Sensing Polar Ice Bodies

Abstract

This chapter investigates how the long-term project we are opposite like that (2017–2022) by contemporary artist Himali Singh Soin engages with posthuman feminist concepts within an Arctic discourse, here in particular in relation to the climatic changes that lead to the melting of the Polar caps, and what the gradual disappearance and transformation of what has dominated its landscape and mythologies over time—ice—means. Methodologically, the chapter uses images and quotes from Soin’s work as guiding story-telling elements to map out different themes and embodied concepts, including: the disappearance of planetary history through the melting Polar ice and with it, the disappearance of the ice as a natural archive; Astrida Neimanis’s ‘figuration’ of bodies of water; the mythologies, ghosts and monsters left behind that remain interlocutors for our future; the omnipresence of colonialism in the Arctic; how the relics of historical Arctic exploration still haunt us today; and how our situatedness points to our differences and distances from one another, but can also be used as a common feminist and transformative ground for creating other possible worlds.