An artist with a deepened sensibility and sensitivity engages with artisans in Kolkata, Srinagar and Guangzhou in China. He creates works that plumb the depths of an intellectual and human aesthetic and brings together a show that is born from the crucible of creation. Praneet Soi's Notes on Labour at the BDL Museum is an ode to the strength and sustaining power of human hands even as it murmurs of a Marxian aura.
Soi's practice involves the creation of motifs that reflect his deep interest in different forms of cultural expression. You understand his process is intuitive; when you see the main installation that follows the curve of the wall at the Museum's entrance, you are looking at images absorbed into the artist's visual language over time. Curator Tasneem Mehta says his images have been created on site—the painted motifs reflect his exposure to the 'Journal of Indian Art and Industry' published by W. Griggs and Sons in 1886 with illustrations by Lockwood Kipling, copies of which are a part of the museum's library. When literary allusions enter into art it forms an inspiration that invokes the foresight of our forefathers. Soi gives us the value of relativity through referential terrain.
