Himali Singh Soin with music by David Soin Tappeser: The Third Pole

The Third Pole is an invitation to venture into a fictional cosmology that encompasses two bodies of work by Himali Singh Soin: we are opposite like that (2017–ongoing) and As Grand As What (2021), made in collaboration with musician David Soin Tappeser and curated by Soledad Gutiérrez. The characters in these works inhabit different temporalities and parallel realities; traversing a colonial, prejudiced past while dreaming up heterotopic futures.

we are opposite like that (2017–ongoing) is a series of interdisciplinary works combining video, performance, poetry, and music from materials gathered during Soin's fieldwork in the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. It tells stories of the North and South Poles from the non-human perspective of ice, presented as an elder that has witnessed deep time. Ice, a melting archive, is running out of time. we are opposite like that fuses a variety of concerns: the ways in which we know the world, the slippery spaces between what is solid what is spiritual, the potential of error, postcolonial preconceptions, a looming climate crisis, and the interdependence of the natural and the magical.

Drawing on these entanglements, the quest continues from the farthest reaches of the earth to Himali’s namesake and the third pole of the world: the Himalayas. There, she encounters an emergent place where the voices of feminine deities and the geological, symbolic qualities of the natural landscape echo each other.

In As Grand as What (2021), a three-channel film by Hylozoic/Desires, a planetary catastrophe has occurred. Inspired by the Kalachakra mandala, a cosmic diagram in which the body is a microcosm of the planet, the artists, disguised as spirits of the earth, conduct a series of five rituals to reactivate the energy centers of the world. They go in search of a lost bla, a term in Tibetan medicine for the subtle life force that runs through the world-body. With the help of the resonance of sound and the force of love poetry, they seek to reinvigorate the collective self and learn from the tremulous temporality of the catastrophic. 

The Third Pole is an open text that offers the imagination a new cosmology fostered by various technologies of love: we listen to nature, we sense direction, we navigate the globe by inverting the map, we polylogue with humans and non-humans alike and make renewed rituals for a softer way of being.

About Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser
Himali Singh Soin’s (b. 1987, New Delhi, lives and works between London and New Delhi) multidisciplinary work uses metaphors from the natural environment to construct speculative cosmologies that reveal non-linear entanglements between human and non-human life. Her poetic methodology explores the myriad technologies of knowing, from scientific to intuitive, Indigenous, and alchemical processes. Soin’s art has been shown at Khoj (Delhi); Mimosa House and Serpentine Galleries (London), Gropius Bau (Berlin); Anchorage Museum (Alaska); the Dhaka Art Summit; and the Shanghai Biennale, among others. She was the recipient of the Frieze Artist Award in 2019. A solo exhibition of her nuclear series, “Static Range”, will open at The Art Institute of Chicago in December 2022.

David Soin Tappeser (b. 1985, Bonn, lives and works between London and New Delhi) is a drummer, composer, and performance artist. His practice is grounded in ideas of time, interdependence, and improvisation. His performances and compositions use rhythm to manipulate and disrupt linear perceptions of time, recalibrating our multilayered connections to the planetary environment. They draw on the intercultural entanglements, parallel histories and animistic energies that become apparent when we transcend anthropocentric, everyday frames of temporal reference. His work has been featured at Shanghai Biennale; Serpentine Galleries (London); Biennale Gherdeina (Alto Adige); Haus der Kunst (Munich); Gropius Bau (Berlin); Mattatoio (Rome); CAC (Vilnius); and Cafe Oto (London), among others.

About TBA21
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary is a leading international art and advocacy foundation created in 2002 by the philanthropist and collector Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, representing the fourth generation of the Thyssen family’s commitment to the arts and public service. The TBA21 Foundation—based in Madrid and Vienna, with situated projects in Venice and Córdoba—stewards the TBA21 Collection and its outreach activities, which include exhibitions, fellowships, residencies, educational and public programming, and policy interventions. TBA21–Academy is the research center of the foundation and an incubator for collaborative experience, artistic production, and new forms of knowledge by combining art and science. All activity at TBA21 is fundamentally driven by artists and the belief in art and culture as a carrier of social and environmental transformation and change.

Please RSVP to the opening: madrid@tba21.org