Praneet Soi was born in Kolkata in 1971. He left 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. Upon completing his Bachelor's and Master’s degrees, Soi found work as a visualizer within the 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 softwares 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 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, politics 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.
In California, sensing that it was the miniaturising tendency of the vast, undulating, suburban landscape that was catching his eye, Gorin, on viewing photographs Soi was taking while driving across San Diego, largely at night, suggested painting them in miniature, a format Soi had been working in before entering San Diego. This led to the a set of 5 miniature paintings upon the unfolded carton his developed photographs were returned within. Soi constructed the compositions by utilizing the cartons fold-lines, using them as separations to abut images against. Scales were inverted and wide-angled views of the landscape, painstakingly fleshed out, were juxtaposed against architectural and mechanical elements symptomatic of them. Largely nocturnes, they are are painted in both oil and gouache. Soi eschewed within this series the decorative elements he had used within earlier work. The series is an essay on Southern California, different from any urban landscape he had seen before.
Gorin pointed to Soi the relationship of photography to painting while perusing the press imagery related to events 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.
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.
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.
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 Jehangir and Shah Jahan.
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 has experienced alienation stemming from political instability. Lesser known is the fact that it 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.
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 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 an installation utilising mapped-video, architecture and sound titled Third Factory: From Kashmir to Lisbon via Caldas as a part of the Museum’s Conversas series in 2018.
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. 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.
Soi 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 city's 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. Soi's response, titled Centurion, 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, its imprint still visible in in the city's renegotiation of its image as a hub for technology.
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.
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 diversity.
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
