No Man’s Land

Sanchayan Ghosh’s work titled Reversed Perspective II Black Boz: Walking on the Edge.

If Mumbai-based artist Prabhakar Pachpute had not discovered his love for drawing, he, too, might have been leading the life of a mine worker in the coal-rich district of Chandrapur in Maharashtra, where his family had worked in its mines for three generations. He makes use of this connection by using charcoal to draw most of his works, ironically to address the universal condition of miners in his series of drawings called “Social Fabric”, which are display at Nature Morte gallery. It is hard to understand these works without knowing their story, the one where he tries to join the dots that connect Chandrapur to Mumbai, the coal miners and farmers of rural Maharashtra to the fast disappearing mill workers in Mumbai.

In Displaced, a man with a small model of a house resting on his back looks up towards a flash of light offered by a torch. It is Pachpute’s way of bringing to the fore the situation of mill workers when they migrated to the city, long before their labour movements were crushed. State Relief Packages is a part of this series, where farmers armed with pesticide sprayers are marching towards a deserted, infertile land, dotted with trees that have crows hanging from their branches. “It is a symbol of a bad omen,” he says. By drawing his protagonists with a sad, grim look on their face, 28-year-old Pachpute highlights the plight of farmers in the Vidarbha region, which has witnessed a high number of farmer suicides in the last decade.

These works are part of the exhibition “Land of No Horizon”, which has been organised in collaboration with Experimenter, a Kolkata-based gallery, where four artists have explored ideas of ownership, development, accumulation and misbalances of land. Adip Dutta carries forward his trademark skeleton-like sculptures in Boring Instruments And Other Sculptures: Specimens, where he has sculpted tools such as a sickle and nails used by farmers.

In Reversed Perspective II Black Boz: Walking on the Edge, artist Sanchayan Ghosh from Kolkata has tried to bring out the industries’ impact on land. By lining the corners of a dark, dimly lit room, he has decorated its edges with samples of china clay he obtained by digging beneath the soil at Kharia village in West Bengal. Beside them are videos of labourers carrying out mining activities in the village. The artist says, “It’s called ‘land of red soil’ and suddenly one finds white soil by digging deep. Mining activities started here in the ’60s. Initially everyone thought that the lifestyle of the people will change due to industrialisation. But it only benefitted certain individuals, not the common man.” While talking about a song that runs in the background, 43-year-old Ghosh says, “The poet is narrating how the land has become gold and the machine has come to dig it.”

The exhibition is on display till May 24 at A1, Neeti Bagh Contact: 41740215