Prabhakar Pachpute
Stolen Horizon III, 2023

Prabhakar Pachpute’s large-scale painting engages mining as both an industrial process and an act of excavation that unearths layered cultural and ecological histories. Mining sites around the world reveal striking examples of this dual character: in Serbia’s Kostolac coal mine, for instance, archaeologists recently uncovered a Roman-era warship buried beneath ancient river sediments; in Turkey’s Çankiri salt mine, the naturally mummified remains of a donkey used for transport centuries ago were found alongside a more recent rabbit carcass. Such discoveries speak to the entanglement of human industry, animal labour, and historical memory.
 
Pachpute’s painting draws on these stories to explore how excavation opens time itself — exposing what has been buried, lost, or forgotten. It asks us to consider how our interpretations of history, culture, and the environment are shaped by what emerges from beneath the surface. At the same time, it confronts the violence of mining: the displacement of animals, destruction of forests, and environmental ruin that are by-products of extraction. In Stolen Horizon III, the horizon becomes both a promise and a theft — a line where land, labour, and memory are exhumed, contested, and reimagined. Through its layered imagery and monumental scale, the work asks us to reckon with the contradictions of cultural excavation as an act of knowledge and a force of erasure.