Praneet Soi (b. 1971) completed his BFA and MFA in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda. He went on to do his second master’s from the University of California at San Diego on scholarship, and then moved to the Netherlands in 2002 to attend the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten for a two-year international residency program for artists.
In 2011, Soi was one of four artists representing India at the Indian Pavilion in Venice, where he created a site-specific drawing installation. In 2014, Soi was artist-in-residence at Stiftung Laurenz Haus in Basel. In the same year he was granted a research fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC for studying illuminated manuscripts at the Sackler and Freer Galleries. In 2017, he unveiled a solo exhibition at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai. Soi’s works reside in important 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, Amsterdam. In 2014 Soi was commissioned to create a permanent work for the HCL headquarters in Chennai. In 2016, he participated in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
The artist lives and works in Amsterdam.
Praneet Soi’s oscillatory movement between Kolkata and Amsterdam deeply impacts his practice. He identifies over time, the patterns that emerge from an investigation of his extended social and economic landscape. Moving to Amsterdam, media reportage of unrest in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the events following September 11th led to a series of miniature paintings. Since 2008 in Kumartuli, North Kolkata, Soi’s documentation of small-scale factories and one-room workshops has been an ongoing activity. Kumartuli is historically home to a clan of potters that have worked with religious iconography and sculpture-making and has over time given way to micro-workshops and warehouses. Interactive processes are important to Soi. He designed drawing-machines that would allow him to share his work process with an audience. The “Astatic Machines”, inspired by Paul Klee’s “Pedagogical Sketchbook” for students at the Bauhaus, emphasize the importance of drawing in Soi's practice. Through the inherent politics of labour and economic transition that manifests itself in a series of works titled “Notes on Labor”, Soi delves into a pluralistic representation of this complex, historic and yet relevant site, through a series of slideshows, miniature paintings and video. Soi first visited the city of Srinagar in Kashmir in 2010 and used the time spent there to explore the disappearing traces of Sufi culture and the related migration, over the course of history, of ancient patterns and forms from Iran into the sub-continent. The migratory nature of the works emerging from Kashmir could perhaps be linked to his family’s exile from what became Pakistan when the country was partitioned in 1947.
Praneet Soi speaks about the work at the exhibition:
“The two imaged in this painting are a part of my growing vocabulary of images. One image is easily recognisable — that of a man falling. The other is also that of a person falling, reduced to a pictogram.
Bothe images serve as vestibules filled with the patterns that are typical of Kashmiri craftsman. The work is done on paper mache tiles, once again a surface that is typical to the crafts of Kashmir."