The installation created by the artist and writer Himali Singh Soin, in collaboration with the percussionist and composer David Soin Tappeser, connects multiple works in a new site-specific configuration to create a space of rest and listening. We enter a forest of hanging tapestries, a world of blue, white and terracotta; we hear words, shivers, creaks and crackles. The artists have researched polar regions and icy imaginaries, as well as the strange and deep-time connections between the Indian subcontinent and the Antarctic region, going back to Pangaea.
Subcontinentment (2020) is at once epiphanic manifesto, field recording and multi-scalar composition. It brings together Arctic soundscapes and recordings of lockdown-era Delhi. The portmanteau neologism of the title suggests the possibility of rest in the face of entanglement, complexity and complicity. Mountain, pixelated in the water (2021) reproduced the sound wave of Subcontinentment in a cotton-and-silk piece, created by master artisan Gajam Govardhan during the Covid-19 pandemic, using ahimsa (or non-violent) silk – a production method that does not require the silkworm to be killed – and a laborious technique whereby threads are individually dyed before weaving. In this transposition, the loom makes its own kind of music.
—Lucia Pietroiusti
