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The latest works of the Indian artist Praneet Soi (Calcutta, 1971), entitled Disasters of War, are as poignant as they are horrifying. They form part of a series on which he has been working for some time. The grey tableaux with their miniscule black and white figures are painted in a mixture of traditional styles, referring to Indian miniatures but they are actually more like drawings that have been executed with a small brush. The depictions in the paintings call to mind the notorious press images that brought to light the misconduct of American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison, but then in a slightly different way. The title and theme of the series have been borrowed from Desastros de la Guerra, the famous series of etchings by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. Soi: ‘The Goya series was a reaction to the aftermath of the French invasion, of Napoleon’s incursion into Spain. My pictures show the same thing, but then relative to terrorism in our present-day society.’To understand the origins of these works, we have to go back to 1999, the year that Soi began his study at the University of California in San Diego. One of his professors, a relative of Jean-Luc Godard, steered him in the direction of the political documentary. Coming as he did from the totally different cultural tradition of India, that exposure helped Soi to get a grasp on contemporary art practice in the United States. ‘Through the medium of the documentary film, I began to explore the reach of my talent as an artist. I started to look at my paintings in a documentary light, related to the existing reality all around us; it was a more sociological approach to art in general and to painting in particular,’ Soi explains. The approach did not just come like a bolt from the blue. In his native region of West Bengal, Soi had been exposed earlier to politically oriented film productions, crosses between fiction and documentary. The narrative aspect of these works can also be found in popular cultural idioms from the same area, in graphics, water colours and miniatures, in which stories of local events are linked to existing legends. As an example, Soi cites the nineteenth-century postcards that were hand-painted by local artists and sold to tourists. But he also points to the seventeenth-century Mogul miniatures, on show at documenta 12: ‘You see a man killing his wife, slitting her throat because she has cuckolded him. It is a familiar tale of city life in Calcutta. Local artists tell the story in pictures.’The Indian tradition of folk art and its techniques play an important role in Soi’s work. He travels from Amsterdam to Calcutta on a regular basis to keep in touch with the local scene and reports back on his impressions in lectures and presentations here. ‘The differences between the two cultures are becoming smaller,’ Soi says, ‘but the approach to art is very different. India has developed a flourishing art market but it still doesn’t mean very much for contemporary art developments. There is almost no financial support for art institutes.’ In an attempt to improve the situation, Soi and the Swedish curator Anders Kreuger set up Calcutta Art Research, an exchange programme for artists from India and abroad. To stimulate the exchange, international artists and curators are invited to Calcutta. Soi views these activities as expressly related to his work as an artist, for which there is much interest in the Indian gallery circuit: ‘My work is not thought to be typically Indian, but rather a more austere expression of Indian art, carrying a universal message. I think that I have to take that as a compliment.’Soi has also been influenced by the Flemish Primitives and seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Following his study in California, he was accepted at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten and moved to Amsterdam. ‘I was working on a series of small miniatures of the California landscape at the time of the attack on the Twin Towers. I began to collect press photos that had indirectly to do with the attack, images from Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. I was searching for a way of combining portraiture and landscape art and by so doing, broaden my visual idiom. With this in the back of my mind, I entered the Rijksakademie.’ Soi discovered a strong documentary quality in the Dutch art tradition – not so much in a political sense but in its treatment of the realities of daily life. He found an important argument for this in the writings of art historian Svetlana Alpers, who views seventeenth-century Dutch painting as descriptive rather than narrative. Soi’s study of seventeenth-century art culminated in a series of works in which he portrayed his friends from the Rijksakademie in classic poses – a sort of twofold allegory of the old masters and his artist colleagues building up their oeuvre in parallel. But his recent works, in which his painted figures are allowed to merge with media personalities, go further. In his newest work, he is in effect unravelling the different layers of images from the media and his work can be seen as an inquiry into the meaning of visual culture. In his photo sessions with friends in his studio he tries to re-enact the images he has collected and by so doing, better understand their meaning and various attitudes. He then reworks this ‘study material’ into drawings on the computer and ultimately develops them into paintings.Lately, sculpture has also been added to Soi’s oeuvre. In contrast to the various painting techniques he has mastered, this is one element of his work that he allows Indian artisans to carry out. Their techniques are every bit as good as his painting skills, he says: ‘In that sense, it is a kind of marriage.’ The sculptures have a very specific, simple style in sober monochrome colours; ‘I wanted to avoid ornamentation and give them a modernistic feeling. I find that very important; I think that just about everything in contemporary art is bound up with modernism in one way or another.’ Most of the sculptures are small, but a large white cannon executed in white fibreglass has a monumental quality. During a recent show at Galerie Martin van Zomeren in Amsterdam, Soi installed his cannon next to the Disasters of War series, lending yet another layer of meaning to the works. The cannon is a simplified copy of the Zam Zamma, forged in 1747 by Shah Nazir in Lahore, now a province of Pakistan. As the largest weapon that had ever existed up to then, it became the subject of many legends and was even mentioned in Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (1901). In Soi’s rendition, the mighty murder machine has been transformed into a silent, serene sculpture that acts as a solemn counterweight to the miniatures.Soi describes his own work as ‘a commentary on the way in which images are transformed by the press and as a result, simultaneously turned into contemporary legends, imprinted in our collective memory. He does not want to call it criticism. ‘These pictures (the Abu Ghraib photos of a female soldier holding her prisoner on a leash have become extremely famous and I am asking myself why that is so. I don’t know the answer but by reworking the images, I am trying to create a story. I am not trying to convey whether the acts are right or wrong. I am trying to figure out how it is that one particular image turns into a symbol and another does not.’ One of Soi’s works in particular shows in a nutshell how he links up different cultural traditions, techniques and political concerns: it is a collage that consists of a fragment from a painting by Caravaggio – David’s severed head of the giant Goliath –combined with a photo taken from the internet of a headless man and a drawing of a person holding up a severed head in which the features of the artist are clearly recognizable. Soi explains: ‘It has to do with how you can work with images that mirror a present-day reality in a special way, in order to tell a story that shows a bit of that. At the same time, my depictions are timeless; you don’t see cars or a landscape and so they also are unrelated to the purely narrative. But for a painter that’s always an interesting challenge: how to tell a story.’