As India prepares its presentation for the Venice Biennale 2026, the selection of artist duo Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser deserves special attention for many reasons. Especially as they have worked together and individually, and as those who explore two kinds of ecological sensibilities—working collaboratively as Hylozoic/Desires—this signals a compelling shift toward interdisciplinary, research-driven, and sensorial practices.
Artists who handle and blend diverse media, such as poetry, sound, performance, and installation, situate India’s pavilion within a broader conversation on ecology, colonial histories, and speculative futures.
The broad claim that metaphor is generative rather than merely descriptive lies at the core of their technique, which sets their collaborative performance apart. That is, an active force that may create new constellations of meaning out of diverse histories, materials, and beings. Soin and Tappeser envision “a flat ontological ether in which all forms of life—stone, spirit, machine or human—are equal” as Hylozoic/Desires, emphasising a worldview that rejects hierarchy and welcomes entanglement.
Rhythm as Duration, Sound as Space
An essential starting point for the duo’s collaborative language is David Soin Tappeser’s solo work, a musical connection in and of itself. Tappeser is a German-born jazz drummer who lives in London and New Delhi. His work is built on improvisation and the use of rhythm to manipulate time, which is both a metaphor that releases people from rhythm and a magnetic force that draws listeners into music. A sophisticated approach to percussion that emphasises tone, dynamics, and the relational possibilities of sound is informed by his deep connection with musical traditions in India, Nepal, Mexico, and Europe.
Performance becomes a common temporal architecture through the accumulation of rhythmic tensions between sound and silence, repetition and rupture. According to Tappeser’s work, rhythm is not just aural but also spatial, social, and profoundly embodied, able to maintain group focus while permitting individual experiences.
Cosmologies of Language and Loss
In Soin’s work, language expands time, but in Tappeser’s, rhythm shapes it. Himali Singh Soin is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who creates what she calls “cosmological constructs” rather than distinct objects. She explores ecological mourning, displacement, and intimacy using a variety of media, including poetry, video, textiles, and performance. She frequently uses metaphors from space and the natural world.
Soin’s writings often deal with what philosopher Timothy Morton refers to as “hyperobjects”—phenomena like climate change or geological time that are so vast in temporal and spatial scale that they are beyond human comprehension. She gives these ideas a sensory quality through poetic narrative and speculative fiction, enabling viewers to interact with them in an embodied, affective way. This strategy is best illustrated by her long-term project We Are Opposite, which positions glacial ice as both an archive and a narrator. Soin navigates the boundaries of language under political constraints by giving voice to non-human phenomena like mountains, ice, and air. This suggests that fiction can convey the truth when direct communication is restricted.
Salt, Empire, and Counter-Histories
The history of Britain’s imperial salt monopoly in India is a major focus of Hylozoic/Desires’ recent work. The pair recreates the widely forgotten Inland Customs Line, a 2,500-mile hedge constructed in the 19th century to impose salt taxes, through installations and performances held at locations including Somerset House and Tate Britain in London. Their 80-meter textile installation highlights the ecological and human implications of this lack of infrastructure while materialising it with botanical pigments made from plants formerly used in the hedge. The artists construct a multi-layered interaction between visibility and erasure, past and present, by combining this outside intervention with an indoor display in former colonial administrative structures.
Salt becomes a charged material—economic, spiritual, and ecological—in initiatives such as The Hedge of Halomancy. Hylozoic/Desires transforms archival voids into places of imaginative possibility by recovering underrepresented voices and non-human views through speculative narratives and multimedia environments.
Toward a Multisensory, Multiversal Practice
The dedication to a genuinely multidisciplinary process in which poetry, music, and material form are inextricably linked sets Hylozoic/Desires apart. Their performances frequently take place in immersive settings where text, acoustics, and moving pictures come together to create what could be called “speculative cosmologies.” Their concern with (non)place and transnational histories is fundamental to this method. Instead of focusing on fixed geographies, their work traces fluxes over time and space, including migration, trade, memory, and affect. This is demonstrated not only by their studies on salt but also by Tappeser’s involvement with international musical traditions and Soin’s investigations of polar locations.
India at Venice: A Poetics of Entanglement
Hylozoic/Desires is set to showcase a collection of artwork at the Venice Biennale 2026 that captures their primary themes: the intertwining of histories, the agency of materials, and the capacity of art to rethink how we relate to the world. In a world characterised by ecological crises, geopolitical strife, and rekindled discussions about colonial legacies, their approach provides a crucial intervention. Instead of offering didactic stories, they create spaces for interaction that encourage viewers to explore complexity, ambiguity, and multiplicity.
By doing this, Soin and Tappeser present a different way of being that is rooted in a poetics of relation, open to the ambiguities of speculative thought, and sensitive to the rhythms of the non-human world. Instead of trying to reconcile conflicts, their art aims to keep them reverberating throughout time, much like an incomplete line of poetry or a sustained note.
Bibliography
Theurer, Sarah Johanna. Himali Singh Soin.
Al-Sweel, Ruba. Himali Singh Soin: The Third Pole.
Wu, Jenny. The Quantum Entanglement of All Mountains.
Boyle, Meka. Himali Singh Soin: Daughter of the Mountains.
Vats, Arushi. The Colour of Salt Is Bruise.
Something Curated. Interview: Himali Singh Soin on Almanacs, South Asian Futurism & The Power of the Word.
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