we are opposite like that

Himali Singh Soin

India – 2019
Video – duration 13 min

A cold fear sends shudders through Victorian England (1837 – 1901). Newspapers and printed illustrations speculate about a new imminent ice age that will invade the English shores — a glacial infiltration that will freeze civilization. In we are opposite like that, Himali Singh Soin takes us on a poetic journey to Arctic regions. She connects the age old anxiety of the intruding ice to another obsession from the same time: the colonial enterprise and the fear of the ‘other’. This is how Singh Soin creates a new mythology about the farthest reaches of our planet, told from a remarkable perspective: the ice. Accompanying our Arctic journey is an original score for string quartet, which mixes field recording with the melodic fragments of The Snow by Victorian composer Edward Elgar.

we are opposite like that consists of several components: in the festival exhibition you can also see a book and a second video work.

Himali Singh Soin

― 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, leakages, alienation, distance and intimacy. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss, and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the healing power of performance and the radicality of love. Her speculations are performed in audio-visual, immersive environments. Soin's arthas been shown at Khoj (Delhi), Somerset House, Mimosa House, Serpentine Gallery (London), Gropius Bau or the HKW (Berlin), Migros Museum (Zurich), Anchorage museum (Alaska) and the next Shanghai Biennale. Soin is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and was the recipient of the Frieze Artist Award last year.

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