Himali Singh Soin’s artwork joins our permanent collection

We are thrilled to share that artwork by renowned artist and writer Himali Singh Soin is now part of the Richmond Borough Art Collection. The artwork—eight digital collages printed on bamboo paper—interrogates the collection, and with it the story, of Sir Richard Burton. 

In July 2021 we invited Himali to explore the collection of personal effects, books and photographs which formerly belonged to the 19th-century explorer Richard Francis Burton. The artist worked with historian of science Alexis Rider to respond to the collection and to Burton’s search for the source of the Nile. Himali’s mesmerising and layered imagery is based on geography, politics and personal reflections. The work superimposes photographs of Burton’s own archives with contemporary imagery of the Nile to examine the archive through a feminist, decolonial, ecopoetic lens. 

Their response to the Burton collection, including this artwork, became an exhibition at Orleans House Gallery in 2022, Brow of a God / Jaw of a Devil. 

The Richmond Borough Art Collection is a celebration of place and community, and it continues to grow and develop.  

The collection accounts for over 4,000 works of art. Most of the collection is housed on-site at Orleans House Gallery its environmentally controlled, purpose-built picture store, and around 200 works are on public display in exhibitions at Orleans House Gallery, in council buildings and at other local historic houses. These include the municipal offices at York House and the Civic Centre in Twickenham, as well as Garrick Temple, Marble Hill House and Strawberry Hill House. 

Explore the collection online 

Himali Singh Soin is an artist and poet. Her works dissect the environments around and beyond her by amassing materials—literary, archival, fictions—to metaphorically reflect on human engagement and disengagement with the natural world. She has shown at Serpentine, Somerset House, Whitechapel and Mimosa House, London; TBA21, Madrid; Migros Museum, Zurich; Khoj, Delhi; Gropius Bau, Berlin and Dhaka Art Summit among others. She was the recipient of the 2019 Frieze Artist Award. Her recent solo at The Art Institute of Chicago was an exploration of transnational nuclear culture and her current research focuses on the metaphysics of salt.