The artist’s approach to global politics and history is informed by his education in both India and abroad. After earning a BFA and MFA at Baroda’s MS University, Soi completed a second MFA at the University of California, San Diego, and held residencies at Skowhegan in the US and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Reflecting the breadth of Soi’s studies, “Juggernaut” was, on the surface, art historically literate and theoretically savvy, referring directly to a text by Walter Benjamin and modeling one series on Francisco de Goya’s canonical early 19th-century series “Disasters of War.”
The centerpiece and conceptual fulcrum for the exhibition was the fiberglass sculpture Angelus Novus (2007), a red female torso whose hands secure a pliable-looking mask over her entire face. Its title references an eponymous painting by Paul Klee, interpreted by Benjamin in his essay “On the Concept of History” as an icon of progress who confronts the future while turned toward the past. While the fragile figure in Klee’s work faces the viewer directly, expressing foremost the vulnerability of her position as an “angel of history,” as Benjamin calls her, Soi does not engage this fundamental aspect of his visual source, instead placing his angel on the ground, preventing the viewer from interacting with it directly in the same way that one might with Klee’s painting. He neglects also to reconcile the competing ideological threads in the Benjamin’s excerpt, which offers substantial evidence of the writer’s conflicted interests in Jewish mysticism and Marxism. Because of this, the connection of Soi’s angel to its self-declared historical precedents seems superficial and unresolved.
In an adjacent corner, Soi presented Disasters of War (2007), 12 delicate gray canvases which form a miniature-scale reinvention of Goya’s series except incorporating images from the contemporary media, including images of the recent scandal involving Iraqi prisoners tortured in US custody at Abu Ghraib. While the wartime reference to Goya is logical, Soi’s interpretation doesn’t rival the critical and emotive gravity of the earlier artist’s work.
Though the artist incorporates knowledge of art history and rhetoric here, “Juggernaut” came off as a series of disconnected references and shallow allusions. His images ultimately read as an indeterminate commentary on the plight of a conflicted, globalizing world, rather than perform as a successful opening to layered dialogues on contemporary events.
- Beth Citron
PRANEET SOI — Angelus Novus (2007) Fiberglass, 120 x 80 cm. Courtesy Project 88, Mumbai
