About the Show | Audio Guides | Gallery Views | Show Materials| Credits and Acknowledgements
Himali Singh Soin, Opaque Topography, 2021 from Brow of a God/Jaw of a Devil: Unsettling the Source of the Nile, 2021 Giclée prints on Somerset Velvet paper, 17 x 22 inches.
Courtesy of the artist.
Artist Statement
Brow of a God / Jaw of a Devil offers environmental phenomena as potential agents of decoloniality. Some are material and existent, like the Sudd: a dense vegetation that grows on the Nile, granting it the right to opacity from those that try to exploit it. Some are elusive and spectral, like the Mountains of the Moon: a range of mountains that was believed to tower over Africa, hiding the source of the Nile within them. While keenly aware that landscapes cannot speak for those lives that were undone by colonization, Brow of a God / Jaw of a Devil asks viewers to consider a world in which alternate narrators shape the flow of history, and where power diffuses and pools through space and time.
This installation engages with the archive of the British explorer Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), whose colonially-motivated search for the source of the Nile is well documented. Using Burton’s erotic tendencies and his keen interest in the Kama Sutra, the archive has been eroticized instead of exoticized. It has been contorted, turning the Western, male explorer’s extractive tendency into a playful quest, a pleasure centre that undermines geopolitical control. What does the river, she, have to say? Evoking Burton’s other eccentric occult affinities for music, hypnosis, poetry, translation, spirit photography, painting and falconry, how can we reclaim art and magic as a tool of necessary healing and care? How can this feminist methodology allow us an entry into the spectral as a way of tender knowing? Reconfiguring the archive is taking it from the hands of those that want to redirect it with dams and understanding it as a feminist archive, a way of knowing that could be embodied and intersectional; and that begins to make space for erased, marginalized voices.
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Artist Bios
Himali Singh Soin (b. New Delhi, lives between London and New Delhi)’s multi-disciplinary 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 intuitional, indigenous and alchemical processes. Soin’s art has been shown at Khoj (Delhi), Mimosa House, Serpentine Gallery (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 2019. A solo exhibition of her work will open at The Art Institute of Chicago in December 2022.
Alexis Rider, Ph.D. (she/her) is a historian of science and the environment, whose research spans the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Her work centers the geosphere and cryosphere as sites of theorization and knowledge-making. Rider completed her doctorate in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in May 2022, and is currently a fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London. In addition to her academic work, Rider engages in artistic collaborations that explore human conceptions of the environment. She is also a potter interested in all things clay, glaze, and kiln-related. See more at alexisrider.com.
