Defacement, Disfiguration, and the Human: A Conversation with Prabhakar Kamble
In Their Words: Reflections on Dalit Art and Aesthetics
The Ambedkar Initiative hosted a series of Zoom conversations on the intersection of art and politics under the rubric of “Understanding Systemic Racism” across the 2021 calendar year as the world emerged from the COVID lockdowns, and the United States reckoned with its violent histories of racism in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The focus was on the radical capacity of words, images, and sound to reorder the perceptual field, and to engage critically with lifeworlds of caste. Writing and literature has tended to be the predominant focus but there has been renewed interest in sound and performance, as well as image making for those interested in Dalit art and aesthetics. The aesthetic, like the economic, the social, and the political is a distinctive domain of praxis. What distinguishes it? One of the definitions of aesthesis is feeling. Or, the aesthetic as a mode of ordering, distinguishing the divide between the sensible and insensible. Caste—embodied, granular, tactile—produces a crisis of representation, because it puts the social under erasure. How then do we imagine affinity, solidarity, touch, and intimacy?
This is the first in a series of wideranging discussions focused on art practice, the work of the hand and the eye, aesthetic training, and the politics of reception initiated by Anupama Rao, who convenes the Ambedkar Initiative and serves as Director, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. We have lightly edited the conversations in order to preserve the intimacy of address, and to reproduce the sense of watching thought in action, in real time, which the mode of call and response allows. Grateful thanks to Samantha DeNinno for editorial and curatorial support.
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: Jai Bhim, friends. I am an artist, curator, and cultural activist. I live and work in Mumbai, but with a practice that is pan-India through my role as a curator and activist of [the] Ambedkarite Movement. Since we are discussing Ambedkarite aesthetics, let me start by recalling the words of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, who liberated us and taught us that “the cultivation of mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence”. Ambedkarite ideology allows us to see that human liberation occurs through ethical intervention in a manufactured, exploitative system which is responsible for human slavery, suffering, and exploitation. I think art is a non-violent tool to intervene in such systems by endorsing the idea of freedom, justice, and equality as well.
I would like to begin with art training in Maharashtra. We are taught about the relationship between social conflict and political art practices in Europe. For instance, I was taught that art has an important role to play in any kind of social change, such as the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution. And yet, these same teachers and the same institutions deny political voices and come from their own societies. In fact, they do not want to think about the politics of [the] art making process. These are practices of what Professor Alone calls “protected ignorance.” So that's the problem I face. I continue to struggle a lot to convince my colleagues or art historians about the relationship between art and politics.
ANUPAMA RAO: I guess one question I would have for you is what would changing the curriculum, or de-Brahmanising the curriculum mean? What specific kinds of artworks, ways of seeing, forms of aesthetic expression and appreciation do you think could be brought in to transform this? I'm also interested because you have been doing all of this public art work, working with artist collaborators. What would that change involve? How would you think about the curriculum if somebody says to you, “Listen, Prabhakar Kamble, we will help you set up an art school.” What would you do? How would you set up the training?
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: See, the thing is that one has to be liberated through a set of startling images, by their truth. No one was talking about caste issues in the Indian art world. Yet, everyone speaks about socio-political problems. I used to wonder: what socio-political problems are they talking about? People are killed in war, but it is possible that more people have been killed by the [ideology of] the caste system. My journey in the art world began with the art education I received at the J. J. School of Art, where Brahminical ideas of education are at work. But fortunately, I grew up with my parents’ engagement in the Dalit Movement. I am grateful to have been introduced to this Ambedkarite ideology which allows me to respond and represent the caste-based oppression of the Dalit community, their immediate social realities, as well as personal and collective histories through an Ambedkarite consciousness that emerges from Dalit experience.
ANUPAMA RAO: There is a fundamental social alienation that is organizing the art practice, right?
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: [The art practice] is totally manipulated and caste is deliberately silenced. If you talk about such kinds of issues, no art gallery or art institution will pick you, promote you, or represent you. That's the reason so many potential artists are hesitant to engage with caste. I started writing about the art practice of artists who come from rural Maharashtra, rural India, like the place where I come from, started writing for them. I got responses from many people, many artists, senior artists who had been working for thirty or forty years, but could not find acknowledgment in an arts establishment dominated by upper-caste artists, who used standards of art judgment to deny the quality of Dalit artists’ work. These kinds of art practices are not limited to the gallery room. They are also connected with the demands for democracy and representation.
ANUPAMA RAO: It's actually a way of opening the white space, as it were, of the museum or the gallery, and bringing people into that space who may not be able to, you know, who won't feel comfortable entering it.
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: I don't think that the people who are interested in buying or collecting such projects are totally aware of the politics. Revenue generation is important, of course. But artists should go beyond the market. People should go to the masses, especially artists, curators, and art scholars, to connect with the people. The establishment is always talking about the illiteracy of common people towards art. But they don't dare to go to the people, they don't dare to go to the society, to present their work in public spaces, in unknown spaces. They just want to be established to exhibit work in popular museums and galleries. Even today, I don't hesitate to teach art in public spaces, in popular spaces. This can go hand in hand with engaging the art market. I have seen so many artists who are very conscious of this politics, but change their mindset once they become successful, and their work enters art galleries.
Art and Identity
PRABHKAR KAMBLE: Am I a Dalit artist because I was born in that community? If a person from the upper-caste engages with Ambedkarite ideology and produces art that reflect it, do we still view them a Dalit artist? Yes, that's the question. How can those working in the anti-caste movement harden caste identity? It is easy to call someone a Dalit artist, but that’s why I raised the question about representation with equity. Most of the times, I notice that there is discrimination with consent. If I agree that I am a Dalit artist, it is discrimination with my consent. It is also isolation in a way, or a separation that means that I only talk about caste.
ANUPAMA RAO: Or, that we must somehow find caste in your work, whether it's there or not. Right? That becomes the organizing logic and rubric for which we process it.
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: They are trying to isolate us from the mainstream. That’s why we didn't title our movement “Dalit Art Movement,” or the “Dalit Artist Movement.” It is the “Secular Art Movement.” It is more than the identity, more than just a caste issue. It is about democracy. It is about the society which is intended by the Constitution. How long shall we carry these caste names? This should be a step to annihilate caste, to leave the identity which is based on caste.
Art Collaboration
ANUPAMA RAO: You had presented work [at the Clark House Initiative] and then you were called in [to curate] work there and to bring sort of, lesser-known artists, younger artists into the fold.
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: I got the funding budget as a curator at the Clark House Initiative in 2017 just after my second solo show. At that time, Clark House Initiative was the artistic point, a stage for people who come from subaltern or marginalized backgrounds. The “Working Practices” show took place in The Showroom in London in 2018. I curated the show together with the Clark House Initiative, and showed works by twenty-five artists. We brought an approach to art production and discourse that is based on communitarianism and rootedness within the specific urban context of Mumbai; an informal sociality that is at the heart of their working practices. The exhibition grew out of a dialogue between the artist and curators that touches on new currents of caste, class, and blackness within the artist's practices, drawing on the connection between the British Black Arts Movement and Indian contemporary art. In particular, the exhibition featured a number of artists whose practice concerns Dalit politics.
Sumesh Sharma and Zasha Colah of the Clark House Initiative started building around Ambedkarite ideology, the idea of freedom, the idea of social justice. They created this environment. Artists found hope in these places, and many of them were thinking about collaborative, collective art practice. People became more confident, they were encouraged that someone was representing their context, their voice. Nowadays, you can see what their cultivation of these perspectives meant, what it meant to be acknowledged. After Clark House, there's nothing to talk about. No, I mean, there is a huge vacuum in the Indian art field. Nobody is coming to listen to such art practices. Clark House Initiative was the first initiative in the Indian art world that directly spoke about the caste issue.
ANUPAMA RAO: You mention the Clark House Initiative. There's also the Secular Art Movement that you've been aligned with. And then there is Revolution Counter-Revolution, which brought artists together at the Ajanta Caves.[1] What are those particular spaces? Can you speak about each of those a little bit more and what those are trying to do? Again, you know, your argument that people are constantly talking about the aesthetic illiteracy of the common person, but that they're the ones who are afraid to actually take their artwork elsewhere. What does the Secular Art Movement try to do? What has been its aim and then your own aim in bringing people together for Revolution Counter-Revolution? Clark House sort of leads into [the] Secular Art Movement?
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: Perhaps there was a collective failure of understanding the relationship between “art,” and an understanding of the politics and agency of politics at the Clark House. In 2018, the mother branch of Secular Art Movement, initially named the Secular Movement, was founded in 2014 by Professor Kamble, who's from Sangli. He is a founder of the Ambedkarite Intellectuals, he was an active member of the Dalit Panthers, as well as other social, cultural, and political movements. In 2018, there was a workshop in Panchali, Maharashtra. There were about thirty to thirty-five artists across Maharashtra who came together around the topic of “The Restless Presence and Understanding of Artists.” There were a series of lectures built around artworks at a residential workshop; a collaboration of artists and activists, social activists. The idea of building the Secular Art Movement came up thereafter. We used the occasion of the second centenary year commemorating the discovery of the Ajanta-Ellora Caves to challenge the art world, which remained silent.
In August 2019, I facilitated a large-format national residency workshop looking at conceptual art in relation to Ambedkarite philosophy, where I assembled fifty like-minded artists at the World Heritage Site of Ajanta Caves to celebrate the second centenary year of its discovery.
The workshop was based on Ambedkar’s Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India. Ambedkar notes there that, “Buddhism was as great a revolution as the French Revolution.” He also states, “the history of India is nothing but the history of a moral conflict between Buddhism and Brahmanism.” There have been revolutions and counter-revolutions elsewhere in the world too, the dominant ones being the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. The two revolutions were followed by counter-revolutions, with art and literature playing a vital role. We wanted to recall this [moment].
For us, to be in a place where we could imagine the Buddha and the traces of Buddhism after thousands of years became a critical space for hosting a series of lectures, discussions with senior artists, who engaged with college students.
Across the state of Maharashtra, I painted several large portraits of Dr. Ambedkar to endorse social movements that fight for social justice with various communities and local artists coming together to celebrate an alternate ritual culture that celebrates Dr. Ambedkar. People refine the public artwork with new ideas every few years, so it becomes a work in progress. Normally, a conceptual artist doesn’t understand the importance of this kind of image-making. But in the rural places of India, you can find a statue or the portrait of Ambedkar in every village. You recognize this as Ambedkar’s because they are using the blue color of the blazer, and drawing Ambedkar’s spectacles. That’s why the image becomes Ambedkar. That's the beauty of the idea, of creating a set of image-effects.
Symbol of Liberation: A portrait of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in a public space.
Acrylic colors on wall: 20ft X 15ft (2017)
Human in Una: Humiliation and Civility[2]
Human in Una - Una Diary Pages - Ink on Postcard (2016)
Prabhakar Kamble: “After the Una atrocity happened in Una, Gujarat in 2016, I made lots of drawings as daily diary sketches”
ANUPAMA RAO: I want to ask you about your Human in Una, I find that a very, very difficult piece. We are talking about caste annihilation, but here, you are restaging what is essentially an act of Dalit violence, of violation. And you are bringing this into a performance space. You are giving your spectators the right to become perpetrators. Right. You're saying, “you’ve come to see something? I want you to do something. What I want you to do is to engage in the act of humiliation.”
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: This episode occurred on July 11, 2016, in Mota Samadhiyala village near Una, Gujarat. Cow vigilantes accused seven members of a Dalit family for killing a cow. They were stealing a carcass. They failed to convince and four of them were brought to Una in a cart to be stripped and assaulted in public.
It is a performance. My performances are often complex commentaries on the society marked by symbolic use of material – either found or made – and at times heightened by the presentation of symbolic color. My reality derives from the experiences of reading the writings of Ambedkar and the Dalit movement and its philosophy.
My performances take place in the villages of India as acts of defiance in solidarity with Dalit experiences where Dalits have come together and protested the lynching of Dalit youth and rapes that are common in rural India. Human in Una is in response to Dalit lynching and is identified as a political work. I confront the suppressions of Dalit lived realities emerging from collective history to current times as an extreme form of sporadic lynching. Shocked by the inhuman assault featured seamlessly across television channels, the episode which occurred in 2016, in Una, Gujarat, I responded through a performance questioning inhuman caste codes. The participatory performance, heightened through symbolic materials, makes one lose elements of our consciousness as social beings, they surpass rational boundaries of civility.
The symbolism of materials such as [a] wooden stick – a tool which represents protection – can also be a potential threat. The black soot symbolizes the dark isolation of Dalits within the society engulfed by greed of power. And the soot also symbolizes the humiliation, the Dalit’s face in various forms of oppression. The weight on my back symbolizes the burdens of the caste and class system.
ANUPAMA RAO: What is your thinking in staging this? What are you asking of your spectators? I think everybody is stunned when they come in.
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: Because, I just appeal [to] them, “you should come into the space and we should react, and you should do whatever you feel using the objects [to humiliate the artist]”. I put some required objects like the black soot, the wooden stick. That's the only introduction I gave. People have no idea about this performance [and] what’s the context behind it. They just tend to come, involve, engage with this object and see the human psychology or human tendency is a state, it is either victim or the oppressor, we are living in counterrevolution. Because nobody can see the psychological slavery. Even if they are psychological slaves, they cannot understand it, [that is] what psychological slavery is. Anybody who’s seen a wooden stick in front of me during the performance, the first thought comes in their mind is to hit somebody with the wooden stick. So, anybody who touches the wooden stick, they hit me. So, that's the psychology of having any tool in their hand. The psychological state of their minds with the objects we might see and they don't realize it before they use it. That’s a conversation. The conversation is not about to teach you or give you a lecture. Art is a very important aspect of life that anyone can [use to make] dialogue visually, powerful dialogues with the idea of emotions. Any discussion, whether it is politics, ideology, movements, whatever it is, it can never be without emotions.
ANUPAMA RAO: So, it's a kind of test, if I can put it that way. Because for some people, it comes easily to associate the stick with violence inflicted on another. I could imagine that there are others for whom it's a moment of a kind of horror. And they're not able to do it. And then they realize also that maybe they're not able to do it, but that's only because of them. Others in their position can do it, right. It's giving them a kind of a test, but it's also it's an ethical lesson. Right. What is it that we are able to do to others?
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: Because it's so important for both. It is also about the culture on which side of what culture to stand for.
ANUPAMA RAO: You know, it's a very difficult piece. It is a horrific piece of re-presentation. I mean, coming back to Ambedkar, it is a representation of the unspoken cruelty of a caste order within the space of performance, of staging.
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: Yeah. So, I am doing something with the culture because art is an important tool. And that's why […] with these kinds of practices, there is a sense of liberation, the culture of rhythm. I don't introduce my idea before the performance, but just imagine. I mean, people can teach you.
ANUPAMA RAO: So, what is the audience thinking when they are asked to perform? They are being given permission to enact violence, they are being told, "okay, you do it now.” Do you perform because so many other people are watching? You [Prabhakar] are playing with the idea of what comes naturally to people in a caste order. But suddenly they are also performing in front of other people. If I was to stand in front of somebody and somebody says, “come on, hit me,” do I say, “No, I can't do this” and go away? You're placing your audience in a bind. It is very interesting to hear you talk about this.
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: Performance is never just for me. [It is not] like I perform and just observe, while the audience enjoys this performance from a distance. Of course, that's the typical idea of performance. But I want them to perform in the space. Generally, what they do, what they've done in their daily life, that keeping silent [in the face of violence] is also part of the performance now. Everybody is performing in their own way. I mean, to keep silence is also politics. There is nothing apolitical, everything is politics.
Disfiguration of the Image: Mechanical Movement
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: My father used to work in the textile mill. He was a daily wage worker. He worked for 12 hours a day, standing in front of six machines. Operating these machines in Ichalkaranji, which is called the Manchester of Maharashtra, for its history of textile production in Maharashtra. My father used to stand in front of six of these machines, huge machines, run between them to operate them simultaneously. It used to be a shock to see my father at his workplace. He would go to the mill at eight in the morning, and return at eight at night, a twelve-hour day doing this. Whenever I used to go [to] his factory to see him while working, the looms are humming. You cannot hear someone even if you stand four feet away. There is noise all the time! I was in school at the time, but I used to enjoy being with him in this huge factory watching those huge machines, listening to the throbbing noise, and watching these people. In observing this space where your mind is always throbbing, I learnt something about human existence. My father and I used to communicate through symbols and signals because nobody can hear each other. This is how I think about kinetic installation.
ANUPAMA RAO: You are bringing the machine and routine work back into the art practice?
PRABHAKAR KAMLE: A statue of Dr. Ambedkar was vandalized in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, on April 7th, 2018. A day later, the vandalized statue, which was painted in saffron, was replaced by a new one. The kinetic installation, Disfiguration of Image, enacts this moment of erasure.
Disfiguration of Image embodies public history, and challenges the relationship between the visible and invisible. An erasure, which is an attempt to deconstruct its origin, its foundational structure, becomes a new construct. Forms of erasures mark the place of forms of assertion.
The mechanical movement of repainting the sculpture of Ambedkar is attempted repeatedly to emphasize on the moment of juxtaposing color. Ideologies [are] perpetuate[d] through societies. They are often used to organize hierarchy and are centralized through social institutions such as media, education, and religion. They change with changing times, creating shifts, and are capable of galvanizing paths of reforms. They are often color coded. But when a segment of society shows signs of insecurity towards a rising ideology which appears to threaten them with its mere presence, not knowing that a mere act of erasure reaffirms the strength of it. This erasure, an attempt to reconstruct its origin, its foundational structure, intentionally juxtaposed, is often motivated with benefits. Here, I enact the politics of color through the act of erasure.
Broken Foot: Labor and Objects
ANUPAMA RAO: How do you move from Human in Una, a performance, and Disfiguration of Image, a kinetic installation, back to objects with deep symbolic import, as in Broken Foot? You're no longer communicating through performance. Neither are you activating the spectator. You are now back to addressing caste labor, and its objectification in the foot. How do you trace your own movement from that period where you're trying to instill movement in art back to the materiality of the art work? You seem to have now come back to saying the artwork can be a solid-state object. It can be an artwork that stands by itself without movement, without activation in some sense.
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: The title of that work is Broken Foot [3]. The idea of caste division is the same as religion. It exists, but no one talks about it as a reality. Discrimination creates a line, and that division promotes social imbalance.
Broken Foot - Wood 12” X 6” X 5” (2019)
Here, the cracked foot symbolizes the reality of caste discrimination in our society, and with this broken foot, no one stands united as a society. A force which built homes, offices, bridges, and cities as we know and imagine, a force that raises the economy of the nation, a force that builds nation. The Constitution unfolds as a light text as millions of feet march thousands of miles homewards.
What were the conditions which made them take an arduous journey on foot till the time their feet developed cracks like cracked earth? These are broken people of the times broken from their homes. Can one stand united as a society on a broken foot? In the context of inequality, we come to as a nation with a broken foot, a divide called discrimination as the pandemic starkly reveals it.
I don't keep a particular language of style while making art. And that’s why I don't want the definition of art. It’s not about time, it’s about the requirement of consistent context. The most important aspect while making art. Whether they're kinetic, performance, objects, or any kind of painting. I also read material as a medium. In this case, material is more contextual to the existing caste system. So again, you can see in the base of that work is the foot, a metal foot, and that base is solid.
ANUPAMA RAO: And it becomes unstable as you start going up.
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: So that is again a powerful statement using materials. So that kind of play, you have to understand by reading this, I have to say, though, it is not about style. Many artists follow their own style. They use performance for their entire life or they draw for their entire life. But for me, I cannot get myself into just a single style for presenting art. Every time, every idea requires some particular discipline of art making. If I draw the art, then it doesn’t always deliver the context and the feeling of that idea. That's the difference when working on different kinds of materials. And also, it comes from my background. I am always attracted by rural life, which has multidimensional value and meaning: the fragility of other parts, contrasted with the rigidity of the metal foot. And then there is the beauty and fragility of the indigo. It can be destroyed when you touch it.
ANUPAMA RAO: In a sense, you're playing with the question of hardness and softness, airiness of materials themselves.
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: Yes, and nobody in the art gallery can touch the art work.
ANUPAMA RAO: Speaking of untouchable.
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: If you touch the object on the top, which is the outcome of that caste system, it is so fragile that it can be disturbed or destroyed. But nobody can touch it in the art space. That is also, again, the contradictory statement but nobody can read it.
ANUPAMA RAO: Did you actually engage with these materials in your own experience growing up? I mean, you're talking about a highly mechanized world of textile production and so on. But did you actually have an engagement with some of these objects - you know, the bells, the pot, and so on? You're saying one needs a sense of the material history of these objects, how they’re made, the discipline that it takes to make them and so on.
PRABHAKAR KAMBLE: I had to work to get my education. I know everything about the level and location of materials. I used to work in a factory. I used to work with the, you know, essential workers. I worked in many places. So, I know materials very well. And that's why I am always attracted by these kinds of objects and materials. I'm not comfortable with the shiny and glossy kind of surfaces.
ANUPAMA RAO: I wanted to amplify a few important points as we wrap up. You speak of coming to know objects through their material histories and the process of working with these objects, and how that makes the world of making and doing absolutely essential to art practice, but also, art education. What you said, your father was an artist, you know, no less than any artist because of his intimacy with objects, the relationship between manual labor and the machine. This, I thought, was significant. The third is the commitment to secularism, Ambedkarite democracy, and identity. Not merely your identity as an artist, often called a Dalit artist, but as well, how you blast open the idea of the individual artist as creator, as maker by consistently opening up your process to collaboration, to the interruption of subaltern images, everyday materials.
Thank you so much for sharing your work!
[1] Ambedkar’s name was first mentioned at an Art History seminar on traces of Buddhism in India, which was held at the Ajanta Caves, and organized by the Department of Art History and Aesthetics, Faculty of Fine Arts, of the M. S. University of Baroda in January 1988. The late M. N. Deshpande, former Director General of the Archaeology Survey of India delivered a keynote address where he mentioned Ambedkar in the context of the contemporary revival of Buddhism and its relation to the archeological past. A seminar in 2003 on the theme of “Theorizing India’s pre-Modern Visual Culture: Issues of Caste, Class, Gender and Sexuality,” and a seminar in 2004 on “Art and Activism” organized by Shivaji Pannikar of M. S. University also mentioned Ambedkar as an important figure for understanding framing concerns of Dalit art and aesthetics. Thanks to Y. S. Alone for these details.
[2] On July 11th 2016, the seven members of a Dalit family were skinning the carcass of a dead cow in Mota Samadhiyala village near Una in Gujarat, when they were accosted by gau rakshaks, members of a vigilante cow protection group, and accused of killing cows. Though the Dalits tried to tell them they were skinning the carcass, they were tied to a car, beaten with sticks, iron pipes and a knife. Four of them were brought to Una town in the car, stripped and assaulted again in public. When the police arrived, the attackers fled in their car. Images of the attack went viral, and there were organized Dalit protests across the months of July and August of 2016, including a protest march of over 20,000 people on August 15th, 2016, which was organized by Dalit leader, Jignesh Mevani under the aegis of the Rashtriya Dalit Adhikari Manch.
[3] Broken Foot was conceived during the pandemic, when a mass exodus of migrant laborers made their way back to their villages walking for days without any support from the state. In an interview, Kamble notes that the artwork is “a representation of the men and women who have been on foot for days during the pandemic to go back to their villages. The sheer apathy of the system for a large section of the society that builds homes, offices, bridges and cities was apparent. Some of them were even walking barefoot. We thus managed to break the feet of the people who support us.” Outlook India, September 24, 2021: https://www.outlookindia.com/national/india-news-broken-foot-an-artists-comment-on-caste-news-395629. (Last accessed November 21, 2024.)
Prabhakar Kamble lives and works in Mumbai, and is well known for his curatorial work and for exhibitions of his work both in India and internationally. He received his post Diploma in Art Education from the J. J. School of Art (Mumbai), and his GD Art Diploma from the L. S. Raheja School of Art (Mumbai). He is known for his public performances, which draw on symbols of Dalit social life and the Ambedkarite tradition to stage social commentary and critique, kinetic installations that gesture to the interface between machine and the laboring body, and his drawings. I asked Prabhakar if he could acquaint us with some of his recent work as a way of addressing his ongoing art practice.
Anupama Rao spoke with him on February 11, 2021, and again on August 3rd, 2022 about how he sees his art practice as an extension of his Ambedkarite commitments. Additionally, how his art functions as a space for working through the questions of social representation at the intersection of his anticaste commitments, on the one hand, and his ongoing art practice on the other. We focused on an in-depth discussion of a performance piece, “Human in Una,” a kinetic installation titled “Disfiguration of the Image,” and Kamble’s ongoing explorations of caste and the laboring body. Please note that the two conversations have been substantially edited for cohesion and the construction of one piece as follows. This has been done with permission from the artist.