In her first solo exhibition in the United States, artist and writer Himali Singh Soin presents Static Range, an ongoing project that explores the intertwined histories and futures of nuclear landscapes.

The story begins with an act of Cold War espionage. In 1965, the CIA and the Indian Intelligence Bureau collaborated to install a plutonium-powered spy device on Nanda Devi, patron mountain of the Indian Himalayas, to intercept Chinese nuclear missile data. A terrible storm interrupted the mission, and the device was abandoned on the mountainside. It has never been found, yet its invisible environmental fallout endures.

During a mountaineering expedition in 1978, a decade after the device was lost, Soin’s father and his team took a photograph of Nanda Devi that was later made into a national postage stamp. The mountain’s nuclear landscape thus began to transmit messages.