Praneet Soi
Writing In The Wall

Born in India, educated in India and the United States, Praneet Soi currently lives and works between Kolkata and Amsterdam. At Artspace the artist will create a new mural upon a specially constructed wooden wall, accompanied by a slide projection, Kumartuli Printer, Notes on Labor Pt 1 as an extension of his current project within the Indian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale.

Soi's work maintains a number of fundamental underpinnings at its core, relating to both the individual and the context within which they live. What are the possibilities to recover a sense of landscape in the face of incessant territorialism? And how can the individual be represented within this struggle, in respect to the fragmentations caused by progress and its extensively manipulated representation within the media.

For the mural, Writing in the Wall, Soi draws upon images from his Cut Out archive in which imagery from the media, specifically related to terrorism, as well as photoshoots undertaken within his studio are translated into drawings as the basis for further experimentation.

The use of distortion, such as anamorphosis, and fragmentation - the physical tearing-up of the images and their reconstitution - remove the image from their primary source and allow them to become, over time, motifs that reappear in differing formats in the artist’s paintings. These images abstracted and then juxtaposed against, or collaged with, the architecture of the site create a narrative through the clash of differing temporalities.

Through a monochromatic palate the work not only references the media but also the act of painting, which at its core addresses a political polemic.

For the work, Kumartuli Printer, Notes on Labor Pt 1, Soi records the movements of a printer in Kumartuli, one of the oldest quarters of Northern Kolkata as he operates an antiquated Treadel press. Soi worked with the printer to transfer documented images of the printer working, into metal plates that would be used within the printing process.

The slide show documents this process between the printer and the artist. The printer is never fully revealed in the frame, however we see sequential images of his hands occupied with the economy of repetitive processes. The sequence intersperses images of the printer’s work and environment and Soi’s depictions of these processes.

Workers’ rights were one of the clarion calls that led to the establishment of a communist government in West-Bengal, yet the workshops depicted within this series operate outside of this safety net. The sometimes troubling representation of labor - the complicated equation by which man becomes intertwined with not only the machine but also the economy - is attempted across the breadth of this work.

Praneet Soi’s travel has been generously supported by the Mondriaan Foundation.