Experimenter presents the second iteration of Prabhakar Pachpute’s solo Lone Runner’s Laboratory at Experimenter Outpost at Alipore Museum, Kolkata.
Woven through a dense interplay of metaphors and contemporary references, 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 exploitation. The exhibition unfolds as an active space of introspection—confronting with discomforting encounters, stark silence, and propositions of hope.
Emerging after a close reflection on the characters who have informed Pachpute’s panoramic landscapes over the years, his responses are shaped through his visits to various kinds of mines, mining and agricultural museums, farms, and barren terrains, and ongoing conversations with workers and activists committed to the struggles of the marginalized. Equally significant has been the influence of literary and intellectual thought, which, alongside his encounters with lived experience, has helped shape the conceptual and emotional terrain of his practice.
Pachpute brings together a new body of morphed sculptures and paintings of the uneasy, unsettled energies buried within difficult social realities. He delves closely into the inner worlds of the characters he has continued to draw over the years, exploring the fire that persists within them. His work captures moments of inner turmoil, emotional collapse, and existential erosion. Echoing the concerns of thinkers and writers who have explored emotional terrains shaped by vulnerability and constraint, Pachpute draws inspiration from George Orwell’s struggle in Shooting an Elephant (1936), which was not a confrontation with an enemy but with forces and responsibilities he never anticipated facing. He also alludes to Gregor Samsa, Franz Kafka’s protagonist in The Metamorphosis (1915), who becomes both the cavern he has carved for himself and the one shaped by his surroundings.
Set in a forest inhabited by sloth bears, rabbits, elephants, foxes, and wild boars, Crawling through the Jungle unfolds like a fable in which characters move freely between the real and the imagined. Blending the worlds of humans and non-humans, the works evoke the strangeness and complexities of everyday life, the multifaceted landscape of aspirations and fears, and the different ways we seek escape. At the same time, they explore the inner strength that can emerge from these experiences.Deeply intimate and unmistakably solitary, Lone Runner’s Laboratory uncovers a churning tempest at the heart of Pachpute’s quest for answers to a complex set of universal questions that confront us today.
