only the artist’s performance, poetry and video footage of the Arctic but also archival materials from the journals of Victorian-era explorers and Rider’s research — music tells another story about the North Pole. Singh Soin’s partner, the musician David Soin Tappeser, has composed an original score, performed by an all-female quartet, that accompanies the film. It incorporates fragments from the Romantic era of classical music, including Edward Elgar’s “The Snow,” as well as Singh Soin’s recordings of the Arctic soundscape, and responds to her field notes about latitudes, longitudes and temperature variations. Tappeser was thinking of what it might mean to create a folk music of the Arctic.
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Source: The New York Times
