Part of Serpentine's Back to Earth
Himali Singh Soin: static range
static range, still, 2020-2021
dear mountain,
how does one move you. shift you, but also elicit emotion, make you cry because something was too beautiful or it hurt.
As part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth, writer and artist Himali Singh Soin presents static range.
static range is a multi-disciplinary and multi-limbed project using a real-life spy-story in the Indian Himalayas as a springboard for speculations and reflections about invisibility, leakages, spiritual entanglements, nuclear culture, socio-political marginalisation and icarian delusions. This series of transmissions that make up ‘static range’, include an adapted stamp, letters, an animation, music, embroidery, healing, planting and a performance installation.
About the Project
Nanda Devi, meaning the goddess of happiness, is the patron mountain of the Indian Himalayas. During the cold war in 1965, the CIA collaborated with the Indian Intelligence Bureau to site a nuclear-powered surveillance device on the mountain to intercept Chinese nuclear missile data. The mountain goddess, a temperamental revolutionary, whipped up an immense tempest, and the expedition had to turn back. The plutonium powered device was stashed on the mountain with the intention of recovering it the following season, however it has yet to be found, and “could still be ticking somewhere”.
