Prabhakar Pachpute
Inclined uncertainties
Calling attention to campaigns for land rights, survival, and sovereignty, Prabhakar Pachpute’s recent works consider how farmers in India use their bodies in performative ways during acts of protest. The oil painting Inclined uncertainties depicts a grotto-like city atop a boat carried by headless human bodies. The waterless boat navigates through a desolate landscape, propelled forward by the faceless humans, who appear to be holding the cumbersome structure together. Not unlike the story of Sisyphus or Atlas, the allegorical implication of Pachpute’s painting is that holding aloft this boat is at once a heavy burden for the figures, but also their only sense of purpose. The physical and psychological burden ultimately creates a sense of kinship and solidarity amongst them, illustrating a key facet of protest and resistance in which the individual is subsumed into the collective.
Prabhakar Pachpute calls attention to issues concerning land politics, industry, and labor through a multimedia practice that includes drawing, painting, sculpture, animation, and murals. Best known for his site-specific charcoal wall drawings, Pachpute’s work references his own experiences growing up in a multi-generational coal mining and farming family. Employing surrealist motifs, the artist’s works are politically rooted depictions of characters that have experienced the seizure or ‘donation’ of their land for economic gain. Considering issues of exploitation through economic, social, and environmental lenses, the artist’s work critically reflects on evolving histories of familial attachment and physical ownership of agricultural and industrial resources.