Himali works across text, performance and moving image. She utilizes metaphors from the natural environment to construct speculative cosmologies that reveal non-linear entanglements between human and non-human life. Her poetic methodology explores the myriad ways of knowing, from scientific to intuitional, indigenous and alchemical processes. Outer space is often used as a place from which to navigate alien distances and earthly intimacy, rewiring ideas of nativism, nationality, nihilism and cultural flight. In the face of extinction, her work insists on resurgence. Her inspirations include the ancient Stoics and contemporary experimental poetry, travel diaries and ancient diagrams. By manipulating semiotic flows, she creates conditions for the observation of microstructures of social and geo-poetic time. 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.
Recent and upcoming group shows include Migros Museu, Zurich, Yarat Contemporary, Baku, Serpentine Park Nights, Somerset House and Mimosa House, London and Dhaka Art Summit among others. Her writing appears regularly in Artforum, among others.
She is the recipient of the 2019 Frieze Artist Award and the 2020 Whitechapel Writer-in-residence. Her book on the poles and their uncanny bearing on the rest of the world, we are opposite like that, is forthcoming post-lockdown.
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