PRANEET SOI

Hold Still continues Soi’s oblique allusion to the circulated image and its public memory. Several works in this exhibition such as Falling Figure, Twin Towers, Memento Mori, transform this archive of images. The fragmented form of the falling figure juxtaposed by the abstracted façade of the twin-towers or the image of the screaming man from Gaza for instance, find themselves represented in paintings as well as craft processes such as coir weavings that lie on the mosaic patterned floor of the gallery. Soi’s use of the archive manifests itself through drawings that are meticulously rendered to reveal correlations of the body and architectural elements. The links between the human body and architecture is a subject than Soi has often attempted to articulate within his work through a process of creating a repository of mapped images, and in this exhibition, through paintings such as Two Architectures, October and Mumbai Diptych.

Hold Still offers a point of entry into the the densely populated world of images that co-inhabit Soi’s mind and explores the construction of meaning through the manipulated and layered visual. It includes traditional practices, such as miniature-painting and coir-weaving and enmeshes them with contemporary techniques such as digital printing and moving image. Soi places the archive of motifs he has built over two decades at its centre, and unravels how he constructs, expands and then rebuilds recurring narratives in his work.