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Artist Himali Singh Soin will create a therapeutic garden, proposing mending through growing plants with decontamination abilities, entangled with several such gardens planted around the world. The programme closes with the premiere of An Affirmation (2022), the final video of Soin’s series Static Range, set around the UK’s decommissioned nuclear plant, Sellafield. An extension of the film’s healing ritual will take place in the garden, led by the artist in collaboration with Viveka Chauhan.

An Affirmation takes the form of a letter that responds to the video Static Range, (2020 – ongoing), Himali’s multi-disciplinary and multi-limbed project using a real-life spy-story in the Indian Himalayas as a canvas for speculations and reflections about nuclear culture, porosity, leakages, toxicity and love, spiritual-scientific entanglements, environmental catastrophe and post-nation states. An Affirmation is written by “mountain” and addressed to “my friend, the atom.” Soin filmed on the periphery of Sellafield, a decommissioned nuclear plant nestled in the picturesque Lake District in northwest England. The accompanying soundscape consists of recordings of choirs performing near nuclear facilities at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Sellafield. Their voices were manipulated to echo the toll of emergency alarms: an aural evocation of the transnational entanglement of remote exclusion zones. As the mountain tells the atom, “This letter holds many elsewheres together.”

Himali Singh Soin 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 and entanglements. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. She has shown at Serpentine, Whitechapel and Mimosa House, London; TBA21, Madrid; Khoj, Delhi; Venice Biennale and Dhaka Art Summit among others. Her recent solo at The Art Institute of Chicago was an exploration of transnational nuclear culture. Her current research with her collective Hylozoic/Desires focuses on the metaphysics of salt, which began at DesertX in California last year and will continue in 2025 at Tate Britain and Somerset House in London.

Image: An Affirmation by Himali Singh Soin (Still – detail).