Himali Singh Soin, To Tehran in My Dreams, 2016/2020, 15:10 mins
Himali Singh Soin, To Tehran in my Dreams, 2016/2020, 15:10 mins, digital performance still
To Tehran in My Dreams traces the historical development of long-distance communication. Through digressions such as the life of W. J. Elms, an employee of the Eastern and Associated Telegraph Companies, who made an error of a single punctuation mark and painter Samuel Morse who developed the Morse code, Himali’s emotive narrative unfolds the idea that language works like electricity, circuiting from sender to receiver, and that love is a glitch that can disrupt the linear logics of time and capital.
To Tehran in My Dreams is a performance that uses the mishaps of telegraph messages to produce a narrative of illogical, surrealist digressions and divergences. It takes time, fragments sentences, where the cross of a t is made into an ellipsis, the dot of an i into a full stop. The work celebrates and disrupts the linearity and repetition of the automatic regenerator machine and argues for error and for the radical consciousness of love to lay the groundwork for a revolution.
HIMALI SINGH SOIN
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, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance and intimacy. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss, and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. Her speculations are performed in audio-visual, immersive environments.
Text and performance by Himali Singh Soin
Directed by David Soin Tappeser
Description of archival image:
The Eastern Telegraph Co. System and its general connections. Chart of submarine telegraph cable routes, showing the global reach of telecommunications, 1901.
Source: A.B.C. Telegraphic Code 5th Edition, via Atlantic-cable via Wikimedia commons
(EXTRA)TERRESTRIAL CURRENTS
(Extra)Terrestrial Currents is an online programme of artist moving image, sound and text, presenting a screening programme with artists Thirza Cuthand, Ayesha Hameed, Evan Ifekoya and Himali Singh Soin, a commission by artist and composer Hannah Catherine Jones and a reading list by scholar Kathryn Yusoff.
Himali Singh Soin, To Tehran in My Dreams, 2016/2020, 15:10 mins 
Himali Singh Soin, To Tehran in my Dreams, 2016/2020, 15:10 mins, digital performance still
