Exhibition

Sachin Bonde

11 Mar 2016 – 15 May 2016

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Clark House Bombay

Mumbai
Indian Oil Nagar, India

Address

Travel Information

  • Bus Numbers from Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus: 14, 69, 101,130. Bus Numbers from Churchgate: 70, 106, 122, 123, 132, 137
  • Opposite Sahakari Bhandar and Regal Cinema, next to Woodside Inn.
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Does the camel that ferries guards on the borders that divide India and Pakistan on the stretch that weaves through the Thar desert know how vital it is to the subcontinent's geopolitical fault-line?

About

A border assigned to a people by a parting colonial occupier, one that lead to a massacre as grave as the holocaust.  The 'Ship of the Desert'  marks a place of honour in India's annual military parade on Republic Day when an invited foreign dignitary along with the President of India inspect the guards of the worlds only declared pacifist democracy.   The Mughals boasted of entire regiments staffed by thousands of elephants,  horses,  ox and the occasional cheetah.  The military pomp so well documented in the miniatures that depicted wars between the Mughals and the Rajputs were never bereft of animals.  These beasts of burden faced the onslaught of marauding armies and their state of the art canon fire, as India saw changes in dynasty , court language and modes of trade.  

The etymology of metaphors has a history with language,  ' Owning a White Elephant'  surely was translated to English from an Indic language during colonial periods.  Its subsequent popularity made us forget the history of its translation.  The Elephant first traveled to the Roman courts from Tunisia or Carthage , the Romans and Greeks referred to the large landmass south of the Mediterranean as Africa.  After defeating the Kingdom of Carthage ,  they named the province what is present day Tunisia as Africa, after the Berber tribe Afri that inhabited the area.  King Leopold the butcher of Congo failed at domesticating African Elephants in his personal fief in the 19th Century.  Sachin Bonde examines the history of Ivory as a history of language , borders and colonial exploits.  Persian the court language of the Mughals gave way to English , so much so that seven decades after independence from Britain, India has the highest recorded percentage of English speakers in its history.  This turn towards a language and the history of translation is well examined within Bonde's solo debut at Clark House.  

 

Imagine the bewilderment of those who encountered Kerosene or Paraffin for the first time.   It would have been their first taste of oil that was not vegetal,  dairy or from animal lard.  An easy explanation would have been its provenance from wells below the surface.  Kerosene found a vernacular description as 'Mitti Ka tail'  or when translated back to English as Soil Oil.  Derived from the remains of past vegetation and dinosaurs , oil was to be found largely under deserts , places that once held abundant flora and fauna.  Soil Oil like the term Sweetmeat instigates a paradox of association.  But the fight for territory and oil has some how dominated the theatre of the world's animosity and war for more than a century.  The British and French mandates for Palestine,  Iraq,  Jordan and Syria as well as the formation of modern kingdoms of Saudi Arabia,  Kuwait and the Trucial states of the Arabian peninsula had their origins in some manner interlinked in the modern day Fossil Oil trade.  The murder of the progressive Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh and the conspiracy of the 'Seven Sisters of Oil'  in the formation of Lebanon are conspiracies that are replayed until today when we speak of modern day wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

Bonde found a piece of armed machinery being dragged on a cart lead by an elephant in a photo where it is flanked by an electric tram.  By the first world war animals began to have few practical uses in war, mules would gather ammunition and war supplies into trenches and the occasional horse would be used to patrol.  The dog has its contemporary use in forensics of drugs and explosives.  The last recorded cavalry charge was lead by the Jodhpur and Mysore Lancers then as part of the British onslaught onto the Ottoman Empire and happened in the September of 1918 at Haifa which is now in Israel and paved the way to the capture of Damascus and Aleppo and the collapse of the Turkish hold of West Asia.  Epics in India have shown the use of armies comprising of monkeys and mythical kings atop of rhinoceroses at war.  

Sachin Bonde draws comparisons between the murder of a rhinoceros for its horn and near extinction of the Elephant in the wild for its ivory to the thousands of deaths that arise out of Western campaigns that target civilian populations in the search of terrorists.  ISIS participates in the oil economy even though it advocates a return from modern day scientific temper.  The oil produced in its territory is pilfered into Turkey and other regimes that oppose it militarily and ideologically.  Ethics and oil are strange bedfellows.  The ISIS era hypocritically uses American automobiles rather than depending on camels and horses.  

The horse has an unending relationship with Oil.  The energy produced from it in cars that have replaced horse driven carriages is still counted by horsepowers.  The Vijaynagar empire encouraged the Portuguese who were able to bring better white stallions to their court than their Arab competitors.  These kings later became colonial agents who crowned themselves in jewels brought from African mines.  The British encouraged such pomp on the expense of the impoverished subjects as it deflected the attention from their diluted powers and actual reach in their titular territories.  Bonde uses the ornamentation of these kings, the flags of the Opec nations and adorns them on the elongated tall hat of Uncle Sam.  A replica of the British crown jewels is coloured tar black and it flanks a print of Kerosene beaker upturned to look like a ceremonial headgear.  

Sachin Bonde draws a map using gold leaf on to rusting aluminium plates.  The Indian socialist state was formed on a system of public distribution that would battle poverty through subsidized food and kerosene that would check the tyranny of inflation.  India imports almost all of its crude oil and refines it in a combination of state and privately held refineries. The wars in Iraq since the 1990s and the Iran sanction adversely have affected prizes.  But largely the public distribution system is at fault at being unable to deliver and is marked by wide scale pilferage  and black marketing.  Kerosene too is now being slowly phased out in favour of liquid gas as a medium to run cooking stoves within homes.  The aluminium  beakers that were used to dispense kerosene now have little use.  They often appear in the work of Bonde onto which he etches maps and paints them into sculptural critiques of a states failed promises. 

Bonde's present show holds 196 boundaries of the world alongside the wickers of lanterns placed in a manner as if they were to adorn an antique store.  The politics of oil are loud and clear in funnels painted gold and black and placed in an amalgamation that resembles a system for sound.  Sachin Bonde is a printmaker who began his practice by initially usurping symbols used by the Indian Hindu right as memories of a golden past.  Bonde through the use of metaphorical placement of these symbols mocked their promises much like he does in Soil Oil of an interconnected international system of power only visible in its transgressions with oil.  The search for oil is as violent as the murder of the musk deer for its glands that produce a few grams of essence essential to human pleasures.  

Sumesh Sharma 

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Sachin Bonde

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