Sachin Bonde: Soil Oil

The World

Sachin Bonde’s works over the last four years have been about the dynamics, maps and networks of movement of petrol and kerosene, and their relationship to realpolitik. In effect, he ends up mapping the world’s networks of pipelines that run underfoot, and that have been the cause of so many wars and invasions, since World War II, and especially foregrounded since 1991 to the present. The war for fuel, is also driven by fuel needed to prop up war. Without fuel, no tankers can be mobilised or fighter planes fly. Innovations in chemical petroleum, its technology and its supply, changed the dynamic of geographic interests. To many, petroleum—the pumped black liquid from under the surface of the earth, is viewed as a resource curse, spiralling countries into war, corruption, and environmental devastation.

The Middle men

His exhibition equally revolves around a single news event, of a district collector. In Maharastra, the Additional District Collector of Malegaon, Yashwant Sonawane, was beaten and burned alive in 2011, for exposing an Indian oil-adulteration mafia. The theme of impurity, refers to the adulteration of kerosene, and therefore, to the scarcity of fuel, to crime and to corruption—to kerosene sold in the black, as an all too necessary supplement to the limits imposed by the ration shop. The helplessness of finding oneself on the side of the illegal, is the most crushing theme of this exhibition. It is a perspective we cannot find online, or in oil statistics, because it simply is not written that way. If oil politics is immense, and spans the world, the artist distills that whole sum, through the funnel of a ration shop. Into the act of pouring out kerosene, for monthly use, in villages, unlit by electricity. It is the kerosene of the oil lamp Bonde is referencing, and this gives the body of works a biting contemporaneity.

Scarcity

Sachin Bonde was born at Darwha, in Yavtmal district in 1985. He completed his schooling at Darwha, starting art education at SPCM Nagpur, then moving to Mumbai for his BFA from 2007-2011 at the Sir JJ School of Art. He was awarded a teaching fellowship at Sir JJ School of Art from 2011-2012, and completed his MFA in Printmaking from 2013-2015 with a first class. Bonde’s father was a school teacher, now retired, and his mother is a house wife. The title of his debut solo exhibition, ‘Soil Oil’, is a literal translation for the name for kerosene in India. It is known as soil oil, in Hindi it’s ‘mitti ka tel’ or ‘मिट्टी का तेल’ and in Marathi ‘मातीचे तेल’. Bonde recalls the strangeness of the expression, “My grandmother used this Marathi word when I was a child. I am from a farming family, so I only knew that the soil of our farm gives grains and vegetables to survive, at that time I didn’t understand how kerosene could come from the soil.”