Praneet Soi
(b) 1971, Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Lives and Works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Praneet Soi was born in Kolkata in 1971. He left Bengal for the west coast of the country in 1990 where he studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharajah Sayajirao University, Vadodara (Baroda). The liberalized economic policies of the 1990's had ushered in an era of globalization and upon completing his Bachelor's and Master’s degrees, Soi worked as a visualizer within the advertising industry in New Delhi.
In 1999 he left for California 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 international residency program for artists and since then, he has divided his time between Amsterdam and Kolkata. This oscillatory movement impacts his practice. Soi identifies over time, patterns that emerge from an investigation of his extended social and economic landscape.
In California it was the miniaturising nature of the vast, undulating, suburban vista that caught his eye. Photographs collected while driving across it were collaged and recomposed as miniature paintings, using as canvas the unfolded carton the developed photographs were returned in.
Moving to Amsterdam, media reportage of unrest in the Middle-East, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the events following September 11th led Soi to collect related press-imagery. A series of miniature paintings on war ensued, titled The Disasters of War, after Goya. Soi gradually developed a methodology addressing the lens of representation he noticed embedded within the media image. Using friends and himself as models Soi restaged these images in his studio. The resulting photographs were subsequently 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 symbol of the current, roiled time.
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 from clay collected from the banks of the river nearby. Thus Kumartuli is synonymous with effigies of the goddess Durga handcrafted with assembly-line perfection for the city's religious calendar. However, Kumartuli is also home to a multitude of micro-industries housed in tiny rooms and decaying, sub-tenanted warehouses that once housed jute. Since 2008 Soi’s documentation of these small-scale factories has been an ongoing activity and has periodically led to the addition of chapters within a series titled Notes on Labor.
Soi first visited the city of Srinagar in Kashmir in 2010. He documented extensively the historic Sufi shrines in the city and met with local craftsmen. He returned to Srinagar in the spring of 2014 and embedded himself within the karkhana or studio of the Master Craftsman Fayaz Jan, working with traditional Islamic patterns and motifs in the making of experimental compositions. Insurgency-scarred, the city of Srinagar experienced cultural deprivation stemming from political instability. Yet it has been a lived city for more than 2000 years and much of this history remains lesser known. 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, representative of a rich diversity of form.
Interactive processes are important to Soi. He has designed drawing machines allowing him to share his work process with others. Most 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 utilised by children, aged 10-12, attending class 2E Tavros Primary School in Athens in the making of drawings of their school environment and subsequently inserted within a site-specific mural composed for the schools music-room.
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 utilised this time walking through the dunes and the forest, marking out trees who’s trunks and intertwining branches intrigued him. Oftentimes returning to sketch them Soi used time enveloped within this verdant landscape to further his Notational Theory, a methodology allowing for the juxtaposition of imagery from different sources within his work. An installation titled A Bergen Diary (2022) outlined such thinking at the Museum Kranenburgh, in Bergen, not far from the forest Soi walked for inspiration.
Soi began visiting Eindhoven after moving to the Netherlands in 2002 and took in its industrial history. His curiosity of the city grew after identifying an image of his grandfather standing in front of the city's Catharinakerk in1939. Soi’s grandfather introduced 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 prosperity. 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. Soi's response, titled Centurion, was commissioned by the Van Abbe Museum for Positions 6 (November 2020- April 2021), is a portrait of the City sparked by the discovery of this photograph which branches off to explore Eindhoven’s historical relationship with Philips, an imprint still visible in in the city's renegotiation of its image as a hub for technology.
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 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. 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.
In 2015 the artist was granted an artist fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute where he spent a month studying illuminated manuscripts at the Freer art Gallery in Washington DC. 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.
Across 2017 and 2018 Soi looked closely at certain artifacts within in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum’s collection in Lisbon. A jade jar once belonging to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir(1569-1627) who built the famous Shalimar Gardens had Soi turn his gaze back to Srinagar, the Kashmiri city he has been visiting since 2009. 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 a mapped-video, architecture and sound installation titled Third Factory: From Kashmir to Lisbon via Caldas as a part of the Museum’s Conversas series in 2018.
In 2011 Soi was one of 4 artists to represent India at the 54th Venice Biennale. 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
