Performing the Nuclear Sublime: Himali Singh Soin’s static range

Himali Singh Soin’s performative work, static range, is situated at the intersection of archives, science, the speculative and the anecdotal. It is premised on an actual espionage story from 1965 (the peak of the Cold War) in which the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States of America partnered with the Intelligence Bureau of India to place a powerful listening device on Nanda Devi, a high massif on the Himalayan range in India. To be positioned on the Indo-Tibetan border, the device was designed to intercept Chinese nuclear missile data. A product of inter-state suspicion and paranoia, the nuclear device was plutonium-powered, and had to be abandoned on the mountain before its installation due to a blizzard. On a second trip to the camp in the following year, the expedition team was unable to locate the device, which has since been believed to lie buried somewhere in the Himalayan glaciers. 

The plutonium from the device has allegedly leaked radiation into the mountain, creating glimmering blue ice-caves from the heat, causing flash floods and resulting in cancer amongst the Sherpa communities of the surrounding villages. Closed to expeditions, Nanda Devi was photographed by the artist’s father, the mountaineer Mandip Singh Soin, from a neighbouring peak in 1978. This image was subsequently converted to a postage stamp by the Indian Post and Telegraph services in 1988. The artist’s assumption is that her father and the film he used might have been exposed to radiation; by extension, the original photograph may have carried an innate toxicity in its material constitution as well. In a conflation of personal and public histories, she uses the conceit of the stamp to create an epistolary narrative addressed by the spy device to the mountain. The image of the postage stamp morphs—through an animated sequence—as it might have under the condition of radiation. Read aloud through its duration, the letter speaks of entanglements in care and toxicity, where the nuclear implant is imagined to still receive and relay signals from across the mountain’s range. In the course of the mutation, the word “India” and its Hindi equivalent, “भारत,” blur, become illegible and disappear―a tangential indication of a slow violence panning out in parallel time within the nation-state, where conflict zones like Kashmir remain outside the purview of postal services.

Soin’s original plan was to transfer the stamp on celluloid film and expose it to radiation from X-ray machines as she traveled through airports to observe the effects of the contact, but the Covid-induced lockdowns foreclosed such a possibility. Consequently, she partnered with Dr Ele Carpenter―a specialist in nuclear photography―to imagine the invisible flux of radiation through visual and sonic registers. The analogue music in the computed sequence, composed by David Soin Tapesser, is inspired by the music of the Uighur community (a censored, Muslim minority) in the Chinese province of Xinjiang―home to the nuclear research facility that the spy device on Nanda Devi was meant to surveil. In tandem with the artist’s intention to trace leakages and osmosis, the music composition imagines that the device―which was designed to function like a covert radio antennae―may also have picked up frequencies from Uighur protest music across the border. The music is thus punctuated with glitches and interferences, purportedly following its interception by the device. The impulse of the project therefore extends itself beyond the perimeters of Nanda Devi, to give form to the nuclear sublime and its territorial reverberations through their reproduction in image. A speculative fiction interrogating the trans-material conditions of their interaction, the artist reimagines the function of the nuclear trespasser and its place in a transformed ecology―one where thresholds have dissolved.

To read more about Himali Singh Soin’s work, please click here.

All images from static range by Himali Singh Soin. 2020–Ongoing. Images courtesy of the artist.