(b. 1971, lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Kolkata, India)
Soi’s practice ranges across painting, drawing, video and site-specific installations. He identifies over time patterns that emerge from an investigation of his extended social and economic landscape. Media reportage of unrest in the Middle-East, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the events following September 11th led him to a series of miniature paintings on terrorism and expanding from there, paintings of the human body. Interactive processes are important to Soi. Images, texts, sound and moving image are harvested and then linked together, outlining what Soi calls a ‘Notational Methodology’; a process that begins intuitively, allowing a subject to materialize, and then, as it expands, allows for connected subjects and tangential trajectories to emerge. As part of this methodology, Soi stitches together personal imagery that he has been working with for years side by side with new material and existing representations to ignite a dialogue that privileges polyphony towards the creation of alternative narratives.
In 2011, Soi was one of four artists representing India at the Indian Pavilion in Venice. In 2014, he was artist-in-residence at Stiftung Laurenz Haus in Basel, 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. He participated in the Kochi–Muziris Biennale in 2016. In 2017, he unveiled “Notes on Labor”, a solo exhibition at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai and in 2018 a solo exhibition, “Third Factory: From Kashmir to Lisbon via Caldas” at the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. In 2019 ‘Anamorphosis” opened at the Mosaic Rooms in London displaying work resulting from travelling across the Occupied Palestinian Territories earlier that year. In 2020 he will be participating in Positions 6 at the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven where a new publication with Book Works and Fraser Muggeridge studio will be released.
Artist website: http://www.praneetsoi.info/