India

Prabhakar was born in Chandrapur to a family of coalminers. Most of his preceding works were sculptures, or mixtures of sculpture, drawing and light, or where these elements came together in stop-animation films. Prabhakar expresses stories of the mines as he has heard them, and his observation of the relations that exist between the miners, in a style of invented proverbs. They are a mixture of things real with those symbolic that have accrued cultural or local meaning. He mixes stories heard, with the thoughts discovered during the process of art making. Details in the work convey the sublime trauma of the mine's psychological impact on those who work in and those who live above the mines. 

Chandrapur is a city in the Vidarbha region of Eastern Maharashtra. The mines were begun in colonial times, and dictate the demographics, industry, and character of the city. The city supplies one fourth of the state of Maharashtra’s electricity needs through the thermal power it generates, but it remains aghast at its own underdevelopment. Vidarbha is infamous for the ‘cotton curse’, a continuous record of farmers committing suicides, edged on by drought-like conditions, failing cotton crops, and a dire politician-moneylender nexus. 

For his work in Social Fabric, Prabhakar recreates unseen lines that connect Chandrapur to Bombay, the coal miners and farmers of rural Maharashtra, to the now nearly disappeared, mill workers in Bombay, beginning with the coal that once powered the cotton mills in Bombay, the cotton curse of Vidarbha, and its neglect by a government that sits in the distant hub of Bombay. The unheard plight of the cotton farmers resonates with the situation the mill workers faced as their labour movements were crushed with rise of the ultra-nationalist Shiv Sena, a political party that presently opposes calls for independent statehood in Vidarbha. He charts his own migration to Bombay as an artist, finding resonances with the migration of the mill workers into the city decades ago to work in the mills.