Urban Kitsch, originally written in 1996, explores the forms of vernacular visual culture that emerged in the city of Baroda following the liberalisation of the Indian economy.
Plastic toys, celebrity mud flaps, and postmodern architecture collide into a new formal category—both celebrated and derided—as Praneet Soi traverses the city on his trusted Yamaha RX 100.
Published here for the first time, Urban Kitsch was written as part of Praneet Soi's Master's in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. The complete facsimile of this dissertation is accompanied by a recent interview with the artist by Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian.
Praneet Soi is an artist born in Kolkata in 1971. He moved to Amsterdam in 2002 to attend the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, and divides his time between the two cities. This oscillatory movement impacts his practice. Over time, Soi identifies patterns that emerge from an investigation of his extended social and economic landscape, and explores these across a multidisciplinary practice. Working in a wide range of media, spanning painting, drawing, collage, text, audio-visual assemblages and intertwining the languages of visual culture, literature, cinema and architecture, Soi suggests possibilities for imagining a new human condition, marked by intensified forces of modernity and progress.
Praneet Soi represented India at the 54th Venice Biennale and was granted a Smithsonian artist research fellowship at the Freer and Sackler Galleries at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.
