Bio
Praneet Soi was born in Kolkata in 1971. He left West Bengal for the Western state of Gujarat in 1990 where he studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharajah Sayajirao University, in the city of Vadodara (Baroda). in the 1990s India, until then a closed economy, liberalised its economic policies and opened its gates to globalization. The market environment changed instantly and upon completing his Bachelor's and Master’s degrees, Soi found work as a visualizer within the nascent, burgeoning advertising industry in New Delhi. Challenged by the demands of international branding yet fascinated to witness, from this vantage point, a country in transition, Soi continued painting. He learned, in this nascent environment, to use the computer and software such as photoshop which until then had not been widely available within the country.
In 1998 he left for the U.S. where he attended the University of California at San Diego on a scholarship. In 2001 he was selected to the summer residency at the Skowhegan school of Painting and Sculpture. Soi moved to the Netherlands in 2002 to attend the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, a two-year (2202&2003) international residency program for artists and has since divided his time between Amsterdam and Kolkata.
Soi’s relationship with the film-maker Jean Pierre Gorin has been of seminal importance to his practice. Their constant dialoguing on art, representation and the relationship between them began in San Diego and continues. Gorin, a proponent of the essay-film, defines narrative as the construction of detours required by storytelling to elucidate an unsolvable mystery. Gorin’s adage, “An Image of an image of an image” helped Soi understand that in order to connect imagery, one has to tabulate and articulate the distance that separates them. This nuanced understanding of the image as outlined by Gorin lays the foundation of Soi’s narratives within his paintings and installations.
Soi’s works reside in important private and institutional collections in Europe and India. These include the permanent collections of the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
The artist can be reached via email:
praneetsoi@gmail.com
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Current
Recently, in April 2024 Soi, commissioned by Tavros Space, Athens, designed with Iris Lykourioti, of the architectural firm A Whales Architect, a tool for drawing. A prototype was built and first used by children, aged 10-12, attending class E at the 2nd Primary School Tavros, in the making of drawings of their school environment and subsequently inserted within a site-specific mural composed for the schools music-room. Soi designs such workshops sharing methodologies from his own practice, including a patchwork of technologies both digital and analogue, towards igniting in the participants an interest in materiality. At the heart of this activity lies Soi's belief that drawing prioritises multiplicity.
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Coronavirus Years: Luceberthuis, Centurion & Migrations
In 2021, towards the end of the Coronavius lockdowns, Soi was awarded a residency granted by the Mondriaan Foundation at the Luceberthuis in Bergen. Located near the dune environment of the Bergensebos bordering the ocean just north of Amsterdam, Soi would embark on long walks across the dunes and forest, marking out trees whose trunks and intertwining branches intrigued him. Oftentimes returning to sketch them Soi, enveloped within this verdant landscape, furthered his Notational Theory, a methodology allowing for the juxtaposition of imagery from different sources within his work. In 2022 A solo titled A Bergen Diary, outlining such thinking, opened at the Museum Kranenburgh, in Bergen, not far from the forest Soi walked for inspiration.
Migrations, Solo Exhibition, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2021.
The name given to this exhibition underlines a conversation between pattern and figuration, an exploration that has been strongly marked by Soi’s work with craftsmen over the course of the last decade in the valley city of Srinagar, in Kashmir. These engagements have renewed within his work a sensitivity to pattern. While working with certain motifs gleaned from the city’s rich Sufi culture the thematic of a bird appeared. Soi proceeded to explore this thematic over the body of works displayed in this exhibition, which marks his return to Delhi after a period of 5 years.
Birds migrate, as do patterns and images, filtered as they are through the innumerable communications that result from their transmission. Attuned to migration, Soi oscillates between the Netherlands and Kolkata. His family, originally from Lahore moved to Bengal during the partition of the country in 1947. The push and pull of such movements ignites a desire for stability - one that can only be attained through hybridity. The body of work on display across Migrations articulates this thinking, wedding this narrative to the semantics of image construction.
The body of work on display consists of paintings on canvas, created in the artist’s studio in Amsterdam and while in residency at the Luceberthuis in Bergen-Binnen, in North Holland. It includes ceramic tiles that were painted and drawn upon by Soi at a ceramic atelier in the region of Le Maupas, in Sussey, France. Soi used his time in this rural Bergundy to work in plein-air, allowing his hand primacy in the images that were etched out in special ceramic pencils, wash like under-glazes and deep over-glazes upon the tiles.
Soi’s narratives are open ended. Patterns serve as ground upon which images, wrought in different registers, are laid out. Washes, patterns laid out in low relief and drawings, often executed in plein- air mark a return to materiality, to the primacy of the hand. Upon the canvasses the drawings are etched out in silverpoint, a medieval technique. Unlike graphite it is permanent and cannot be erased. Silver oxidizes over time and these drawings will grow warmer over the years, a gradual transformation that allows Soi to link his use of photography in collecting material to his extensive use of drawing. Within Migrations two photographic images from his archive, used as references within this body of work have been placed as keys, shedding a light upon how he sees images as being composite structures.
Centurion: A body of work commissioned by the Van Abbe Museum for Bodyworks: Positions 6 (November 2020- April 2021), is a portrait of the city sparked by the discovery of a photograph taken by his grandfather of the Catherineskerk, in the centre of Eindhoven, in 1935, which branches off to explore Eindhoven’s historical relationship with Philips, its imprint still visible in in the city's renegotiation of its image as a hub for technology.
Soi first began visiting Eindhoven after moving to the Netherlands in 2002. His curiosity of the city's industrial history grew after identifying an image of his grandfather standing in front of the Catharinakerk in1939. Soi’s grandfather brought neon technology to Kolkata and was in Eindhoven ostensibly to visit the Philips Factory.
Starting with the manufacture of light bulbs, Philips, founded in 1891, propelled Eindhoven’s development. Under the aegis of Gilles Holst (1886-1968), the Science Director of the famed Natlab, both technological and fundamental research flourished. By 1970 Philips was an international electronics behemoth, employing 350,000 people.
Global competition subsequently began eroding profitability and in 1990 a harsh restructuring code-named Operation Centurion unfolded, causing almost 40,000 people to lose their jobs. The city of Eindhoven was forced to reinvent itself, preventing the decay industrial decline invariably brings. Its current positioning as a centre for hi tech is a result of this restructuring.
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Anamorphosis & Third Factory: 2019 & 2018
Anamorphosis: Notes from the West Bank, Winter in the Kashmir Valley opened at the Mosaic Rooms in London in 2019. An artist book, Anamorphosis, was released in 2021, co-published by Book Works UK and the Mosaic Rooms as an epilogue to the exhibition.
Invited by the Mosaic Rooms, London to create a new body of work, Soi travelled across the West Bank, visiting factories, workshops and farmers to understand the difficulties of productivity in an occupied and fragmented country. These journeys were punctuated by visits to sites known for their beauty, such as the Jordan Rift Valley. These subjects, the landscape and productivity, when juxtaposed, established a framework enabling Soi to construct a personal and alternative representation of this landscape, home to one of the most complex of political problematics in the world.
A new body of works emerged including drawings made in plein air, paintings and a video constructed from a cut and paste aesthetic narrating conversations and places visited. Soi included within the exhibition an installation of paper-mache tiles made with craftsmen in Kashmir in the winter of 2018.
Third Factory: From Kashmir to Lisbon via Caldas opened at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in 2018 as a part of the museum’s Conversas series. Across 2017 and 2018 Soi visited Lisbon repeatedly to examine artifacts within the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum’s collection.
A jade jar once belonging to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir(1569-1627) who built the famous Shalimar Gardens in Srinagar had Soi turn his gaze back to the Kashmiri city he has been visiting since 2010. He replicated at the historic Bordallo Pinheiro ceramic factory in Caldas da Rainha, a glazed tile from the 14th century tomb of Queen Miran Zain, who’s enigmatic pattern had fascinated him for years.
Such historical and geographic cross-overs, metaphorical of the dissemination of culture, were the subject of an installation utilising mapped-video, architecture and sound, forming an immersive installation. The title, Third Factory, alludes to the book by the Russian formalist Viktor Shovsky (1893-1984) who formulates that certain periods of ones life which are formative, in which one learns a lot may, be termed factories.
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Residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art & Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship: 2017 & 2015
In 2015 the artist was granted an artist fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute where he spent a month studying illuminated manuscripts, such as the Falnama, created in Safavid Iran and Ottoman Turkey in the 16th and early 17th centuries. This was followed in 2017 by a research period at the Chester Beatty Library while on a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin here he studied muraqqas within the Minto Album, painted between 1612 and 1640, which once belonged to Jahangir and Shah Jahan.
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Engagement with craftsmen in Srinagar: Ongoing since 2010
2014: Srinagar, an installation underlining Soi’s work with craftsmen in Srinagar, Kashmir was commissioned by curator, Bassam AL Baroni for the EVA Biennale (Limerick, Ireland). Subsequently it was has been shown in 2016 in the Van Abbe Museum where it is included within the museum collection and in Beirut as a part of the 13th Sharjah Biennale.
This project has a a prologue: Soi first visited the city of Srinagar in Kashmir in 2010 on a grant from the Basque Museum, Centro Culturo Montehermoso Kukturunea. He documented extensively the historic Sufi shrines in the city and met with local craftsmen and was captivated by the intricate motifs painted by them on papier-mache objects for the craft industry.
He returned to Srinagar in the spring of 2014 and embedded himself within the karkhana (studio) of the Master Craftsman Fayaz Jan, working with traditional Islamic patterns and motifs in the making of experimental compositions.
Srinagar has been a lived city for almost 1500 years. Kashmir was an important centre for Buddhism - the 4th Buddhist Conference was held in Kashmir under the rule of Kanishka in 72 AD. Hindu rulers left their mark in the region as is visible from the Martand Temple, built by Lalitaditya Muktapida of the Karkora dynasty and dating to eight century AD. Sufi saints such as Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani (1312-1385) travelled to Kashmir from Central Asia, spreading Islam while simultaneously introducing crafts such as papier-mache as a means for their subjects to earn a living.
Over the years and across repeated immersions with the craftsmen Soi has introduced imagery from such histories, along with his own, into the craftsmen’s workflow. The ensuing hybrid compositions are entanglements, an intertwining of the craftsmen's embodied knowledge and Soi's iconography. A metaphor for the accretion of culture evident in Srinagar which is representative of a rich diversity of form.
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Indian Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2011
In 2011 Soi was one of 4 artists to represent India at the 54th Venice Biennale. The Indian Pavilion, curated by Ranjit Hoskote, was titled Its About To Explode. Soi created on site at the Arsenale a large scale black and white painting upon a specially built wall, a continuation of his exploration of the media image. The slide-show Kumartuli Printer: Notes on Labor was projected upon an adjacent wall. A monograph, published by Distant Press, designed by Manuel Reader containing texts by Ranjit Hoskote and Charles Esche was released for this occasion.
The works at the Indian Pavilion marked a culmination of a working methodology that began in California at the University of California at San Diego and through the residency at the Rijksakademie. It allowed Soi to experiment in placing bodies of work together that came appear to have no direct connection to each other and originate from disparate sources, a procedure that he later labelled A Notational Methodology.
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Rijksakademie (2002,2003) and Just After
Accepted to the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in 2002&2003, Soi continued on the trajectory that he had begun while being mentored by Gorin at San Diego. Gorin had pointed to Soi the relationship of photography to painting while perusing the press imagery related to events just preceding and following 9-11. Soi began collecting the images they discussed and a sensitivity to framing grew through across such conversations.
Soi moved to Amsterdam in 2002 and continued working along the trajectory begun with Gorin in California. A series of miniature paintings on war ensued, titled The Disasters of War, after the etchings by Goya(1746-1828).
Gradually Soi developed a methodology addressing the severe aestheticization embedded within the media image. Using friends and himself as models Soi restaged the images in his studio. The resulting photographs were distorted, fragmented, recomposed and translated into drawings from which a further series of paintings unfolded, some as site-specific wall paintings, narrating the human body as a symbol of the current, roiled time
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Kumartuli and Notes on Labour: 2008 onwards
Kumartuli, in Kolkata’s old northern precinct, running along the banks of the river Hooghly, is historically home to a clan of potters, or kumors, that have historically worked with religious iconography prepared with clay collected from the banks of the river nearby. Thus Kumartuli is synonymous with the images of handcrafted effigies of the goddess Durga astride her tiger, slaying the demon Asur, lined up in assembly-line perfection in preparation of the city's religious calendar.
The tableau-vivant aesthetic utilised within the religious iconography and the skills of the craftsmen in modelling human bodies built up in Soi a curiosity as to how certain of his media related imagery might look as sculptures. Soi worked with the craftsman Monti Pal and a body of sculptures emerged from this interaction.
Working in Kumartuli exposed Soi to a hive of activity. Along with the workshops of the kumors it is home to a multitude of micro-industries housed in tiny rooms and decaying, sub-tenanted warehouses that once housed jute. The printer Biswanath Baag, operating an antiquated treadel letterpress became the subject of a slide-show titled “Kumartili Printer: Notes on Labour. Soi documented the printer, taking photographs of his hand at work feeding the press.
These photographs, certain of which were turned to drawings, were etched on letterpress plates and run through the machine once again.This entire process was documented by Soi on camera and the resultant images printed within his studio. He added to this imagery collages made of the printers work-space, tools and his commercial prints, adding a scrap-book aethetic to the collection of images that were subsequently turned into transparencies. An essay in slide-show format resulted, telling the story of the printer at work.
Completed in 2011 this work marks a beginning in Soi’s utilization of the moving image in creating essays that comment upon the intertwining of the making of images and labor.
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