Setting the Stage for a Gathering of Friends

Himali Singh Soin’s “Setting the Stage for a Gathering of Friends”, which was made in the heart of the pandemic of 2020, in Delhi, is about uncertainty, fear, chance, missed connections, false promises. The work is a return to something we once felt and a repetition of something we had never experienced. It charts the path of an Ensō (a special circle form in Zen Buddhism), a depiction of a “whole” or a “void”, a different cosmology, depending on the way you look at it, up-close or at a distance. The circle in the video holds together the improvised elements of free jazz and the disparate footnotes found in fortunes opened at random. It sets the stage for a gathering of friends and proposes that waiting can be a form of love.