Migrations, the name given to this exhibition underlines a conversation between pattern and figuration, an exploration that has been strongly marked by Soi’s work with craftsmen over the course of the last decade in the valley city of Srinagar, in Kashmir. These engagements have renewed within his work a sensitivity to pattern. While working with motifs gleaned from the city’s rich Sufi culture the thematic of a bird appeared. Soi proceeded to explore this thematic over the body of works displayed in this exhibition.
Birds migrate, as do patterns and images, filtered as they are through the innumerable communications that result from their transmission. Attuned to migration, Soi oscillates between the Netherlands and Kolkata. His family, originally from Lahore moved to Bengal during the partition of the country in 1947. The push and pull of such movements ignites a desire for stability - one that can only be attained through hybridity. The works on display across Migrations articulate this thinking, wedding a polymorphic narrative to the semantics of image construction.
The body of work on display consists of paintings on canvas, created in the artist’s studio in Amsterdam and while in residency at the Luceberthuis in Bergen-Binnen, in North Holland. It includes ceramic tiles that were painted and drawn upon by Soi at a ceramic atelier in the region of Le Maupas, in Sussey, France. Soi used his time in rural Burgundy to work en plein-air, allowing his hand primacy in the images that were etched out in special ceramic pencils, wash like under-glazes and deep over-glazes upon the tiles.
