Himali Singh Soin

Writer and Artist

Himali is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance and intimacy. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss, and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. Her speculations are performed in audio-visual, immersive environments.

Himali’s poetic methodology explores the myriad technologies of knowledge, from scientific to intuitional, indigenous and alchemical processes. Outer space is often used as a place from which to navigate alien distances and earthly intimacy, rewiring ideas of nativism, nationality, nihilism and cultural flight. Her inspirations include the ancient Stoics and contemporary literature, travel diaries and ancient diagrams. By manipulating semiotic flows, she creates conditions for the observation of microstructures of social and geopoetic time. In the face of extinction, her work insists on resurgence.

Click here to find out more about her previous works and exhibitions.

Read on for an exclusive Q&A with Himali ahead of the Summit:

What does wellbeing mean to you?

We feel wellbeing, I think, when we are able to listen to and attend to our many senses and the pleasures of the natural world and follow their guidance, softly. Wellbeing is a sense of justice, aided by an openness to magic.

Why are you looking forward to being part of The Wellbeing Summit?

It feels like making kin.

How does your work connect to wellbeing?

Ancestors of the blue moon draws on research into my namesake, the Himalayas, and its animistic rituals and remedies, mystical geometries, old-new materialisms and spirit realisms. These flash fictions are from the perspective of remote or forgotten deities. Deities protected by rites of secrecy or left out of archives. Deities invisible and formless. Deities incarnated as ruined objects, dangerous aspects or shadowy energies. They flow through our contemporary timescape, recounting the world they witness. These 13 dispatches signify the Tibetan Buddhist conception of the layers of the astral world and the years it takes to transform linear time into mythical time.

How does your work for the summit bring you and your audience closer to wellbeing?

It is my hope that the words of the goddesses protect everyone, that they give life to lesser heard voices, and brings us closer to the spirits of the earth. That we might consider the catastrophe of climate change and imagine new rituals for healing.