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

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and TBA21, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary present The Third Pole, an exhibition that invites you to venture into a fictional mythology that encompasses two bodies of work by Indian artist Himali Singh Soin: we are opposite like that (2017 - ongoing) and As grand as what (2018-2021). The companions on this journey inhabit different temporalities and parallel realities; traversing a colonial, prejudiced past while dreaming up heterotopic futures even while love attunes to the catastrophe of the present moment. 

we are opposite like that is an interdisciplinary series –video, performance, textile, poetry, and music–from material gathered during Himali’s fieldwork in the uninhabited parts of the Arctic and Antarctic circles. This series tells stories from the poles from the non-human perspective of an archive that has witnessed deep time: the ice, a melting fossil, which is running out of time. The series fuses a variety of concerns: the ways in which we know the world, the slippery spaces between solidity and spirit, the potential of error, postcolonial preconceptions, a looming climate crisis and the interdependence of the natural and the occult. 

Drawing on those 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 physical and symbolic qualities of the natural elements coexist, calling for a transnational spirituality. As grand as what proposes a series of five rituals conducted by earth spirits to reactivate the energy centers of the earth post catastrophe with the tools of rhythm and love poetry.  

The exhibition is accompanied by two groups of performances carried out by Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, coinciding with the opening, on October 24, 2022, and its closing, on January 27, 28 and 29, 2023. More information and tickets.