Initially trained as an art historian and critic, Anita Dube's work brings together experiences of mortality, desire, pain and pleasure. Over the years she has developed an aesthetic language that privileges sculptural fragment as a cultural bearer of personal and social memories, history, mythologies and phenomenological experience. Employing a variety of found objects drawn from the regions of the industrial (foam, plastic, wire) craft (threads, beads, velvet, sequins, pearls), the somatic (dentures, bones), and the ritual and the popular (ceramic eyes), Dube explores a divergent range of subjects the addresses a very human concern with both autobiographical and societal loss and regeneration.
Her early experimentation as a practitioner, as a sculptor, was the result of her affinity with the Radical Painters and Sculptors Association from Baroda in the 1980s. This association or collective of artists emerged in the aftermath of anti-Muslim riots and aggressively leaned towards a radical-left sensibility and provided a sharp and abrasive critique and analysis of the Indian social and political situation. At that time, Dube's work was dedicated to an exploration of the human body, its tactility and its resilience. Human body parts were carved out of logs of wood in varying sizes, as autonomous piece of sculpture assuming their own formal qualities.
The work Desert Queen (1996) is considered a shift in Dube's practice. From that moment, she started to work using fabric and ephemeral material. The work itself was conceived during a residency in Africa. It is made out of ropes, sequins and dyed-blue velvet. The work itself suggests a protective shield breastplate, as well as a skinned, slaughtered, spread-legged relic or animal. The object bears the ambiguity of its own status, between a woman, an animal, or goatskin bottle. With Desert Queen, Dube embraced a strategy which aimed towards the crystallization – in an almost Stendahlian understanding of the word – of the experiences of death, celebration, physical pain, refined aesthetic pleasure and the embodiment of desire. Such a work also brought her practice to a more conceptually-oriented methodology that draws from both traditional means and practices as well as from the language of installation art in its Western modernist acceptation. Challenging both models by merging them together, she re-introduced 'emotion' into conceptual practice, while at the same time she introduced irony and distance into a traditional language of forms – a language of forms that had become increasingly complex and referential.
Continue Reading (PDF 42 K)