overview

Itself a corpus in protest, Sea of Fists by Prabhakar Pachpute is a traveling exhibition which examines and reimagines the postures, gestures, animations, and motions that form a social movement.

Now on display for the first time in India, this immersive installation harkens back to the Indian farmers’ campaigns of 2017 and 2018. Here, dream-like landscapes and anamorphic figures depict the otherworldliness of a resistance prompted by the effects of extraction on terrestrial, internal, and historical topographies.

Pachpute’s interest in the consequences of human and environmental extortion is as intimate and familial as it is social. Hailing from a mining and farming community in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district, it is Pachpute’s consideration of his own origins which impels him toward an aesthetic inquiry into the conditions for vitality. From this place, the figures and landscapes presented in Sea of Fists provoke questions and posit suggestions on what it means to harvest energy, mine resources, and forge new pathways as an ecology of bodies which insist on justice.

Through mutability as solidarity, motion as stance, linkage as freedom, community as energy, and fantasy as prerequisite to reality, Sea of Fists invites viewers to imagine and inhabit new social realms. It offers hope for a future beset by welfare over warfare, conviviality over violation, and unity over anomie.

About the artist

Prabhakar Pachpute (b. 1986 in Sasti in Chandrapur, Maharashtra) lives and works in Pune, India. Pachpute works in an array of mediums and materials including drawing, light, stop- motion animations, sound and sculptural forms. His use of charcoal has a direct connection to his subject matter and familial roots, coal mines and coal miners. Pachpute often creates immersive and dramatic environments in his site-specific works, using portraiture and landscape with surrealist tropes to critically tackle issues of mining labour and the effects of mining on the natural and human landscape. Using Maharashtra as a starting point, the artist combines research from around the world and personal experiences, moving from the personal to the global, investigating a complexity of historical transformations on an economic, societal and environmental level.

Pachpute received his Bachelor’s in fine arts in sculpture from Indira Kala Sangit University, Khairagarh (Chhattisgarh, 2009) and his MFA from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (Gujrat, 2011). He has exhibited extensively with solo shows at Clark House Initiative, Mumbai (2012); Experimenter, Kolkata (2013, 2017 & 2020); National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (2016); Asilo Via Porpora, Milan (2018); Glasgow School of Art (2019) and Tate St. Ives (2022). He has also participated in group exhibitions at Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2013); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2013); IFA, Stuttgart & Berlin (2013); DRAF, London (2014); MACBA, Barcelona (2015); Parasite, Hong Kong (2017); Asia Cultural Centre, Gwangju (2017); STUK, Leuven (2018); AV Festival, Newcastle (2018); and was part of the 31st São Paulo Biennial (2014); 5th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial (2014); 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015); 8th Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2015); and Dhaka Art Summit (2018); 2nd Yinchuan Biennale (2018) and the 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018), Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2019), 3rd Industrial Art Biennale (2020), Artes Mundi 9, Cardiff (2021), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2021), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021) and The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022).