Crawling through the Jungle
Exhibition essay by Snehal Morey
Woven through a dense interplay of metaphors and contemporary references, Prabhakar Pachpute’s Lone Runner’s Laboratory marks a new chapter in his evolving thinking, presenting both social and psychological readings of individual quest and systemic abuse. The exhibition unfolds as an active space of introspection—confronting with discomforting encounters, stark silence, and propositions of hope.
What does it mean to be a witness of the persecuted? What is the mound of systematic abuse? What does it mean to craft wings of wax and fly in perfect balance? How do we confront the shadows of violence when we, as citizens and as a society at large, have failed to learn the lessons from everything we believed we understood? What does it mean to embrace empathy in the haunting shadow of privilege? What relationships do we build with the people around us and what is the ethical quest? How can we arrive at a terrain that cultivates hopefulness? The exhibition poses a series of questions that attempt to reveal more than what is immediately apparent and unsettle us with personal dilemmas and philosophical conundrums, while giving voice to question truth to power.
Sculpture in a wide range of mediums anchors Pachpute’s Lone Runner’s Laboratory, as does his continued enquiry into the natural and animal world we co-habit with our fellow creatures. The rabbit, quietly observing the fox’s movements, conveys through its posture the calculations it makes about the fox’s strength, which in turn informs its own intuitive defence. Unlike the depiction of a hunting scene, Crawling Through the Jungle — a pair of sculptures cast in jesmonite — explores the idea of survival, capturing a fractional instant between decision and hesitation, alertness and a rush which determines the ultimate outcome of what happens next. Embedded within the surface of the sculptures or rising into hill-like forms punctured with cavities, Pachpute reveals the inner worlds of both prey and predator, delving into the psychological terrain that expands boundaries of their metaphorical existence.
For more than a decade, Pachpute has been drawing desolate landscapes of minefields, barren lands, and exploring politics of exploitation. In a long, considered pause over the last five years, he revisited conceptual frameworks and his urgent responses from a period when he initially began critically examining the impact of mining on both the environment and human lives. In Lone Runner’s Laboratory, he reflects primarily on the characters that have shaped his panoramic landscapes. Pachpute delves into their personal worlds, unravelling their hidden depths, and situates their individual journeys within a wider collective context. At this juncture of his philosophical inquiry, Pachpute examines what it means to live on the margins through careful acts of witnessing, observing, and experiencing.
A series of paintings titled Museum Menageries, emerge from repeated visits to mines, mining and agricultural museums, farms and barren landscapes, and sustained conversations with miners and farmers from around the world. The body of work expands his sharp inquiry beyond acts of material extraction and turns to the afterlives of characters who reappear in intimate moments of rumination and respite. These are intimate paintings of morphed forms: a labourer spraying pesticides across farmlands while offering a container of contaminated water; a fully wrapped human body; the cast shadow of a dead calf urging a mother to continue milking; fossilised wildlife; and a mutated human-animal figure, partly clad in gumboots, barrel-like in form, beaming headlights and emitting smoke,, its raised hand signalling a plea for rescue. Pachpute uses time as a circular force in Museum Menageries — becoming, in part, witness, participant, and chronicler of the time past, present, and future — as both a citizen and an artist.
As one engages more closely with the works on view in Lone Runner’s Laboratory, one becomes acutely aware of Pachpute’s deep attention in shaping a visual language in which relationships between people, places, and objects generate new meaning. He often uses lived experiences, narrative, and folklore in his work and constantly improvises through material juxtaposition and experimental processes. In the paintings and sculptures, humans, machinery, and animals morph into each other and into the landscape. Addressing themes of exploitation and oppression, he develops altered forms through which new possibilities and readings emerge, often arriving at expressions of hope through motifs such as headless men with guiding headlamps, knots, fist, and monumental poles, situating them within a broader social context and acts of collective resistance. At first glance, the trope appears surrealist, with dreamlike imagery, distorted forms, unexpected juxtapositions, and multiple perspectives and timelines. Yet, Pachpute’s practice remains firmly grounded in reality and deeply embedded in mutating manifestations.
While deciphering Prabhakar’s journey, George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write” resonates strongly. In his essay, Orwell says, “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a scene of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art'. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
In 2018, Prabhakar collaborated with Johny Rodger, Professor of Urban Literature at the Glasgow School of Art, on a book titled Political Animal, published by the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. The publication uses the form of a fable to reflect on reality, social responsibility, and political awareness. As researcher and curator Viviana Checchia notes, their collaboration explores the idea, drawn from Aristotle, that humans are either outcasts or political beings, with the latter seen as the natural condition. It also draws on Dante’s idea of humans as companionable animals, bound by family and community ties that shape their relationship with place and society. His recent body of work takes this exploration further. One of Prabhakar’s primary enquiries is into the constitution of human beings as divided creatures, sensitive and selfish at the same time, capable of both, acts of unconscionable violence and supreme empathy. Set within the metaphorical setting of a forest, Pachpute’s visual language reflects on the destructive effects produced by the megamachine and its techno-scientific apparatus on social bonds and the environment.
In Lone Runner’s Laboratory, Pachpute continues his engagement with the politics of exploitation, but takes inspiration from thinkers and writers who focus on emotional experiences shaped by vulnerability and constraint within broader social structures . He is profoundly influenced by the renowned writer George Orwell (1903–1950) and responds to the essay “Shooting an Elephant” (1936). In the essay, Orwell recounts his experience as a British colonial police officer in Myanmar, then Burma, exposing the ethical paradox of imperialism, where the performance of power overrides moral agency, compelling him to shoot an elephant he is personally opposed to killing. Cast in jesmonite, Pachpute’s sculpture After Shooting an Elephant (Close Observer) traces Orwell’s psychological terrain through cavern-like forms of his introspective inner landscape. Orwell’s ethical quest further unfolds in the monumental painting Looking at Shooting an Elephant after Orwell, in which Pachpute renders a multi-layered landscape. He exposes the dehumanising mechanisms at work and the tragedy of acting against one’s conscience: fighting on behalf of a crowd unable to recognise that the elephant is no longer an enemy. Prabhakar continues this inquiry in the Devouring Mind sculptural series, exploring the ethical dilemma that accompanies the profession.
While discussing Pachpute’s drawings from Political Animal, Checchia describes them as inhabiting a world of deus ex machina (God from the machine). The animal metaphor serves as a reflection of the contemporary world — one dominated by machines and labour. A bull’s inner world is enclosed by barbed wire; a donkey spills cotton within a factory-like setting; humans are rendered as worms or ants; a headless kangaroo is holding toxic water in its stomach; and finally, a buck stands on the edge of a mountain range, hollowed by emptiness. Extending this line of thought, Close Observer (after Metamorphosis), also cast in jesmonite, is a portrait of Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Drawing from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), Pachpute develops a series of sculptures that engage with the main character, Gregor Samsa’s physical and psychological transformation into an insect, and the neglect and alienation he experiences from his surroundings and society, rendering a philosophical diagnosis of modern life. It is this essence that Pachpute attempts to uphold in his sculptures and paintings.
Other works in the exhibition with revealing titles such as, Doubting Head, Dissolving Caves, A Portrait of a Cavity, The Skeleton’s Dream, Brassed Off, Broken Dimensions, Walking Out of the Dream, The Observer, and The Length of a Dream - call for a pause—, urging us to reflect on Gregor’s transformation, and to consider what a profound alteration of spirit truly means, - and how daunting its repercussions can be. Has Gregor really changed, or has something merely been revealed? What does it mean to reduce oneself to a function, a commodity, or an object, and to inhabit a world where passion becomes transactional and care conditional?
Distinctly different from everything else in Pachpute’s Lone Runner’s Laboratory, are a series of woodcarvings, titled A Flame of the Forest (A series of an observer). They draw on indigenous references and are shaped by his visit to Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology. Resonating with the vertical forms of tree bark set against floods, as well as totemic poles from Africa and North America, these monumental works recall structures that have served multiple purposes within communities and stand today as enduring symbols of resilience.
An earlier painting, In Between Beliefs (not on view in the exhibition) responds to an Aztec myth centered on Tepēyōllōtl, the god of darkened caves, earthquakes, and echoes, often portrayed as a jaguar, a sacred animal. According to some beliefs, earthquakes in Mexico are caused by Tepēyōllōtl. In this work, Pachpute sculpts a spinning tunnel, evoking regions of intense seismic activity, marked by a jaguar’s paw. The sculpture Whispering echoes in the exhibition reinterprets mythological narratives that subtly shape our understanding of the world, while operating at the intersection of ideology, intervention and instinct on the one hand and technology, beastliness and everyday life, on the other.
In his diary entries, Prabhakar writes a note, titled विध्वंसाचं रहस्य/Whispers of Ruins, that quietly resolves his ethical and psychological quest:
“प्रत्येक क्षण हा सांभाळून ठेवलेल्या श्वासांना आणि थरथरणाऱ्या ओठांना जाणवेल असा जात होता. डोंगरातून निघणाऱ्या रहस्यांच्या धुरानी सर्व परिसर झाकून गेला होता. झाडांची मुळं त्यांचं वेढा देण्याचं कार्य अजूनही संयमानं करत होती. बऱ्याच शतकांपासून उभ्या असलेल्या मुर्त्यांच्या प्रतिमा हळूहळू त्यांचं आवरण सोडून सगळीकडे भटकू लागल्या. शहरात आणि गावात भेटणाऱ्या प्रत्येक व्यक्तीच्या पुढे येऊन त्या त्यांना निरखून बघत होत्या. तग धरून जगणाऱ्या आयुष्याचे प्रश्न त्यांना सतावत होते. काही काळ गेल्यानंतरही प्रत्येक डोळ्यात त्यांना विध्वंसाच्या आणि अधोगतीच्या लाटा दिसत राहिल्या. समानतेचं नाजूक आवरण खचलं होतं.. मानसशास्त्राचं पतन होत होतं.. नात्यांतली विभक्तता प्रभावित करत होती.. आणि निःस्वार्थाचं फळ हळूहळू विघटित होत होतं.. अशा या निसरड्या दिवसांतील काही अश्रू जमा करत त्या मुर्त्या आपल्या प्रतिमारुपात परतल्या. त्यांनी आपलं भग्न रुप पुन्हा स्वीकारलं आणि त्यांच्या पेटत्या प्रश्नांच्या अंगावर ओली चादर चढवली गेली.”
“Each passing moment carried the sound of deep breaths and trembling lips. From the mountains, smoke of ancient mysteries rose, veiling the land. Patiently, the trees sank their roots deeper, holding the earth in a quiet, steady embrace. After centuries of stillness, the images of the statues began to shed their shells and wander. They moved through cities and villages, appearing before everyone they encountered, watching closely. Questions of survival followed them everywhere. As time slipped by, they kept seeing waves of destruction and decline mirrored in every pair of eyes. The delicate weave of equality had come apart; minds had grown weary, bonds had broken, and this unrest stirred them deeply. The fruit of selflessness was beginning to wither.. Carrying a few tears from those uneasy days, the statues returned to their carved forms. Once again, they accepted their brokenness, and a damp cloth was placed gently over their burning questions.”
Pachpute’s Lone Runner’s Laboratory is a pivotal punctuation in his practice and thinking—turning inward to the characters he has been drawing to reveal a fraught psychological landscape of numbness, dilemmas, and hopelessness that accompanies barren lands, dug into and stripped through extraction. Lone Runner’s Laboratory operates under the shadows of abuse and trauma, carving out a space for introspection where the human, the wild, and elemental forms of nature merge and transform. It is also a commentary on human desire for supremacy, extraction, and exploitation, shaping a dystopian state riddled with internal conflict. Not unlike a laboratory though, the body of work on view is an ongoing exploration of form and thought through material experimentation, philosophical anchors, and contemplative juxtapositions. Deeply intimate and unmistakably lonely, it uncovers a churning tempest in Pachpute’s quest for answers to a complex set of universal questions that confront us today.
Snehal Morey is a researcher, curator, and Programme Manager at the Dr. Shantilal K. Somaiya School of Art, Mumbai.
Prabhakar Pachpute lives and works in Pune, India. He received his BFA in Sculpture from Indira Kala Sangit University, Khairagarh (Chhattisgarh, 2009) and his MFA from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (Gujarat, 2011).
Select institutional solo and group exhibitions include Folkstone Triennale (2025); Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Poland (2025); 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022); Tate St. Ives (2022); Artes Mundi 9, Cardiff (2021); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2021); Beneath the Palpable, Experimenter - Ballygunge Place, Kolkata (2020); 3rd Industrial Art Biennale (2020); Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2019); 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018); 2nd Yinchuan Biennale (2018); Dhaka Art Summit (2018); STUK, Leuven (2018; Parasite, Hong Kong (2017); Asia Cultural Centre, Gwangju (2017); National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (2016); MACBA, Barcelona (2015); 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015); 8th Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (2015); 31st São Paulo Biennial (2014); 5th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial (2014), (2013); Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2013); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2013); IFA, Stuttgart & Berlin (2013); Clark House Initiative, Mumbai (2012), and three solo exhibitions at Experimenter galleries, 2013, 2017, 2020 amongst others.
Pachpute was awared the Artes Mundi 9 Prize (2020-21) and Asia Society Game Changer Award (2020)
