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The word inanation is related to the state of emptiness. A vessel is exhausted of its contents, rendering it hollowed out, enervated, fragile, and in some sense, prepared for an act of regeneration or transfiguration. The corporeal body, a faithful companion or even ‘a sly beast’, can through certain embodied practices wander into liminal realms. Acts of inanition such as ritualistic fasting, meditation, and other forms of deprivation result in significant shifts in metabolic, psychological, emotional states. In this liminality, all consciousness and reality seem untethered from the physical world ‘where the body, partly lightened of ballast, enters into a world for which it is not made.’

In Sincere Seeker, artist Nicola Singh’s new gallery work, these liminal states are a critical starting point. She applies her expanded studio practice to the work, a process of prepping her body for vocal, movement and text based performances and engagements. For this solo show at Cubitt, her fastidious prepping also comes into play. It is drawn from her extended critical engagement and training in devotional practices, Indian classical music traditions, yoga asana and pranayama, western popular music, not to mention experimental music.

She makes a series of improvised vocal recordings, overlaying one on top of the other. In the first instance, she records an improvised durational performance of the Sanskrit mantra soham, a nominal sentence. In its performance as a durational chant, Singh not only leverages the metaphysical and esoteric underpinnings of the phrase, but importantly, its sonic attributes. Often readily translated as ‘That Is I’ or ‘I Am That’, soham appears in numerous ancient Sanskrit texts of metaphysic and religious philosophy. The mantra underscores the philosophical identification of an individual with the oneness of all matter and the ultimate reality or the Supreme Being. In instructions to the chant, practitioners are told to mentally articulate the so with inhalation of breath, and to sound the ham on exhalation. Instead, Singh sounds this mantra on both the in and out breath, drawing the so into her on the inhale and the ham as she breathes out. The chanting of the phrase itself is informed in part by Singh’s training in Dhrupad—an ancient style of Indian classical music wherein long, elaborate expositions of Sanskrit syllables, often in iterative combinations, reveal the shape, colour, emotive and spiritual depths of the raga form. Such iterative chanting nudges both the practitioner and the listener towards meditative states, lulling them into a spectral submission to pejorated phrases. It is not the meaning of words that matter anymore in such a surrender, it is the meaning of sound and sonic states that matter. Any semantic meaning that words or lyrics possess transmute into gibberish, leaving only the sonic building blocks, the syllables and phonemes that propagate in a rarefied atmosphere.

Secondly, she draws from her ongoing training in the esoteric practice of chanting Sanskrit alphabet sounds known as Mantra Purusha, wherein the relation of sound, subtle energies and the corporeal body are explored. Vowels and consonants, long and short, are vocalised and serve as ‘locational indicators’ to energetic areas of the subtle body. Singh improvises with these alphabet sounds and the English words given to guide pronunciation, mixing up somatic and semantic meaning. Therapeutic and diagnostic ultrasound provides us with conventional modes of understanding the connections with sound and healing, but experimental practices, especially traditional ones, are often conflated with the arcane or the crypto or pseudo-religious. Singh very deftly brings alternative meanings into the realm of sonic and performance arts by demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of the depth of possibilities between the body, sound, emotion, environment, and atmosphere. In Singh’s deployment of these sonic artefacts, she recovers the profound depths that esoteric aesthetics offer to contemporary art.

Thirdly, Singh performs subtle strains of the Bob Marley and the Wailers song Natural Mystic, adding a playful and melancholic lyrical melody to the drone like recitations of the first two elements. This rare, sparse melody and lyric, seems a dainty but also unruly, ethereal texture pointing to a private emotion. The three recordings thus created form the sonic layers of the composite work, which is characterised by an unsettling mix of shamanistic ritual, mystical ordering, stark ferality, and a persistent sense of otherworldliness.

In some sense, the composition can be seen as ‘prepared’, in the convention of western experimental music of the early 20th century. In such instances, the preparation of an instrument with a combination of a conceptual thought and a material intervention shaped the artistic outcome. Maurice Delage’s Ragamalika for the prepared piano, wherein a piece of cardboard is used under the B-Flat strings for a dampening effect in order for the sound to mimic Indian percussion, brings to mind this century old tradition of preparing instruments in experimental and avant-garde music and art. To my mind, Singh employs her body as a prepared instrument—a conceptual strategy located ‘in the neighbourhood of history and influence’. 

In the gallery space Singh’s installed work subverts the conventional visual trope of the three wise monkeys which embody the proverb of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” Here, Singh reconfigures their forms and expressions. Drawing inspiration from the sculptural work of the renowned Indian artist K.G. Subrahmanyam, Singh set out to fabricate three monkey figurines. Singh’s three monkeys began as soft toy teddybears. The monkeys were covered in a thin silicone to make a mould and then cast in Jesmonite. Singh wanted to achieve a look that showed the transformation of a soft entity into something hard and hollowed out. A speaker sits in the hallowed out belly of each monkey. Each monkey has its own voice. 

Further, Singh’s intention was to imbue the monkeys in poses associated with the energy-sound twinship of the Mantra Purusha practice. Each monkey sculpture is fixed with its hands touching the associated part of the body to the vowel sounds used in the vocalisations. Whilst the conventional three wise monkeys are blocking the sense in a proverbial act, Singh’s monkeys are tending to the energetic animations of the subtle body. These Purusha energetic areas, or chakras, feed into Singh’s conceptual thoughts, informed as they are from intersecting interests in experimental, devotional, and esoteric practices alike. Singh adds significant conceptual depth by locating the idea of the totemic monkeys in a memorial terrain—to her father’s Ikea soft toy monkey. This brings complex colours of grief, loss, love, and memorialisation to the composite work and imbues the three figures with additional layers of artistic, psychological and emotional meaning. Also, certain phrasings of Singh’s composition mimic monkey calls. Here too, the parallel to the Balinese Gamelan Monkey Chant and its influence on Steve Reich’s work are apparent. It is noteworthy that Singh did not attempt to mimic monkey sounds; the sounds she made in her performative state took on an unusually coincidental mimetic character. The three monkeys can be seen as shamans, or deities, there to conduct an oracular ritual of sorts. Perhaps they impart to the viewer, through their presence and the sounds emanating from inside their hollow bodies, a sense of transcendence. An elegiacal yet playful and oddball transcendence. 

Sincere Seeker marks an important coalescence of Singh’s interests, skills, and artistic vision. Over the 20th century there has been a great deal of experimental art engaging in a serious way with eastern metaphysics and aesthetics. Singh extends this experimental legacy by introducing extraordinarily rigorous embodied practices into a singular artistic idiom. In doing so, Singh points us to the transcultural, conceptual, aesthetic, and temporal connections between diverse practices and traditions. Sincere Seeker is a work of unsettlingly alluring depth and reflects Singh’s thoughtful and subtle embodied artistic practice.