Himali Singh Soin and Alexis Rider
Brow of a God/Jaw of a Devil: Unsettling the Source of the Nile, 2021
Transcript: Brow of a God/Jaw of a Devil: Unsettling the Source of the Nile sparked from a collaboration between artist Himali Singh Soin and historian of science Alexis Rider where they investigate the work of Sir Richard Burton. Connected to the East India Company and the colonial extractions of the continents throughout the 19th century, Burton was particularly obsessed with searching for the “source” of the Nile River in Egypt, or settling the question of the Nile. The history of Burton’s archives as it connects to imperial explorations are steeped in colonial notions of place and otherness. Brow of a God/Jaw of a Devil refigures this archive by playing with notions of fluidity, mystery, and materiality. Through the participation of their viewers, Himali and Alexis invite guests to interact with the archive by moving or reordering texts and images. Rather than focusing on control and order, the artists capture a playful and speculative sense of place. They reconstruct narratives of power with fluidity, leaving the space and the story malleable as it shifts through space and time. Rather than settling the question of the Nile, they work to unsettle this story and turn towards creating a space for the unheard voices in history. Written and recorded by Ally Swanson
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Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser
Chapter 3: Antarctica was a queer rave before it got busted by colonial white farts, 2020
From the ongoing interdisciplinary work, we are opposite like that, 2017-2022
Transcript: Himali Singh Soin’s work often moves across text, performance, imagery, and sound. Fluidity has become a common theme in her constructions of intimacy and entanglements between human and nonhuman forms. In her sound piece, Antartica was a queer rave before it got busted by colonial white farts from the larger multimedia project we are opposite like that, she traces the history of Antartica’s formation, particularly the possibilities within a decolonial framework. Rather than focusing on linear notions of time and western imagery, the artist imagines a place free from the rigid confines of borders and the conditioning of bodies. The music was rendered by David Soin Tappeser, capturing 90s rave beats. Recording on an acoustic drum set, the artists create a world that is anything but desolate. Antarctica is instead queer, full of life, and free. Without depending on restrictions of the body and confinements of place, Himali invites us to imagine the possibilities outside of these constructs carrying us through time and space. Her work serves to offer a space built around collective being and practices of caring for our environments and each other. Written and recorded by Ally Swanson
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micha cárdenas, in collaboration with Marcelo Viana Neto, Kara Stone, Abraham Avnisan, Morgan Thomas, Dorothy Santos, Wynne Greenwood and Adrian Phillips
Sin Sol/No Sun, 2018
Transcript: micha cárdenas’ augmented reality game, Sin Sol/No Sun, challenges her viewers to consider the material and immaterial ways in which climate change disproportionately affects immigrants, trans people, and those living with a disability. The augmented reality (AR) game is told through the poetry of Aura, a trans Latinx hologram who narrates the positionality of trans people of color in the climate crisis. Simultaneously, Aura’s dog, Roja, leads the players through a landscape of environmental collapse, allowing the players to escape the brutality of the fires by finding oxygen capsules containing poetry. As the players progress through the game, their senses are overwhelmed with information. cárdenas uses AR in her game to access multiple realities at once to display their interconnectedness. Her game is a combination of environmental archiving as well as envisioning a future of multi species survival. As Aura reveals the particular violence that trans people of color face amidst climate change, she also ignites hope in the players. She not only illustrates a world devastated by human destruction and environmental despair; she also imagines a future of climate justice. The AR game looks towards realities beyond our time, envisioning a world built around kinship. By placing us within the framework of collapse, players must use the knowledge of Aura to escape disaster. cárdenas encourages us to build relationships with each other and think about our own positionalities and responsibilities in addressing climate change. Written and recorded by Ally Swanson
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Ada M. Patterson, The Whole World is Turning, 2019
Transcript: The Whole World is Turning is a multi-media installation forged around ideas of kinship, belonging, and mourning. Through textiles, performance, and poetry, Patterson demonstrates the individual and collective ways climate change affects people. She acknowledges that global climate change affects people and communities differently, and she reckons with this discrepancy in historical narrative. In the artwork, the figures reflect on their collective loss while each feels and experiences that loss differently. Through their shared perception, they are able to adapt and survive. Their desire for connection allows them to think of collective ways of being and existing that are essential in their survival. Patterson uses music and textiles to call on histories of collective healing. She insists that our way out of the climate crisis is reliant on our abilities to make bonds and create space for empathy. Patterson uses storytelling in this way to think about the value in kinship in addressing our current and future crisis. Written and recorded by Ally Swanson.
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Joiri Minaya
Woman-Landscape (On Opacity) #4, 2020
Transcript: She smiles at you, her lips as plush as ripe fruit. Within her is the expansiveness of the Caribbean Sea: blue, abundant, and promising. Tropical. Pleasurable. Consumable. She is another’s image of paradise. But what is she smiling for, this young Dominican girl? Does she grow tired from the sun’s heat as it browns her skin? What does she dream of when she looks to the open skies? To us, the audience, her thoughts remain unknowable. The lush, innerness of her life is elusive, untranslatable, and slippery like water.
Joiri Minaya is a multi-media, interdisciplinary artist whose practice complicates and untangles the social fabrications of gender and identity. In her recent piece titled, Woman-landscape (On Opacity) #4 & #5, she contemplates how Dominican folk’s feminine bodies have been historically perceived and further reified into erotically “available” commodities. Inspired by Glissant’s notions of opacity, Minaya resists transparency and the colonial gaze’s capture by rooting her collage-based art in a kind of illegibility. Through the superimposition of abstract, tropical patterns—such as palm trees and decorative flowers—onto the silhouettes of Caribbean women from vintage postcards, Minaya creates a protective, liberatory type of masking that disallows the easy consumption of these women’s rich, ineffable lives. Visual stereotypes that once ostensibly signified Caribbean-ness are instead used to conceal the subject. Minaya’s work intentionally sabotages the essentialization of Dominican identities and landscapes. Rather than comply to the ethnographic photography and tourist advertisements that have historically bounded her, Minaya dismantles such reductive labels by reconstructing them into newly innovative, expansive visions of identity. This subversion thus allows Minaya to regain control of her own cultural narrative. Written and recorded by Cheyenne Bryant
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