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.

we are opposite like that (2019) was commissioned by the Frieze Artist Award 2019 in collaboration with Forma and Channel 4.

audio works

In 2020, under lockdown in delhi, we were commissioned to transform a selection of chapters from Himali’s almanac we are opposite like that - at the time stuck at the printing press - into a series of audio pieces. In transforming the text into a soundscape, himali and I began finding correspondences and intersections between polar recordings and the hyper, denuded aural environment of Delhi under lockdown.

subcontinentment

composition for percussion and electronics, 2020

Subcontinentment is a manifesto that stems from Himali’s fieldwork in the polar circles, where she was confronted with her 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: 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.

antarctica was a queer rave before it got busted by colonial white farts

composition for acoustic disco drums, 2020

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.

lady antigua

composition for organ, 2020

Lady Antigua starts at the bow of the boat. Lying in the net, Himali 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 her 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. 

Boatness

text score, 200 x 30cm, 2020

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.