Political Animal

Political Animal draws on the animal fable of both the Indian and European traditions to make an existential examination of the bestial and instinctual sides of our political and civic life in word and image.Prabhakar Pachpute's artworks are inspired by the work of writer Johnny Rodger, who has been experimenting with a type of modern prose-poem fable in order to come at the question of the 'contemporary' through the angle of literary form.This collection of twenty modern fables takes the simple but fantastical elements of the conventional talking-animal fable and reworks them with political complexity in an engaged and discursive existential style which creates its own literary space. A long term collaboration between a curator/editor Viviana Checchia - an artist and a writer, the work examines how diverse formations of the collective - the mob, the pack, the crowd - pay into everyday behaviours.Accompanies am exhibition of the same name at Reid Corridor Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, 21 June - 4 August 2019.