First published in Experimenter 2018 Annual Book
Viewing Praneet Soi’s work is like embarking on a journey - one which takes you through sights both familiar and unfamiliar. Embroideries from Kashmir, the skyline of Mumbai, and heart-wrenching images from conflict zones, as popularized in the media, came together in myriad permutations and combinations to form new meanings. Soi, like an able orchestra conductor, guided you through photos, patterns, and motifs to create a narrative which was solely your own. There was a certain lyrical quality - a fluidity - to his new show. Certain images made an appearance time and again - in drawings, installations, and paintings - often flitting from one work to another. Just as soon as you felt you had left them behind, they made an appearance yet again, albeit in a new form and a new context, taking you by surprise, often playing games with your mind. Take, for instance, the Falling Figure - the fragmented form could be seen juxtaposed against the abstracted facade of the twin-towers. In another, created with silverpoint and acrylic on linen, it almost felt as if the figure was sliding through one’s hands. Another version of this could be seen in an Untitled drawing [inkjet, pencil, acrylic paint on paper and tracing paper], in which the falling man seemed to be an extension of a tall, looming building. And if one were to gaze below, at the mosaic patterned floor of the gallery, one would find the image recur, formed with coir and acrylic, with a UV matt finish. Another such oft-repeated image was that of the screaming man from Gaza.
Works such as these formed part of Hold Still, the second solo by Soi (a Kolkata-born and Amsterdam-based artist) at Experimenter, Kolkata. The show was titled after Sally Mann’s seminal book, published in 2015, and laid bare a layered lens through which the artist looked at his surroundings, creating a unique interplay between the narrative and the image. Hold Still carried forth Soi’s deep association with the circulated image, its archiving and re-appropriation. Though the title had been suggested by Prateek and Priyanka Raja, what appealed to Soi were the connotations that it encased. “I feel the need to repeat certain images. I take them far away from where they originate, to build a narrative. On one hand, it’s recognizable to people. There is a sense of familiarity,” he said. On the other hand, there was a desire to look again, to find newer landscapes within a familiar one. “I want you to free the mind to make associations,” he added.
This ability to transfigure, fragment, and deconstruct the original form has formed the essence of Soi’s practice over time. The roots of this lie in his personal experiences, garnered during his student years in the United States in the late 1990s. The changing political climate, the devastation of Manhattan during 9/11, and the subsequent attacks on Afghanistan, combined with the way the media represented each of these events, has had a huge influence on his artistic process. “It was my first time outside the country. The visual language that I was learning at the University of California in San Diego was very different from the one I had come across at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda. So there was anyway this need to move away from things that I was familiar with,” he said.
As Soi had been contemplating these urges, the atmosphere in the US changed drastically post 9/11. He began to notice a change in the way newspapers talked about terror. The depiction of the fall of the Twin Towers was portrayed by the Western media very differently from the subsequent attacks by the US forces on Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Images from the latter were almost biblical, anachronistic in nature, whereas those from Manhattan seemed out of a film set in a post-apocalyptic world. “That’s when I realised that a lot of coding happens. The Western gaze of the East is very different. It looks at its own landscape in a very different way. And I began to wonder why that happens,” he said. That led Soi to build an archive of images circulated in the media - one that he is still adding to constantly. At times, an image might enter his archive, and stay on for years till it submerges into his work.
One of his endeavours has always been to change the imbalanced perception of conflict zones. A stark example of this was October, an acrylic paint and silverpoint in linen canvas, through which Soi delved into ideas linked to the depiction of the Srinagar’s cultural fabric and slippages in the public understanding of its rich history. It was a beautiful reminder that the city is not just about violence and loss, as depicted in mainstream media. The painting is a map of various artists’ references to the architecture of the Twin Towers, patterns from Kashmir, and an image from war-torn Syria. “The decision to work on the image of Syria by silverpoint is a conscious one to link the history of photography to drawing. Photography initially involved the use of silver halide as a photosensitive material. The use of silver-point here references this context,” Soi had mentioned about October. It was this multi-layered narrative that underlay each of his works. He created a link between the circulated picture and its public memory in Piggyback, inspired by an image that he has often used in his work: that of a man carrying another wounded person to safety. A recurring trope in the media - often used to depict places of conflict, in Soi’s opinion - it has a long tradition in myths and legends as well, such as Vasudeva carrying Krishna across the Yamuna, Christopher carrying a baby Jesus to safety, and more.
For him, the human body as a motif is amplified in such complex images where the separation of the two bodies is not immediately clear. What also interests Soi is the link between the body and the architecture that it inhabits, and he looked at this through a series of mapped images. A stark example of this was Huisduiner Church, in which he evoked the stories and legends that make this old church - once used by the fishermen community - so significant. The work offered an interesting insight into his process - one in which he takes a motif from his immediate surroundings and constructs a fiction, of sorts, around it by changing the colour scheme and reducing its design. In some ways, this draws from his fascination with the Progressive Group and their treatment of landscapes. “I am very aware of the human scale in context of the landscape that it occupies. How do you navigate the architecture around you?” he said. “But I prefer to look at post-modern architecture, such as the ugly, prosaic, mundane buildings in Gurgaon. Those are more interesting to work with.”
This tendency to link people’s stories with landscapes stems from the fact that he is a humanist at heart.Soiisalsoextremely drawn to craft and industrial processes. Artists often tend to work within quiet, personal spaces, often isolating themselves from the world outside. By collaborating with craftspersons or learning from other artists, Soi gives vent to his need to communicate with people. One of the most inspiring meetings for him was with master craftsman Fayaz Jan, in Srinagar in 2010. He has also employed traditional techniques, gleaned from such interactions, in his work time and again. For instance, the Mumbai Diptych featured the Barringtonia tree from Marine Drive, fleshed out in tones inspired by miniature paintings. “I am also interested in learning about how things are made in industrial processes, and how these works then populate the world. For instance, I have works made with coir, produced in a factory in Kerala, which manufactures mattresses used all over the world,” said Soi. The show, Hold Still, was significant as it offered a point of entry into these various strands of thought that inhabit Soi’s mind. One got a glimpse into the way his mind works and sifts through the politics of representation. The viewer was given a unique opportunity to explore the processes through which Soi constructs meaning through the manipulated and layered visual.
Avantika Bhuyan is a Delhi-based journalist, who has been writing about art and culture for the past decade now.