An art in violence

(I 'meet' a lot of interesting minds in the course of working for a newspaper. Artists are a great proportion of those and some of the minds there can be very interesting indeed. here's one...)


Artist Praneet Soi uses the central reference point of the ‘angel of history’, the mythic vision described by Walter Benjamin, German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator and philosopher: "His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet…The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." Soi has crafted work that uses a form of political documentary to bring together the forces of war and globalisation, history and the future and presents his vision in Juggernaut, his new show

You present the trauma of war/disaster. Why?
I’ve been living in Europe in the past five years and before that in California. Especially after 9/11 there has been a huge amount of media coverage of a specific kind of violence, of terrorism, telling stories that are all about fundamentalists and extremism. What is coming out of it is very particular kinds of images - unrest in Baghdad, in Afghanistan, the blasts in London and Madrid and, of course, 9/11 itself. When I was in California, I began comparing these images and how they were shown. A very distinctly different lens has been put on these subjects. We have a different take on fundamentalists in India, because we have dealt with it for centuries.
I began to have a very personal interest in the subject. For me, the paintings were a kind of investigation into what makes these images symbolic. So the series – The Disasters of War – became a way to investigate how to look at these images, how certain images might reach symbol-hood and some may not. I am referencing Goya’s black and white (Disaster) series that showed the kind of violence unleashed by Napolean in Spain; there was a lot of destruction. Violence can be caused by the enforcement of some kind of democracy. This makes the images interesting and evokes questions: What does democracy mean? Why is the West pushing for democracy?

Why not happy images?
I am extremely positive; I do not feel pessimistic. But I am ambivalent. There is something very beautiful about progress, something sublime. There are so many forces, how can you choose to talk about them? I did the series in miniature format. It’s about war, but there could be a beauty behind it too. I have done other works that directly address the notion of progress, not war, as in a big painting called Juggernaut – which is, of course, the unstoppable force or ‘juggernaut’ of progress.

Why does political documentary, as it is called, influence you so strongly?
I am from Bengal, a Marxist state, surrounded by a certain kind of ideology. I am not Marxist, but you come out of Kolkata aligned somewhat left of centre. Then I went to Baroda, which is very political; then there was my California experience. It is not just politics, but how to make a contemporary image that connects with the social context that could be considered political.

Your work is said to present questions but provides no answers…
I am not providing a point of view. I am not saying through my images that something is good or bad. Government can also be very cold and not very nice. My imagery does not ask you to take a side, but to examine the phenomenon. Again, there is a sense of ambivalence. The work is meant to draw the viewer into the argument. I am not presenting a one-sided argument, but hoping it would throw up opinions.

Living in the Netherlands and in Kolkata, has Dutch painting influenced you?
Yes it has – especially 17th century Dutch painting, which is not narrative, but very descriptive, presenting interesting arguments. But the light and the landscape somehow finds its way into your work, wherever you are at that point in time.
Living in various places as I have and continue to do, certain aspects of these spaces are collaged together and so enter the language of my work. This notion of the collage not only underlines my existence as an artist who lives in Europe and India, but also enters the work in how the imagery is collaged together. It is through the collaging and juxtaposition of various imagery that the story of the show reveals itself to the viewer.