we are opposite like that

(2017-2022)

An ongoing series of interdisciplinary works that comprises 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.

book, 2020

An almanac, a messy collection of missing paraphernalia from archives, false philosophies, unreliable observations from the ship, love letters, ekphrastic poems, made-up maps, theories, recipes and small resistances. It has a beautiful canvas cover and screen-printed title. The spine is an outline of a receding glacier, the glitchy + denoting the error on a ship’s GPS.

Offset lithography print, canvas cover, screen printed title with a bookmark made of silver space blanket, wax sealed.

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AN ESSAY, BY LUCY IVES

A REVIEW IN THE FORM OF A CROWN OF SONNETS

VIDEO, 2019

Pairing poetry and archival material, the video recounts the tale of the omnipresent anxiety in Victorian England of an imminent glacial epoch. The disorienting fear of an invasive periphery sent shudders through the colonial enterprise, the tremors of which can be felt in contemporary times. Here, an alien figure traverses the blank, oblivious whiteness, and undergoes an Ovidian transformation into glimmering ice.

This imagery floats above an endangered, soon to be mythical, soundscape: 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. The tempo is controlled by her shifting latitudes, the dynamics by the temperature variances between the late nineteenth century and her recent expedition. 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.

Trailer

VIDEO, 2018

Building up non-anthropocentric, post-human ways of storytelling, this video captures the attenuation of planetary temporalities, confined geographies and decolonial possibilities through the motions of an alien figure entangled in a shifting landscape of receding glaciers. we are opposite like that desires to rearrange the map, and while firmly located in the two polar circles, it proposes a kind of transnationalist world blanketed in lichen and in which north and south are collapsed.

Since the poles are used as laboratories for outer space research and have been the site of high frequency UFO sightings, Soin uses sci-fi tropes to propose a south-asian futurism, in which her brown body finds friction and friendship in a white landscape, in which rationalism and the occult make up a multiplicity of disparate narratives, unified by strange teleconnections.

The scenes move from a receding glacier to an abandoned township called Ny London, where British extractionists found marble but upon bringing it to the mainland, the permafrost evaporated and the marble turned to dust.

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PERFORMANCE

Live-scoring the video with poetry, percussion, a harp made of emergency blanket, guitar and a string quartet. Image from a performance at Concrete at Alserkal Av. Curated by Block Universe.

Movement choreographed as mourning rituals for dying glaciers.

prints on bamboo (edition of 100 each)

A series of five unique prints of interconnected fictional mythologies inspired by artist Himali Singh Soin's journeys to both polar circles: the Antarctic and the Arctic, in 2017. It fuses a variety of concerns: the ways we know what we do and the skewed hierarchy between reason and spirit, (post-)colonial attitudes and a looming climate crises. It also imagines the polar landscapes as projecting screens for alternate, otherworldly or non-linear futures. This archival set of editions is extracted from the historical component of the moving image work, in which ice forms a ghostly presence overlaying early observations and records of geological phenomena.

Aurora Illustrations.

Giclée, Hahnemühle Bamboo
590mm x 402mm or 23.2" × 15.8”

The Last Human Family.

Giclée, Hahnemühle Bamboo
590mm x 402mm or 23.2" × 15.8”

The Lure.

Giclée, Hahnemühle Bamboo
590mm x 402mm or 23.2" × 15.8”

Erratic Blocks.

Giclée, Hahnemühle Bamboo 590mm x 402mm or 23.2" × 15.8”

A Frozen Thames.

Giclée, Hahnemühle Bamboo 590mm x 402mm or 23.2" × 15.8”

INVERTED MAP: PRINTS ON ALUMINIUM

A series of 5 prints tracing the myth of an equatorial being in an extraterrestrial landscape. An intuitional cosmology in a world governed by arbitrary rules of reason.

SOUND INSTALLATIONS

soundscape by david soin tappeser

CHAPTER 1: SUBCONTINENTMENT

Subcontinentment is a manifesto that stems from my fieldwork in the polar circles, where I was confronted with my alienness as a brown body in a landscape commonly used for outer-space simulation experiments. As part of a series of fictional ice archives, south asian futurism, renamed subcontinentment, anti-chronicles the geopoetic links between the poles and the subcontinent.

In transforming the text into a soundscape, David and I began finding correspondences and intersections between my polar recordings and the hyper, denuded aural environment of Delhi under lockdown. Crows cawing, a static in the ether of the polyphonous city, intertwined with screeching skuas, lone reminders of life in the expansive nothingness of the ‘white’ continent. A fan that points to the circulation of air, capital, contagion, compassion. The extra-terrestrial echoes of stones skimming on frozen lakes sound like firecrackers, blackening the air with their celebratory overzealousness. گھنگرو‎, ghungroos, the metallic ankle bells of the temple-dancer-by-day, sex-wroker-by-night or ice in a frozen river. The pressure of stretching the word, ‘rest’ builds, it is released as if sounds of government-mandated clangings of pots and pans could avert a pandemic, substitute a virus for a communal agenda. Rhizomatic root structures of melting, frozen lilypads. Lilypads that open at dawn and close at dusk just like the Na'at, poetry sung in praise of Allah, heard in the depths of a tomb.

CHAPTER 2: LADY ANTIGUA

Lady Antigua starts at the bow of the boat. Lying in the net, I couldn’t help noticing the bust of a black woman pinned to it. The poem is a fictional imagination of her life, pointing to the imagination of black culture in the binaries of slavery and fetishism. And it began to reflect my own complicated displacement and confusion being a brown body in the polar tundra. As it were, we made this piece while the world was out on the streets chanting, Black Lives Matter. The pipe organ harks back to early hymns sung in the church, an institution that controlled narratives of the self and the force behind European colonial expansion, with the repetitive chord structure representing the repetition of history. The hammond organ that follows was a portable, inexpensive instrument that led to the empowerment of small communities by placing faith and worship in individual hands. The free improvisation is this desire and celebration for freedom.

CHAPTER 3: ANTARCTICA WAS A QUEER RAVE BEFORE IT GOT BUSTED BY COLONIAL WHITE FARTS

Antarctica was a queer rave… traces the history of conjecture and how Antarctica was hypothesized to exist. It recounts, in a non-linear fashion, the western imagination of the savage underworld, an imagination largely based on projection and fear. It turns this same imagination into a utopian desire: a place not populated by horrific freaks with malformed bodies and exquisite tentacles, but free from the normative conditioning of convention and straightness, free from the grids of the map as it dissolves into mists and fog. The music is analogue and recorded rogue, an acoustic rendering of EDM and 90’s rave beats. By recording single-track, on an acoustic drum set, David Soin Tappeser subverts, emulates and pays homage to contemporary queer party culture.

The original article from Bombay Monthly, 1850

HOW TO STARTLE THE UNBELIEVING

In 1850, just before telegraphy is standardised, the British Empire uses a clairvoyant girl from Calcutta as a porous channel through which to travel to the Arctic in search of Franklin and his two lost ships, Erebus and Terror. The wreck of Erebus and Terror were discovered in mid September 2014 and 2016 respectively.

how to startle the unbelieving is a poem produced from an erasure of the only archive left about the girl in the Bombay Monthly Times. The cables of distance and desire are tangled in the word. The periphery and the core become porous thresholds through her natural electricity passes. Disembodied, she may be an early cyborg. Authority no longer rests in the antipodes of sender and receiver, but in the agent of interpretation in between, in the medium.

AURORA AS ART WRITING

Text score. Indigo screenprint on Hahnemuele Britannia. Edition of 8.

Boatness is a state of being in which ontology and epistemology flow into each other: in which your experience of the world is inseparable from your knowledge of the world. It is a non-dualistic entanglement between the vessel and what contains it. In boatness, attention is called for, but with detachment. Boatness is the thin place in which theory can be practiced, intuition can be a method and love can be a robust form of critique. The part has a feminine energy that integrates it into the whole. The text score is as instructional or speculative, as performative or ritualistic, as participatory or discrete as you’d like. It is an open text inviting you to choose your own adventure, find your own boatness as a guide in those periods when you are adrift or when you are dispirited or have been silenced, boatness can be the wind that assures you of the movement even in stillness.

MOUNTAIN, PIXELATED IN THE WATER

14 ft x 2ft, 2021
Double Ikat in ahimsa silk and organic cotton

Possibly one of the longest single design Ikat pieces to have ever been made in India, this new tapestry charts the sound waves of ice crystals smashing into each other, and the various histories of south asians, freaks, and exotic others at the Poles. While Ikat is an old and traditional weave, it appears pixelated, glitchy, embodying the digital distance of alien sightings at the poles. The color combination invokes the colonial histories of indigo, the peaceful resistance of Gandhian cotton, ahimsa (non-violent) silk that protects the silkworm, and the archeological color of terracotta and belonging. It took 8 months for master Gajam Govardhan to complete 20 pieces over a 280 foot long loom, in Andhra Pradesh, a project that supported his community during a year of lost work.

an omniscience: an atmos-etheric, transnational, interplanetary cosmist bird opera spanning seven continents and the many verses

Inspired by the many mythological birds across the world, a performance combines poetry and wind instruments to tell the story of the Arctic Tern, a bird that makes the longest migration of all species.

Listen to excerpts

TOO MUCH AND NOT ENOUGH

A scaled, solid marble replica of Deception Island in Antarctica, at the opposite side of the globe. It’ll be contoured in Cipollino marble, which looks just like the ashen, rusted landscape. Deception Island was the gateway to Antarctica at the end of the 19th century, serving as an outpost for whalers and adventurers. Rather than resisting extraction through self destruction, Deception Island resisted differently, even refusing to host colonial and extractionist infrastructures - even ‘spitting out’ the graves of those that had been buried there. It’ll be 130cm in diameter, determined by the shape of drawing an enso, a circle with a small opening, drawn in a single stroke of the hand.