Singh Soin also learned that, unlike glacial parts of Canada or Scandinavia, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard has no native peoples and no mythology. Now, the North Pole has become the blank canvas for the artist’s own imagined mythology — what she calls “an old-school, Ovidian story of metamorphosis,” which has earned her a Frieze Artist Award. At the London fair in early October, she will show “We Are Opposite Like That II” (2019), a fantastical film that offers a feminist answer to masculine explorer narratives and colonial unease, and which meditates on ice as an archive of stories that risk being lost to glacial melt. (The film will also be broadcast on the U.K.’s Channel 4 this fall.) Singh Soin herself plays an equatorial, tropical creature who transforms into ice: a figment of the Victorian imagination, perhaps, but also an agent who animates and awakens the permafrost to become a “vibrant, living, breathing” entity.

The artist, 32, grew up in Delhi and attended university in the United States and London, but her relationship with the Arctic extends back to her childhood. Her father is an explorer, and not long after she was born, he traveled to the Arctic to study the erosion of the ozone layer. Her parents founded a travel company together, and Singh Soin makes annual expeditions with her family to “the edges of the mainstream map,” as she puts it, where she collects folklore, sand, seeds and imagery.

In one way or another, Singh Soin says, all of her work is “about creating speculations or alternate cosmologies.” She’s drawn to fantastical writers like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, and folk stories like the Buddhist Jataka tales from India. While aboard the Arctic-bound ship, she quickly became absorbed by the “history of conjecture” that has taken root in the North Pole, the theories that have settled there. “I was reading about the history of the Arctic, and I immediately loved the idea that the Arctic and Antarctic may have been tropical paradises in the past, that they were teeming with mosquitoes and dinosaurs.” In response, she began to invoke what she describes as her own “alienness” in the Arctic, by bringing symbols of her home up onto the deck — an orchid, or a pineapple.