Mashrabiya brings together an expansive body of work spanning a decade which showcases Soi’s immersion with the craftspeople of Srinagar, Guangzhou and Amsterdam.
September 2025: Experimenter opened Mashrabiya, Praneet Soi’s third solo at the gallery, in Kolkata. Soi’s first exhibition in India after 4 years includes artworks from 2014 to the present that include painting, sculpture and painted papier mache and porcelain tiles; the exhibition foregrounds his longstanding multidimensional and geographically spread practice. In Islamic architecture, a mashrabiya is a jutting veranda with an ornate latticed wooden window through which the view of the exterior is obtained. To Soi, every view is a construction and the exquisitely filigreed pattern on a mashrabiya window forms a filter through which the world is perceived. Soi uses this metaphor extensively through this body of work to draw attention to cultural contexts, a slowly growing archive of media imagery, historical research, and architectural details.
The exhibition brings together his ongoing immersion with craftspeople in the valley city of Srinagar; his engagement with traditional porcelain craftspeople in the Southern Chinese city of Guangzhou; and his own studio-based practice in Amsterdam. Such immersions are important to
Soi’s praxis and they become sites where knowledge is gained, experiences shared and friendships are formed, underscoring how his perspective is sutured by the thread of personal experiences and multiplicity of thought.
Soi’s formative years were spent in Kolkata and he has also lived in Vadodara, San Diego, and Amsterdam. He was a student in San Diego in 2001 when the twin towers came down and witnessed the aftermath of the conflict in the Middle East through the media while attending the Rijkakademie van beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. This initial media coverage of war and conflict in the early 2000s led him to experiment with representations of the human body and portraiture.
Born into a Punjabi family that had migrated from Lahore in 1947, and living abroad through troubled times, made him curious to experience life along his country’s border. Upon visiting Srinagar, he found himself drawn to its 2000 year old history, its craft traditions, its patterns and architecture. Further research led him to build on the idea of the Mashrabiya as a metaphor within his work.
In Overlapping Landscapes or Bone, Soi juxtaposes two images inspired from two different places that he has lived in. An oak tree from the Bergen Forest north of Amsterdam, drawn in silver-point, whose shape inspired him and became a site he returned to often, as well as a relief pattern which refers to the blue glazed tile that is a part of a 600 year old Kashmiri tomb of Queen Miran Zain. This tile, unique in design and hard to pin down (possibly a lotus flower) harkens to a time when there was an accretion of Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic motifs, leading to a rich visual language in the valley and the surrounding regions, such as Ladakh, all of which would have influenced the craftsmen that constructed it.
Artist Praneet Soi says, “At a certain point how do you bring your environment into your work? I think that any landscape is a sum of the history of that place and this leads me to think of culture as an accumulation. It is representative of so many viewpoints, all of which are involved in the act of representation. This is what is manifested by storytelling.”
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Featuring Image Courtesy: Art Fervour
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