Given
the expanse in which Project 88 is housed, Praneet Soi has chosen
rather little to make a statement. But there is something to be said
for resuscitating the walk in the gallery space, a leisure our art
dealers tend to underrate these days.
With overheads being
notoriously high, gallerists are tempted to stack it up (if not rent
out their premises to a third party altogether). Juggernaut, Soi's
exhibit on war and globalization has a Spartan set design: it features
a large white canon, a traumatised red angel, and very tiny paintings.
For an exhibition that is about war, it's all laid out very calmly, one
might say. But it'sAngelus Novus whose starry presence gives the show a
plot worth engaging.
Now who exactly is Angelus Novus? It's
certainly not the artist because the legend goes thus: Walter Benjamin
interpreted a painting by Paul Klee, titled Angelus Novus, as the angel
of history. Angelus Novus was a character whose face was always turned
towards the past.
While we perceive history as a chain of
events, Angelus sees it as one single catastrophe which keeps piling
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to
sort things out but a storm is blowing from Paradise, pushing us
towards the future; this storm is what we call progress.
Artist
Praneet Soi has employed this imagined mythology of Angelus Novus and
emerged with Juggernaut, an exhibition that showcases the Abu Ghraib
torture cells, the invasion of Afghanistan, the Beirut bombings,
historical embarrassments. However, since there is a bit of Janus in
Soi, his drawings keep vacillating between contemporary horrors and
Biblical mythologies, among other fables.
Soi makes history even
more malleable (and localised) with his installation of a canon (titled
Zam-Zammah) at the centre of all of this. When first made in 1757, the
original Zam-Zammah was the biggest piece of artillery ever built.
After Partition, the mammoth canon was moved to Lahore, only to collect
dust outside a city museum.
Draped in white paint, the Zam-Zammah is in stark contrast to the
atrocities and simmering violence on the walls surrounding it. "In a
way, I wanted to depict history as a moveable object, as rapidly
mutable. This once grand object is now languishing outside a Lahore
museum. But at the same time, its transfer is steeped in a violent
historical event itself — the Partition."
Juggernaut is a
sophisticated and confidently curated show by an artist of prodigious
talent; catch it before it silently conquers another part of the globe.
Juggernaut by Praneet Soi is exhibiting at Project 88, Colaba, until Feb 9
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