The exploitation of human beings and the depredation of the land they live in and live off has fired the imagination of Prabhakar Pachpute from a small village named Sasti in Maharashtra known for its mines. In his online digital exhibition titled Under the Crust (December 16, 2020-April 13, 2021) organized by Experimenter in Edition 5 of In Touch, an internet platform created in partnership among galleries, Pachpute’s fantastic humanoids and hybrids, who have walked out of the pages of sci-fi comics, are in focus as he conjures up a hellish vision of a scorched earth that has lost its fertility and its ability to regenerate life on earth.

Pachpute seems to have been prescient of the cataclysms that the world in general and the mining community in particular is witnessing. That experience could extend to the farming community as well. Part human, part animal, part machine, these grotesques are metaphors for Pachpute’s concern for the environment and ecology that humans and the machines and technology they created have been destroying systematically. They are caught in such an indissoluble embrace that they have grown into each other. The destruction of human and natural resources by capital could not have found a more powerful set of imagery, particularly at a time when dissent is being equated with sedition.

These are basically monochromatic works that have become even more relevant at a time when the farming community is under attack because it dares to protest against the government’s repressive laws.

It is a nightmare vision in which a prowl car turns into a giant bird of prey, killer machines and animals grow human limbs and vice versa, the earth turns barren and mine shafts sprout furry insect legs. In what is a familiar scene today, a woman wears a protective sheath over her sari that resembles a PPE as she goes about her business in the wasteland. This over-mined earth that has turned barren is an image that recurs in Pachpute’s work.