Painting (Painting)

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.

Painting (Painting)

Prabhakar Pachpute was born in 1986 and raised in Chandrapur (Maharashtra), India, a place known as ‘The City of Black Gold’, where his family has worked for three generations in one of the oldest mines in the country. Currently, he lives and works in Mumbai. He has done his Bachelors in Fine Arts from I. K. S. University, Khairagarh (Chhattisgarh) in 2009 and Masters from M. S. University Baroda (Gujrat) in 2011.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Dark Clouds Of The Future” is a cinematographic video animation of the abandoned gold mine in Brazil, Serra Pelada (“Naked Mountain”). Thought to be one of the largest mines in the world, made famous by the photographs Alfredo Jaar and later by Sebastião Salgado, the hand-dug mine is now a mercury-polluted lake. During his research trip to Brazil, Pachpute met many former gold diggers who used to work at Serra Pelada, inciting his interest in the concept of the witness.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

To produce the series of sculptures collectively titled Utarand , Prabhakar Kamble relocated his studio to Kolhapur, Maharashtra, near the village where he was born into a family of daily wage earners. Kamble cast the feet of agricultural workers in metal to prop up the eponymous terracotta pots traditionally used to store food and grains in every home. A commentary on the caste system’s four-tiered hierarchy, the pots become smaller as they go up the stand, mimicking the structure of society where most of the population is comprised of impoverished communities, which form the base of the caste system while a small minority makes up the wealthy upper castes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

To produce the series of sculptures collectively titled Utarand , Prabhakar Kamble relocated his studio to Kolhapur, Maharashtra, near the village where he was born into a family of daily wage earners. Kamble cast the feet of agricultural workers in metal to prop up the eponymous terracotta pots traditionally used to store food and grains in every home. A commentary on the caste system’s four-tiered hierarchy, the pots become smaller as they go up the stand, mimicking the structure of society where most of the population is comprised of impoverished communities, which form the base of the caste system while a small minority makes up the wealthy upper castes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

To produce the series of sculptures collectively titled Utarand , Prabhakar Kamble relocated his studio to Kolhapur, Maharashtra, near the village where he was born into a family of daily wage earners. Kamble cast the feet of agricultural workers in metal to prop up the eponymous terracotta pots traditionally used to store food and grains in every home. A commentary on the caste system’s four-tiered hierarchy, the pots become smaller as they go up the stand, mimicking the structure of society where most of the population is comprised of impoverished communities, which form the base of the caste system while a small minority makes up the wealthy upper castes.