The paintings on papier-mâché tiles show glimpses of Srinagar, from chinar leaves and mountain greens to the serene lake that passes through the Valley, offering a radical contrast to where they are exhibited, a dimly lit gallery. The exhibition titled “Srinagar” is Praneet Soi’s tribute to the capital of Kashmir and is at Experimenter in Kolkata. “I did not want to make a political statement. It is based on my observations and what I absorbed during my stay,” says Soi. Shuttling between Kolkata and Amsterdam, the artist made a 10-day halt in Kashmir in 2010. He extensively documented its historic Sufi shrines, from the Khanqah-e-Moula — the shrine where Mir Syed Ali Hamdani, the 13th century Iranian Sufi saint meditated — to Dastagir Pir, that has since burnt down and is now being rebuilt. In the spring of 2014, he was back in Srinagar, where he stationed himself in the studio of craftsman Fayaz Jan for six months. With his team, Soi produced patterns well-embedded in the shrines. “Papier mache travelled to Kashmir from Iran, much like the decorative motifs in Sufi architecture. In geometric patterning, Islam had found a metaphor not only for divine order and presence but also a visual reference for contemplation, unity and balance,” says Soi. During his conversations he discovered that most artisans know some images by memory, others need references, and few others have tracings which they rub on the surface and then paint. The 43-year-old artist was to introduce them to another format. He got them to paint on tiles, where the Islamic patterns appear under a different guise. “In some cases we would make block sketches of the landscape and the apprentices would fill in with their motifs. I would suggest patterns and colours that I had recorded at the sites around Srinagar,” says Soi, who also has a slide show of ancient patterns within the Sufi architecture and pages from the the diary of a Khatumbandhi artisan. The frames document not migration of people, but culture. Soi’s own family too moved from Pakistan to Delhi and finally settled in Kolkata in 1950. Falling figures and the desolate have featured prominently in his work. If at the 2011 Venice Biennale he was at the India Pavilion with a site-specific drawing installation that engaged with war as an existential condition, his project since 2005, “Disasters of War” borrows from Indian miniatures, exploring media-dispersed images of war and unrest from the world over. Since 2008 in Kumartuli in north Kolkata, Soi has been documenting small-scale factories and one-room workshops. A centre for a clan of potters who work with religious iconography and sculpture-making, Kumartuli has now become a hub for micro-workshops and warehouses. The current exhibition has impressions of the distortions in Kashmir too. A drawing in chalk has an image from Da Vinci’s folio in Anomorphosis, a perspective technique that distorts the image, unless the viewer sees it from a specific vantage point. “There are always so many views regarding Kashmir,” says Soi. He intends to return to Valley. “I understand it better.”
