Majlis Talks Session 5: On Translucency

Alserkal Arts Foundation Residents - Spring 2024

A lecture performance, “On Translucency” is a mytho-poetic manifesto about the space between the shore and the tide, the translucent shallow, visible and invisible, dense and sheer. It departs from Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity and arrives in places where frosted windows keep the heat of the sun out, soften the detailed edges of bodies while holding on to the relational, letting light through and not shutting out the other. Translucency argues for a kind of not-knowing that allows for the private world of thought and the gregarious world of friendship, as island to archipelago. This manifesto is filtered through the translucent lenses of air, ice, skin, oil, and film. Translucency is both the right to illegibility and the desire for interpretation. Translucency is an erotic way back into our post-natural lifeways.

Accompanied by home-made instruments and an experiment in the music of iridescence.

About the Artists

Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist currently who works between New Delhi and London. Singh Soin's interdisciplinary work focuses on the nature of identity, environmental issues, and the notion of deep time. She works across film, spoken word, performance, epistolary poetry, animation, music, and embroidery, which allows her to interweave complex concepts and narratives together.

david soin tappeser is a drummer, composer and performance artist based between London and New Delhi. his practice explores socio-eco-spiritual-tempo-somatic dimensions of sound. his performances and compositions use rhythm to unearth, manipulate and deconstruct linear perceptions of time, interdependence and alterity. they hint at intercultural entanglements, parallel histories and extra-human frames of reference while thinking about environmental destruction and sociopolitical fissures.